Nintendo Switch 2 Eve
New Media Layoffs • Automatic AI Ads • OpenAI, The Movie • 'Living Glass' UI
Happy Nintendo Switch 2 Eve to those who celebrate. Of course, there’s not much to celebrate today as… there are no actual reviews of the device to be seen (and read). And that’s because Nintendo didn’t send any review units out ahead of the launch. And that’s apparently because there are "important features and updates" which won’t go out until the launch. I’m sorry, what?
It’s a strange situation. My — Occam’s razor — read would be that the current software is buggy and Nintendo is scrambling to fix that right up until the last minute. And rather than send out review units which will all say "the software is buggy", they’d rather have no reviews. The reality is that it doesn’t matter since they’re undoubtedly sold out anyway, so it’s not like anyone can make an immediate buying decision today.
Nintendo has always been an enigma as a company — a strength and a weakness — so it’s a little hard to know what to make of this. Guess we’ll know tomorrow!
• Listening to The Legend of Zelda Main Theme 🎶
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴 Notebook
💸 Blodget On BI Layoffs: 'The Market Has Changed'
While everyone is used to seeing layoffs at "legacy" news orgs at this point, the trend has seemingly shifted to the early wave of digital publications as well, which, I suppose can also now be considered "legacy". Over 20% of BI is brutal, as is all of Europe for TechCrunch (where I worked for many years way back when). It’s not easy, but the reason why is obvious: all of these sites were built for the last wave of the web, including, of course, monetization. At first, it was all about search and it shifted to social, but it was always about driving traffic to serve up ads. That traffic is drying up as both social and web search shift. And so… you need to pivot the model, but that’s much easier done as a new, nimble site versus a old one with a ton of staff being paid through the old model. NYT has been able to pull it off but, well, there’s only one NYT. Blodget, who started and ran BI for years sold at perhaps the perfect time — a decade ago. Now he’s running his own one-man site again — with a new model. [Forbes]
👁️ Meta Aims to Fully Automate Ad Creation Using AI
Speaking of advertising, we’re seemingly about to enter a new era in that world as well, where it’s literally one-click and AI does the rest, with humans out of the loop. Assuming this works as well as everyone is expecting, I’m fairly worried it will make the web even more unusable. It’s the old "if you give a mouse a cookie" issue. Such a model would scale even better than the current ones do and so I suspect you’ll see ads of all shapes and sizes now being crammed into every nook and cranny of the web. And it will be these insanely targeted and personalized ads that are hard to ignore. While all of this will undoubtedly be good for many advertisers and certainly for the ad platforms like Meta, it will probably make using the web an even shittier experience, perhaps creating a natural divide of places where people who can afford to pay use and those who can’t are stuck in the adpocolypse. And all of this brings us closer to the Minority Report-style ads that scan your eyes and pop-up as you walk around. Which we’re also probably just a few steps away from... [WSJ 🔒]
🍿 Luca Guadagnino to Direct OpenAI Movie 'Artificial'
And my god they’re sending this into production fast — shooting may start this summer. But it’s timely, and there are undoubtedly competing projects given the hype around OpenAI — and the sheer amount of drama surrounding that company. This, of course, centers on "the blip" when Sam Altman was fired for a weekend. If it all feels a bit Social Network-y, the fact that Andrew Garfield — aka: "I’m coming back for everything" Eduardo Saverin — is being circled to play Altman will just add to that. Meanwhile Monica Barbaro from A Complete Unknown as Mira Murati and Yura Borisov from Anora as Ilya Sutskever seem like pretty good, interesting choices. As does the choice of Guadagnino himself. All I know is that Jesse Eisenberg better be back to play Zuck in a scene. Who lands the Elon role? [THR]
Spyglass
⚾️ Around Many Horns
At the end of ESPN's 'Around the Horn'
🔎 A Samsung Deal Makes An Apple One More Complex for Perplexity
But it still makes a ton of sense for the AI company, obviously...
🧟♂️ The Fans Demand Netflix's 'Frankenstein' in Theaters
Guillermo del Toro's latest looks big screen-worthy. Will Netflix listen?
Loose Leaf
The app winners of the 2025 Apple Design Awards, as always, look very nice. And per usual, I actually wasn’t aware of quite a few of them, so it’s a nice little discovery bump. [Apple]
Meta officially joins Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in the new race for nuclear power, signing a 20 year contract with a plant in Illinois. The contract starts in 2027, so it will take them close to 2050. And, of course, the one plant won’t be enough given the AI demands — Meta’s electricity consumption almost tripled from 2019 to 2023 — not nearly. Cue the Kylo meme. [Bloomberg 🔒]
NVIDIA aiming to put their first ARM-based CPUs in PCs by way of a gaming machine seemingly makes sense for obvious reasons… [Verge]
How much did it cost to make Andor? About $650M, according to Tony Gilroy, who noted that Disney tried to push back on their cash commitment for season 2 because "streaming is dead" but Gilroy pushed ahead. At 24 total episodes, that’s about $27M an episode. While it seems like it worked out pretty well for all sides, it may be the last time we see that type of budget commit. [Variety]
It does indeed seem like Anthropic is limiting Windsurf’s access to their latest models, but well, wouldn’t you sort of expect that when Anthropic’s biggest rival is acquiring them? It sucks, but it is what it is. And it’s why M&A in this particular space is extra challenging. Vibe coders want to surf that latest waves, no matter who is pushing them out there… [TechCrunch]
Is there a race to build a "vibe coding" brand before the window closes and the Big AI players step in to take over the space due to cost and bundling advantages? That would not be good for many such investments, of course. Is Windsurf just the first to find safe harbor? [Reuters]
Speaking of Anthropic, they aren’t just battling OpenAI, they’re also seemingly taking on the Trump administration, pushing on their AI proposals, which most of the other AI companies are cheering on (including you-know-who), amongst other things. [Semafor]
I don’t know that Reed Hastings can help with that, but he’s a good get for their Board of Directors — beyond Netflix, he’s been on the boards of both Facebook and Microsoft at different times. [Bloomberg 🔒]
I feel like we’re going to see some variation of "Are AI data centers the next bubble" at least once a week for the rest of this year. Cost aside — well, beyond all the debt — one issue may be just how convoluted and intertwined all the partnership agreements are for such deals. [NYT]
xAI is doing a secondary sale to validate the $113B valuation which was established in the merger with Xitter. I would have thought that the combined price would have been ~$8B less since Xitter owned around 10% of xAI at the time of the sale, but honestly, does any of it matter? The price is whatever Elon says it is. And right now it’s $113B before it shoots up again in a primary sale coming soon. [FT 🔒]
Oh yes, and $5B in debt in a third transaction, to help fund the continued build-out of xAI’s "Colossus" AI data center project. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Meanwhile, Cohere is said to be raising $500M in a round that would seemingly be either flat, or a small step-up from their last fundraise last year, which would obviously not be the best signal in the current AI market (see: above). [FT 🔒]
No surprise to see a fundraise report given the recent weird back-and-forth in the press around major revenue projection shortfalls followed immediately by other reports touting their ARR growth. [Information 🔒]
Groundbreaking update in Microsoft Windows land: Notepad is getting text formatting. It’s 2025. [Verge]
My personal favorite of all the (very good) Apple TV+ shows (as opposed to the very mediocre movies), Slow Horses will be back on September 24 for its fifth season. [9to5Mac]
Deadpool director Tim Miller, who had an X-Men movie in the pipeline at Fox when it was bought by Disney, is eagerly raising his hand to get a stab at the franchise (though Thunderbolts director, Jake Schreier, would seem to be first in line). Better not screw this up, Disney. [THR]
The web payment changes forced upon Apple eliminating their 30% cut has been "fantastic" for Substack’s business, their CEO says — as you might imagine for a company that does a 90/10 split. [Information 🔒]
I Spy...
It’s hard to read this post by Sebastiaan de With and not be excited about what’s set to be unveiled with the visual overhauls of Apple’s operating systems. Yes, even if it’s UI and not AI. And de With, who worked on such things at Apple back in the day, does a nice walk-through about where such UI has been and where it’s likely going — from "The Flat Age" to "Living Glass". And yes, such things you can already likely see glimpses of in the recent iOS/iPadOS iterations, which themselves have borrowed from visionOS — wouldn’t it be something if the legacy of the Vision Pro ends up being more on the UI/UX side?
