Steven Johnson is one of the rare writers whose Substack newsletters I follow, and his most recent post will give you a good idea why. It is nominally about “The Infernal Machine”, his new book out today, but it is also about how he writes, and why, and has room for a story and a poem which both pack a punch. Recommended.
🏀 The craziest end to a half-time in a long long time happened last night in Minnesota and even if you are not a basketball fan I am sure you will appreciate the cinematic quality of the scene starting at 1:17. But do watch the whole thing, it is only 90 seconds long.
It was a packed coast-to-coast flight a few days ago and I was flying economy. But even then, the social anxiety of being “that guy” ultimately stopped me from putting on the goggles. The series of events before that decision was this: I had opened a book as soon as I got into my seat, then the plan took off, then drinks and snacks were served and before I knew it we were an hour and a half into a five-hour flight. Fiddling with AVP’s battery and jamming the charger in between the seats felt like too much.
Still, there were a few emails in my inbox that needed long, thoughtful responses that referenced a few different files so as soon as the flight attendant cleaned out the drinks I got my laptop out, set it on the tray and started typing. Not a minute later, the person in front of me — about 6' 8", can’t say I blame them — reclined their seat all the way down.
I had never dug into my backpack so quickly, and it turns out that setting up AVP doesn’t take all that long, considering.
A few minutes later I was in Joshua Tree National Park, my Mac’s large virtual display in front of me, typing away on the MacBook Air’s keyboard that was just barely visible from the screen that was being pushed by the reclining seat. A seat that I didn’t see and wasn’t bothered by one bit.
My friends, it was glorious. I spent the next three hours Doing Important Things, messaging apps on one side, documents on the other, and I could easily have spent three more but before I knew it the pilot announced that the trays should go up so I packed all the electronics — again, quite quickly, considering — and went back to my book.
The flight back was not nearly as full — I had the row for myself — which made the experience even better: with all three trays to myself I could position the apps all around me from the middle seat. Better yet, I was ready for landing, flipping the tray up and setting the laptop back into my backpack but continuing to work with AVP on and Apple’s tiniest keyboard in my lap. I liked this set up so much that I was wondering whether Screens has a VisionOS version (it does), and whether I could ditch the MacBook altogether and stream my Mac Mini — or, in the future, a Mac Studio — for the heavier work.
So that was good.
But of course AVP is still very much an 0.1 product. It couldn’t remember app position or different setups: of all of Apple’s platforms, VisionOS needs Stage Manager the most. It often couldn’t decide whether to use the virtual or hardware keyboard. Using on-flight WiFi made things laggy at times — which is why the Screens setup probably wouldn’t work — and I had a feeling that some of the legginess was from unoptimized software more than anything else, particularly from the iPad apps. But if people don’t use it, what is the developers' motivation to improve their apps?
Which ties to what will most likely kill AVP, if something does kill it: Apple’s inexplicable inertia. Environments that were “Coming Soon” on launch still haven’t arrived. All but one immersive show are still in the Season 1 Episode 1 stage. There haven’t been any new Apple apps since launch even though the iPad event would have been a pretty good time to highlight them.
This is important: unless you use AVP as a personal TV — which I don’t, movie and TV watching should be a communal experience — or travel almost daily, your only incentive to put it on frequently is to see what’s new. And not using AVP frequently brings it into the empty battery — wait to recharge — wait to start up — wait to update death loop that has been the bane of many household gadgets, most of them, admittedly, costing much less than $3,500 plus tax.
Bud I digress; I do travel often enough for AVP to see frequent-enough use, and for the scenario I described at the beginning it is well worth the price. Conditional, of course, on what you actually do with the freedom it grants you.
Dave Winer thinks newspapers need democracy and the First Amendment rights to survive. But that is only if you see e.g. The New York Times as something more than a logo and a list of paying subscribers. Правда is still running under the same banner, long after everything it stood for disappeared.
Today’s quote in the Hobonichi planner — from their CEO, no less — is a good one:
It’s not so much that people who don’t practice, or don’t practice enough, want to play hooky. They just don’t know what to practice. If they knew what to do and how much to do it — how to practice and what goals to aim for — I think the situation would be completely different.
It reminded me of Tyler Cowen’s deliberate practice routine
Two long-ish articles for the weekend before I board the plane back home:
Both are gift links! And if the one about Cass Elliot has whet your appetite, make sure to see this SNL skit featuring one of the best performances by a guest host ever from Emma Stone.
Of course I mean Crush, which is quickly becoming Apple’s second-most iconic add. Much like 1984, Apple’s most iconic add, it will be remembered and reference for a long time to come and for the same reason: it is an accurate, impartial representation of the effects technology has, or will have, on the world.
The only difference, and the reason why 1984 is still better, is timing: it took almost three decades for technology to break “The Man”. So 1984 was prophetic to the extreme, the second-order effects of “The Man” breaking weren’t immediately clear, and the add was well-received. Alas, we now know all to well what they are and how they came about, as described by Martin Gurri in his 2018 book “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium” and as seen on your favorite and less favorite social networks.
But imagine that add airing in 2020, in the midst of the Covid pandemic. Here is Anthony Fauci ordering you to socially distance and mask up. A year later he drones on about vaccines. And here comes our valiant antivaxer, ready, willing and able to break the mainstream media, the deep state, the uniparty, or whichever else term is popular with that particular crowd these days. I haven’t checked, but I am quite sure there is a meme out there with 1984 cut in just such way.
What 1984 was to media, Crush is to the material world. It is not as good as it is quite late to the game: we are already seeing dematerialization in action, at least in the United States, and are closer to its second, third, nth-order effects. These range from beneficial (to the planet and natural resources) to potentially devastating (to our sense of identity, history and culture), so the anxiety is completely justified and Apple was right in deciding not to air it on TV. But it is still good, educational work which I will be showing and talking about with my kids.
Kudos to Apple for making it.
Update: As promised, Pratik wrote more about the creative destruction aspect of the add. For many people, as bridges are collapsing and the world is crumbling, destruction is destruction.
A very DC story about a DC cat in today’s Washington Post:
She dozed on sunlit stoops, scaled fences and slept in a boxy shelter on a neighbor’s lawn. She was named Kitty Snows, after her new home on Snows Court in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of D.C., where she belonged to everyone and no one.
And then, she vanished.
What has unfolded this year around Snows Court in is an old-fashioned neighborhood melodrama — “Kittygate,” if you must — complete with wounded feelings, rampant gossip, sidewalk spies and lawsuit threats.
For what it’s worth, I side with the new owners.
(ᔥReddit)
