Next week, we’re pretty sure Apple’s going to launch a headset. But this week, we’re interested in the early days of the company — we have two stories, one about a huge success and one about a huge failure, both of which help explain why Apple is the company it is today.
(Also, y’all, seriously, watch our Lisa doc. It’s awesome.)
The Paragraphica camera makes photos, but not in the way you’re used to. Designer Bjørn Karmann rigged the experimental device so that when you hit the shutter, it collects information about where you are, the current conditions, and what you’re looking at — and then feeds that to an AI image generator, which creates a picture for you.
He also made a generator for building your own images. Is it a photo? Is it something else? Who knows! I want one.
It’s a browser meets a bookmarking tool meets, I don’t know, Instagram Stories? Pick a bunch of your favorite websites and quickly swipe between them. Or, shake your phone and be taken to some delightful corner of the internet. It’s silly and simple and I kind of love it so far.
[App Store]
You know how, after all the build-up and suspense, the Gonzalez v. Google Supreme Court case ended with a serious whimper? Kate Klonick’s latest Substack post smartly explains why, and wades through an ocean of amicus briefs to figure out where the Section 230 fight goes next... and why this turned out to be the exact wrong venue for that fight.
This whole interview is great, but I nodded aggressively reading his take on streaming services:
So forty-five minutes later you have decided, by way of bitter compromise, what you are going to watch—which is not what you really want to watch, but you’re going to have to go along with it because three of the rotten members of your family have voted in favor of this thing and you’re on the losing side. You turn down the lights. You enter your fucking password. And the code comes along and it asks for your billing address.
And that’s only, like, half the rant. It’s beautiful.
[The New Yorker]
Clippy’s back because Microsoft can’t stop building things to use your computer for you. And does Max even want to be a good streaming app? We spent this Friday’s Vergecast debating exactly that.
Say what you will about Mark Zuckerberg, dude is a committer. He’s spending billions on the metaverse, he’s still trying to make Reels a thing, and he’s by all accounts pretty good at jiu-jitsu. This interview with Vijay Hanumantha Raju, an opponent from Zuck’s first tournament, is wonderful:
I was going for a lot of takedowns, single legs and double legs. And that’s something that they wanted him to do as well. So the first round he didn’t do it and the second one they kept saying, “Okay, fake the take-down!” But I was like, okay, I can hear that.
