We’re getting the traditional “deep dive into the weird specs of the new chips with Johny Srouji,” and one of the things he’s talking a lot about is ray tracing, which is crucial for drawing high-res and realistic virtual spaces. That matters for gaming, the metaverse... and the Vision Pro.
We’ve been to Apple Park a lot in the light, but in the dark, it has a real... “supervillain lair slash college campus from a horror movie where no one survives” vibe?
A minute ahead of time, even, at least on my stream. We’re expecting Macs, chips, who knows, but so far, it’s just a squiggly hello.
I really can’t decide! On the one hand, Apple (specifically Craig Federighi, the Action Hero himself) loves being right on the edge of incredible cringe. But also, doing a whole Halloween bit during tonight’s event means a lot of meme risk and bad looks and congressional hearings where they show Tim Cook as a vampire and they’re like, “Yes, this, Apple is bad.” You know? I don’t know!
I think my ultimate guess is Craig in costume and only Craig in costume. But I might be more excited about this than new Macs.
After a fun back-and-forth in the courtroom about the merits of redacting an exhibit during Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s testimony, we got a new tidbit of information. Google explicitly agreed, as part of its search deal with Apple, that it would not promote Chrome to Safari users — which it could do with banners in other Google apps, pop-ups, and the like, and does to many other services.
We’re slowly but surely learning how these deals get done, and it keeps getting juicier.
We’re a bit over an hour into Sundar Pichai’s testimony in US v. Google, and we’ve spent a surprising amount of the morning in a time machine back to 2005.
That’s when Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 (the browser a Pichai-led team would ultimately crush by launching Google Chrome). At the time, Google’s legal chief David Drummond sent Microsoft a letter that was very mad about search defaults. Drummond wanted a choice screen, and said Google was very worried about the anticompetitive nature of Microsoft prioritizing its own search engine.
Pichai is being asked a lot of questions that amount to, “this is now the argument against you, right?” So far, he’s sparring with it pretty well.
I’m here today to see Google CEO Sundar Pichai testify in the ongoing US v. Google antitrust trial. I just saw Pichai go through security, and there’s a lot of energy in the building to see how Google’s leader defends the company’s moves in search.
Things are set to start at 9:30, first with Google’s lawyers and then cross examination from the Justice Department. The line to get in is long, it’s weirdly warm in here, it’s gonna be a day, friends.
