Summer's Sobering Box Office
Apple's AWS • "America's Party" • Netflix/Spotify • RIP Michael Madsen • Apple's EU Appeal • TikTok 2 • Expensive Superman • Expensive Superintelligence • Mobile Social DAUs
With Summer movie season in full swing, it feels like a good opportunity to take a step back and revisit just how to look at the box office "records" you keep hearing about. Context matters but it is constantly and conveniently forgotten in much of the reporting around the metrics – notably box office receipts themselves... And now with Apple, Amazon, and other tech companies in these races and spaces a more sober (and sobering) lens will perhaps be applied...
🦖 Taking a Bite Out of the Latest Box Office "Records"
With 'Jurassic Park 7' and 'F1', the goalposts keep shifting as the reporting around recent box office numbers remains ridiculous...
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴 Thoughts On…
☁️ Apple's AWS
The news about Apple's awesomely named "Project ACDC" actually isn't new – there were two reports about it last year leading up to WWDC – but the idea that they could try to turn it into their own cloud business for developers seemingly makes sense. It would be a new vector of growth for the now all-important Services business (especially if those Google Search payments go away or start to fade...). And it could compliment what they're doing with opening up the on-device models, and obviously will do with cloud models at some point. And Apple's chips are thought to actually be pretty good at inference (not pre-training LLMs, which they wouldn't focus on) and just as importantly, are said to be super efficient. I'm sure they'd love to give NVIDIA even just a small run for their money too. [Information 🔒]
🇺🇸 "America Party"
On one hand, I'm glad it's not named something stupidly juvenile like DOGE. On the other, can it be more generic? It also sounds a bit like a store in which you'd buy goods to throw a party. I'm all in favor of trying to break the stranglehold the two-party system has on American politics but such a starting point – being big mad at the leopard who ate his face – is clearly too self-serving for Elon Musk. I also suspect it will further showcase where the power truly lies in the relationship. Elon's money certainly helped, but perhaps only because it was Trump – i.e. I'm skeptical his money will have the same (or even similar) impact with other candidates who are not Donald Trump. [BBC]
🤝 A Netflix/Spotify Partnership
Continuing to do more "traditional" television things like talent and award shows is obvious for Netflix, the conversations with Spotify are potentially more interesting if they also bring about a television/music bundle. That's not what this report says, but it seems like a logical extension of any partnership for the most popular streaming television and most popular streaming music platforms. After all, Apple and Amazon already have such TV/Music bundles internally... [WSJ 🔒]
🎭 Michael Madsen Dies at 67
"If the role called for a sprinkle of sadism, Mr. Madsen was your man..." is just a great line in the obit for the actor. He was working as a mechanic and paramedic in the early 80s when he saw "Of Mice and Men" on a stage in Chicago and he loved it so much that he went up to the star to ask for advice on how to break into acting. The actor sent him a brochure for acting classes – that actor was John Malkovich. Madsen went on to have a remarkable 346 acting credits. His second movie role was in WarGames (his fourth was The Natural). In the span of a few months he made The Doors, Thelma & Louise, and Reservoir Dogs. RIP, Mr. Blonde. [NYT]
🇪🇺 Apple's EU App Store Appeal
The best part of this appeal is Apple's statement about it which includes: "As our appeal will show, the EC is mandating how we run our store and forcing business terms which are confusing for developers and bad for users." It's confusing for developers because Apple clearly made it confusing. This is what they do. Here, they're saying the EC is making them add confusion by adding more choices, and, fair enough to some degree, but it's hard to see how this appeal fares any better than the situation in the US. At that point, what does Apple do? Pull the App Store out of Europe? That would be the nuclear option, but the first course of action is probably to appeal (again) to President Trump. And hope that Google and Meta complaining about the same general treatment in the EU compels Trump to step in... [MacRumors]
🤳 TikTok 2
Over there, in the water! 'M2' – TikTok's life raft in app form! On September 5, some 170M users are going to be asked to download a new app. I wonder if it will be the biggest download event in the history of the App Store? Will Apple be able to handle the all-at-once influx, or will they ask TikTok to stagger notifications over the course of days/weeks/months since the old version will technically work until March 2026? Of course, all of this presumes that a deal is actually approved this time by China. But with this work seemingly well underway – to the point where we have a very specific launch date – it would seem to be a sign that TikTok/Bytedance thinks it will happen this time? [Information 🔒]
🦸🏻♂️ The 'Superman' Budget
In other big budget box office news, James Gunn says it's "complete and utter nonsense" that his new movie has to make $700M in order to be considered successful. But if the Superman budget is really $225M (after incentives and tax breaks) and the marketing cost really is near the reported $200M, well... it's just math. I guess it's technically true that it wouldn't have to make $700M – it would need to make something closer to $850M. Are there other ways Warner Bros. Discovery is going to monetize the film? Of course! And it feels like it should do well. But to suggest that the simple box office break-even math is "nonsense" seems awfully disingenuous. [THR]
Spyglass
🇺🇸 Trump's New Plan for a US-Made iPhone: Something, Something AI
And a new idea for Tim Cook to get the administration off his back...
Loose Leaf
Nearly four years after its release, Windows 11 has finally surpassed Windows 10 – which is a decade old – in terms of usage. [Verge]
NVIDIA's first 'Blackwell Ultra' systems are in market thanks to Dell-built systems for CoreWeave. A new mini layer cake! [CNBC]
Nearly a week later, I'm still not sure what to make of Neil Druckmann abruptly leaving HBO's production of his Last of Us game. He says it's to get back to making games but clearly there's more to the story. [Variety]
Apple has lost one of their top engineers in AI to who else? Meta. They're apparently paying Ruoming Pang (who was at Google before Apple and oversaw their internal LLM work) "tens of millions of dollars per year" – which is not quite a "Godfather" offer, but certainly more than what Apple is used to paying top talent. [Bloomberg 🔒]
As an aside, Gurman's report mentions that Meta poached yet another OpenAI researcher and one from Anthropic as well. [Bloomberg 🔒]
To my point about Tim Cook perhaps just promising an American iPhone now, Samsung is delaying the completion of a long-promised US chip plant. Why? There are no customers for it. Which seems like a problem. [Nikkei]
As the balance of Bitcoin holdings shifts to institutions, it's becoming far less volatile in terms of price swings – which might be good for the longer-term but creates new short term issues as it's sort of an identity crisis moment. [Bloomberg 🔒]
Cloudflare offering tools that can block AI crawlers seemingly makes sense and could lend a hand it trying to figure out an actual business model that works for both sides. [NYT]
Related, a Creative Commons straightforward approach to how content can be used in the age of AI also makes sense... [TechCrunch]
I first knew of Matt Cameron as Soundgarden's drummer – which he was for 11 years. But he joined Pearl Jam (a band he helped bring together through his drums on some demo tapes) in 1998 after they kept cycling through drummers and stayed for 27 years until stepping down now. [Rolling Stone]
I Quote
You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us. We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through.
We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence.
— Ilya Sutskever, confirming such "rumors" about Meta trying to "hackquire" Safe Superintelligence.
Instead, when rebuffed, ever-ruthless Mark Zuckerberg poached their CEO, a role which Sutskever will now assume. Meanwhile, Daniel Gross will be at Meta working on... superintelligence. I'm guessing Sutskever wouldn't necessarily call it a race, only because he won't believe whatever Meta is building to be "safe".
My god, what must Zuck have offered Ilya to try to entice him? $50B? More?
I Spy
Obviously, you always have to take third-party data with grains of salt, but the trendline is pretty clear here regardless. Threads seems awfully close to surpassing Xitter in terms of mobile app DAUs – 132M DAUs for Xitter vs. 115M for Threads. (Bluesky is at 4.1M on this chart.)
FWIW, the same data provider, Similarweb, suggests Xitter's web usage is still massively ahead of Threads (145.8M DAUs vs. 6.9M DAUs). Still, this would be one key milestone in a prediction that's inevitable, it's just a matter of timing...