Apple released the Vision Pro on February 2; 12 days later Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered his verdict: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck) Alright guys, so I finally tried Apple’s Vision Pro. And you know, I have to say that before this, I expected that Quest would be the better value for most people since it’s really good and it’s like seven times less expensive. But after using it I don’t just think that Quest is the better value — I think the Quest is the better product, period. You can watch the video for Zuckerberg’s full — and certainly biased ..read more

Anniversaries are strange: no one but those involved have any reason to even know they exist, which makes them easy to skip; for example, last year I mostly ignored the 10 year anniversary of starting Stratechery because I was more eager to write about ChatGPT Getting a Computer. That leaves today, April 16, as my last chance to mark a tin anniversary: ten years ago Stratechery added a subscription option, making this my full-time job. It was, for the record, a miserable day: I had a convoluted plan to offer different site experiences for subscribers and non-subscribers: the former would recei ..read more

It was impossible to miss the leading message at yesterday’s Google Cloud Next keynote: Google has the best infrastructure for AI. This was CEO Sundar Pichai in his video greeting: I want to highlight just a few reasons Google Cloud is showing so much progress. One is our deep investments in AI. We’ve known for a while that AI would transform every industry and company, including our own. That’s why we’ve been building AI infrastructure for over a decade, including TPUs, now in their 5th generation. These advancements have helped customer train and serve cutting-edge language models. These i ..read more

First, there is the moment when the news hits the wires: U.S. Sues Apple, Alleges Tech Giant Exploits Illegal Monopoly. This, we know, is the beginning of a long journey: there will be months or years of filings and discovery and preliminary rulings; eventually we will have a trial, and months after that a decision. Then there are the appeals, first with three judges, then perhaps en banc, and maybe even the Supreme Court. At some point, should the government win, there will be a hearing about remedies, themselves subject to the same grinding schedule. Only then can a proper determination be m ..read more

From the Wall Street Journal: The Nvidia frenzy over artificial intelligence has come to this: Chief Executive Jensen Huang unveiled his company’s latest chips on Monday in a sports arena at an event one analyst dubbed the “AI Woodstock.” Customers, partners and fans of the chip company descended on the SAP Center, the home of the National Hockey League’s San Jose Sharks, for Huang’s keynote speech at an annual Nvidia conference that, this year, has a seating capacity of about 11,000. Professional wrestling’s WWE Monday Night RAW event took place there in February. Justin Timberlake is schedu ..read more

Last Wednesday, when the questions about Gemini’s political viewpoint were still limited to its image creation capabilities, I accused the company of being timid: Stepping back, I don’t, as a rule, want to wade into politics, and definitely not into culture war issues. At some point, though, you just have to state plainly that this is ridiculous. Google specifically, and tech companies broadly, have long been sensitive to accusations of bias; that has extended to image generation, and I can understand the sentiment in terms of depicting theoretical scenarios. At the same time, many of these i ..read more

Matthew Ball wrote a fun essay earlier this month entitled On Spatial Computing, Metaverse, the Terms Left Behind and Ideas Renewed, tracing the various terms that have been used to describe, well, that’s what the essay is about: virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, Metaverse, are words that have been floating around for decades now, both in science fiction and in products, to describe what Apple is calling spatial computing. Personally, I agree with Ball that “Metaverse” is the best of the lot, particularly given Ball’s succinct description of the concept in his conclusion: I l ..read more

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. — CmdrTaco, Slashdot My one small comfort in the cold Wisconsin winters, walking up and down Bascom Hill in the snow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was listening to music on my Diamond Rio. That Rio served me well all through college; Apple shipped the first iPod my senior year, but it was Mac only, and besides, my Rio was good enough. Sure, I could only fit 20 songs or so (of course I bought the proprietary expansion memory card), but if I wanted more I could just sync with my computer. I certainly wasn’t going to pay $2,000 or whatever it ..read more

There are times when being a semiconductor CEO is rather easy. Just consider Brian Krzanich: when he took over the Intel job in 2013, I wrote in The Intel Opportunity: A new CEO has taken over Intel. Their core business, upon which the company has been built, is floundering. Does the new CEO, who is not really new at all (he’s the current COO), have the vision to ensure Intel’s continued success? I’m not talking about Brian Krzanich, who today was promoted from COO to CEO at Intel. Rather, I’m talking about Andy Grove, who took over Intel in 1987. The crisis Grove encountered was Intel’s flo ..read more

Om Malik has been observing, writing about, and investing in technology for going on three decades; that’s one reason I find his unabashed enthusiasm for the Apple Vision Pro to be notable. Malik wrote on his blog: Apple touts Vision Pro as a new canvas for productivity and a new way to play games. Maybe, maybe not. Just as the Apple Watch is primarily a health-related device that also does other things, including phone calls, text messages, and making payments. Similarly, the primary function for Vision Pro is ‘media’ — especially how we consume it on the go. Give it a few weeks, and more pe ..read more