Apple is now a $1 trillion company

Not quite what Wired – or anyone else – thought was going to happen in 1997:

101 Ways to Save Apple, Wire, June 1997

Party on Dudes

[I have a backlog of articles related to Instagram I’m trying to get through and post (like my last two posts here and here). I spend a decent amount of time on Instagram and I find the mechanics and strategies behind account creators and Facebook interesting.]

Writing for The New York Times, Daisuke Wakabayashi on the mating rituals of brands and online stars:

Deals between big brands and viral online video performers, once an informal alternative to traditional celebrity sponsorships, are quickly maturing into a business estimated to reach $10 billion in 2020. Some brands pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single sponsored video. Brita, the water filter company, paid Rudy Mancuso and Andrew Bachelor, who is known as King Bach, to make music videos with the basketball star Stephen Curry. Mr. Bachelor’s song imagined being roommates with Mr. Curry, who would regularly refill the Brita container. Mr. Mancuso’s song imagined Mr. Curry helping him live a healthier life by drinking water from a Brita instead of a bottle.

Despite The Fat Jew believing Instagram is super-saturated with influencers, it seems unlikely they’re going away anytime soon.

What’s the alternative? Broadcast television? What’s broadcast television?

Over at The Atlantic, Taylor Lorenz informs us teenagers are using ‘flop accounts’ on Instagram to debate and distribute the news.

What the hell are flop accounts?

[…] pages that are collectively managed by several teens, many of them devoted to discussions of hot-button topics: gun control, abortion, immigration, President Donald Trump, LGBTQ issues, YouTubers, breaking news, viral memes.

And their content?

The accounts post photos, videos, and screenshots of articles, memes, things, and people considered a “flop,” or, essentially, a fail. A flop could be a famous YouTuber saying something racist, someone being rude or awful in person, a homophobic comment, or anything that the teen who posted it deems wrong or unacceptable. Some of the teens who run a given account know one another in real life; more likely, they met online.

The kids say these accounts are more accurate than what’s being put out by news organizations:

“A lot of news nowadays claims to be facts, but it’s based off people’s opinions or they purposefully omit information,” she said. “I wish we could trust articles more, but it’s been proven multiple times of people reporting things that aren’t true. It’s just hard to know who to trust, so you always feel the need to check things yourself. You can’t just read an article and take it as fact, because there’s always a chance that it isn’t.”

I think these Instagram accounts are fine as an outlet for kids to talk about issues with their peers, but the irony is they are exactly what they claim to be fighting against. Ah to be young and ignorant.

The teenage admins of these flophouses need to truly understand how journalism works and how companies like The Washington Post and The New York Times operate.

Josh Ostrovsky, aka The Fat Jew, is pivoting from Instagram to his next venture, selling wine. His venture is called Swish and they have wines called ‘Babe’, ‘White Girl Rosé’ and ‘Family Time Is Hard.’ Those are funny names and I bet he makes a killing with Swish.

He’s seeing us approach peak-influencer on Instagram:

“Eventually there will be too many influencers, the market will be too saturated and the value of influencer posts will continue to plummet,” Ostrovsky said. “It’s a very standard value proposition. The more people join, the more options there are for the brands — the less each influencer is worth.”

I was pissed back in 2015 when news broke that Ostrovsky was caught stealing comedians’ jokes. But hey, Robin Williams was also a notorious joke-stealer within the comedy world and he’s beloved, so what do I know?

There are clearly industries that have way too many influencers, but in the circles I run in on Instagram I don’t see them.

Sidenote question: What is the name of the industry of hot chicks in yoga pants who only post pictures of their asses and protein suppliments with an inspirational quote in the captions? I don’t think they teach about that industry in business school.

I compare it to my year living in Los Angeles. People — mostly those who have never lived there — love to say that Los Angeles is fake. My response to this is yes, LA is fake if you’re fake. If you’re a dude like me who likes dive bars with juke boxes and pool tables, then you’ll gravitate to and find non-fake areas of town.

I’m also not rich, which shielded me from a significant amount of fakeness in LA. When I start making bags of money from my clothing line, I’ll gladly take on the responsibility of dealing with fake people.

Om Malik on e-cigarette company Juul:

In a CNBC news report, Juul spokesman Matt David said: “Like many Silicon Valley technology startups, our growth is not the result of marketing but rather a superior product disrupting an archaic industry.” First of all, there is nothing technological about this company — unless you count behavioral addiction as a common ground with Facebook and others like them. It is utter bullshit, and reporters should know better than letting this slide without serious questioning.

From Business Insider (which called it iPhone of e-cigarettes) to CrunchBase, everyone seems to marvel over their growth rates, their post-Unicorn valuations, and jaw-dropping success at raising capital. And very rarely have I seen anyone stand up and point out that it is no different than traditional tobacco peddlers like Marlboro and Camel. They are peddling nicotine-based addiction. By focusing on charming founders, their backgrounds, large amount of funds raised and crazy valuations, no one is asking the right question: why are we supporting this company that is essentially Camel 2.0?

Addiction is a profitable and high-growth business. Ask the cartels selling other addictive products. “And is it an ethical business?,” asks Crunchbase. “We can’t answer the latter question here as we’re not equipped for it.” Yes, you are! Any halfway decent person can see that tobacco & nicotine industries are driven by greed and have preyed on human frailty.

Their “we’re not equipped for it” response reminds me of Facebook’s initial response to the use of social media platforms by Russians to manipulate politics in the United States. “We’re powerless! There’s nothing we can do!”

Fast-forward to today when Facebook announced it removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior:

It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past.

Rather than be proactive about taking down accounts & pages that violate Facebook policies, they’d rather do nothing until something bad happens. They don’t want anything effecting their bottom line so they’d rather do nothing. It’s shameful.

When Bloomberg asked 89-year-old Milton Glaser, along with 7 other designers, to design a logo for Trump’s proposed ‘Space Force’ he didn’t disappoint:

via Daring Fireball

Apple has officially released design resources for macOS.

via Designer News

Jim Dalrymple has the scoop on the firmware fix for the overheating MacBook Pros (via Daring Fireball):

“Following extensive performance testing under numerous workloads, we’ve identified that there is a missing digital key in the firmware that impacts the thermal management system and could drive clock speeds down under heavy thermal loads on the new MacBook Pro,” An Apple representative told me. “A bug fix is included in today’s macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 Supplemental Update and is recommended. We apologize to any customer who has experienced less than optimal performance on their new systems. Customers can expect the new 15-inch MacBook Pro to be up to 70% faster, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar to be up to 2X faster, as shown in the performance results on our website.”

That was quick.

From Wired: Surface Go Is Microsoft’s Big Bet on a Tiny-Computer Future:

Panos Panay is the betting type. You can see the evidence in Microsoft’s Building 37, where two $1 bills stick out from beneath a Surface tablet sitting on a shelf.

When I ask Panay about the dollars during a recent visit to Microsoft, he says it was a wager he made a few years back on a specific product. I ask if it was a bet on Surface RT, the very first Surface product Microsoft made, and he seems genuinely surprised. “I would have lost that bet, and I’m going to win this one,” he says. “It’s about a product that’s in market right now.” And that’s all he’ll volunteer.

Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, isn’t there to talk about the ghosts of Surface’s past, or even the present. Panay wants to talk about his next big bet in the Surface product lineup: the brand-new Surface Go. But to call it “big” would be a misnomer, because the Surface Go was designed to disappear.

I have to hand it to the people at Microsoft. They won’t give up on Surface. You cannot give up in the hardware game when you have billions of dollars in your pockets already.

I’ve thought Panos Panay is particularly adorable ever since he introduced the Surface Book back in 2015. Look at him, the little-big engine that could. You get excited at your show-and-tell day at school! Yeah!

Panos is clearly the right guy for the job, but the real question is whether Surface is the right hardware for the job. I can’t find Microsoft having any meaningful representation on tablet marketshare stats for 2018 (or 2017 or 2016).

But hey, what do I know? If Apple starts screwing up iPads like they’re currently screwing up their MacBook Pros, maybe Microsoft has a shot at getting in the race (just kidding, they don’t).

Michael Beirut

From the Editorial Board of The New York Times:

The last time President Trump claimed that “both sides” were responsible for bad behavior, it didn’t go well.

That was nearly a year ago, after a march of neo-Nazis descended into violence and a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protesters, killing a woman.

On Monday, Mr. Trump again engaged in immoral equivalence, this time during a gobsmacking news conference after his meeting in Helsinki, Finland, with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. A reporter referred to last week’s indictments of 12 Russian military officials for a coordinated cyberattack on the 2016 election and asked Mr. Trump if he held Russia responsible. “I hold both countries responsible,” Mr. Trump said.

Even in a presidency replete with self-defeating moments for the United States, Mr. Trump’s comments on Monday, which were broadcast live around the world, stand out.

The title of this opinion piece is ‘Why Won’t Donald Trump Speak for America?’ and they don’t answer that question because no one but Trump knows, yet.

Instapaper is going independent (via 9to5Mac):

Today, we’re announcing that Pinterest has entered into an agreement to transfer ownership of Instapaper to Instant Paper, Inc., a new company owned and operated by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper since it was sold to betaworks by Marco Arment in 2013. The ownership transfer will occur after a 21 day waiting period designed to give our users fair notice about the change of control with respect to their personal information.

We want to emphasize that not much is changing for the Instapaper product outside the new ownership. The product will continue to be built and maintained by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper for the past five years. We plan to continue offering a robust service that focuses on readers and the reading experience for the foreseeable future.

Lastly, we want to express our deepest gratitude to Pinterest for being such great stewards of the product over the past two years. With their support, we rebuilt search, introduced an extension for Firefox, made a variety of optimizations for the latest mobile operating systems and more. Our focus is providing a great reading application to our users, we appreciated the opportunity to do that at Pinterest, and are excited to continue our work.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns please let us know by sending an email to support@help.instapaper.com or replying directly to this email.

– Instapaper Team

When I got my iPhone in 2008 one of my first wishes was an app that let me read articles from the Web while I was in the subway without Internet access. Then Instapaper came out and made my day.

I’m happy Pinterest sold Instapaper. They haven’t updated their own service, let alone Instapaper. Seriously, Pinterest has been coasting for at least 3 years with no feature updates.

Shame on them.

Last week I went to an advanced screening of Blindspotting.

It was written by and stars Oakland natives Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal and was directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada. It’s an honest look into the hipsterification of Oakland and the experiences of both locals and transplants. Intense & hilarious. I highly recommend you see it if you can.

I was lucky enough to see Blindspotting in a Dolby Atmos theatre at the Dolby headquarters in San Francisco thanks to my wife who works at Dolby. Not only was the sound quality incredible, but the picture was insane too (neither my wife nor Dolby paid me to say that).