I have read dozens of excited reviews of Orion like these pieces from The Verge and Ben Thompson . I have also seen a comparable number of people surprised by this wave of affection, like John Siracusa in the most recent ATP episode.

And I can understand this. Orion can be an impressive demo, but it’s still a demo. A prototype. A concept car. It’s reasonable to assume that Apple might have a similar pair of glasses in their labs somewhere and faced the same cost issues. “Apple doesn’t release prototypes” .

But I think we should stop giving Apple the benefit of the doubt. It’s their job to convince us. We’re excited about Orion precisely because Meta showed them, and Apple didn’t. I honestly do not care if they have something cooking. Yes, they have a good track record overall. But I don’t believe in a second we should buy in on their secrecy. They do it for their benefit, not ours. Otherwise, it becomes a cult with blogger shamans trying to interpret the divine signs.

Hyperlinks are the foundation of the internet. People say that Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet as we know it when he connected hypertext with TCP/IP. And yet, in 2024, hyperlinks are second-tier citizens at best, as the most popular social platforms don’t support them or penalize you for trying.

Facebook started deprioritizing links in 2017. Zuckerberg confirmed this later by announcing a broader effort to prioritize “meaningful social interactions” on users’ news feeds. The stated goal was to focus on posts from friends, family, and groups over content from businesses, media outlets, and publishers, particularly those containing outbound links. Twitter joined the party in late 2020, as they also wanted to reduce their reliance on external content.

This shift forever changed the internet.

When I got my first MacBook in 2014, the thing that impressed me the most was how many built-in apps MacOS had and how good a lot of them actually were.

Windows wasn’t like this and we were used to installing third-party apps for literally everything: a proper browser surfing the web, something to listen to music and watch videos, Nero Burning ROM (of course). When I used Windows XP, I had to use an app for dialing dial-up internet, because the native one was so much worse.

Apple showed me a different world, where default apps are good enough for most people. Safari was much better than Internet Explorer. Pages and Numbers are great for personal use (and I have used the former for many years without lawyers noticing). I’m still not a fan of Mail.app but many people use it just fine. Finally, you get Reminders and Notes.

If you spend too much time on Twitter (like I do), you might have heard about the idea of Going Direct. It started with a growing chasm between the tech and media industries and eventually turned into the idea that founders and companies should build their own audience instead of going to the media. This is what “Going Direct” is.

What’s the motivation here? They say that news websites aren’t your friends, so you should focus on content marketing through blogs, social media and friendly podcasts. This way, you grow your own audience you can leverage it for your goals.

There’s a lot of truth to this idea, and you can follow Lulu Cheng Meservey , who previously led PR for Substack and Activision/Blizzard and is one of the most active speakers on the topic.

Just listened to a podcast with Nikita Bier by Lenny Rachitsky that explained the power of communications very nicely.

Nikita is famous on Twitter for selling the same company twice (not really). He sold tbh to Facebook, left, built Gas to earn money, and ended up selling it to Discord. He is a master of growth hacking and building viral products.

With Gas, he and his team faced a grave danger. Somebody put out a hoax that the app was facilitating human trafficking. How an anonymous app where users can’t send arbitrary messages could have done, it is irrelevant because the hoax spread faster than the app. They rebranded the app and started with the other coast, and the same hoax resurfaced.

Telegram is a secretive social media platform with 900 million users. Their employees aren’t allowed to talk about their jobs. It only has one product manager in its founder. And they got to 900 million users without turning into Facebook but also aren’t earning as much.

Telegram is not really a secure messenger app. It’s one of the largest social media platforms. But certain product choices and the location of its audiences make it almost invisible to people based in the United States or Western Europe.

When you first open it, Telegram looks similar to WhatsApp. WhatsApp’s founders famously focused on keeping it simple and clean. For them this meant not adding anything else: “no ads, no games, no gimmicks”. So they added nothing to the app, even years after Meta bought it. About a year or two ago I noticed WhatsApp started adding very specific features that were obviously lifted from Telegram, like channels . But still much slower.

We’ve all seen these posts about how Twitter fired 80% of its employees, and then nothing happened. Seems it ultimately did affect their revenue:

Internal documents obtained by The New York Times show that, in the second quarter of this year, X earned $114 million in revenue in the United States, a 25 percent decline from the first quarter and a 53 percent decline from the previous year. The company aims to reach $190 million in U.S. revenue during the third quarter, bolstered by advertising associated with the Olympics, football and political campaigns, the documents said — but that target would still set the company’s quarterly earnings at 25 percent less than they were last year.

These people might argue that these two items aren’t correlated but I doubt it. Twitter didn’t have a great advertising engine, so most of its revenue came from generic brand advertising, and companies have brand safety teams for a reason. Elon, a “libertarian capitalist”, still seems to have a problem with the free market when it’s against him.

The Digital Markets Act is a bad law. I can understand the idea that led to it. Digital tech companies have a lot of power, and existing regulations don’t adequately cover them. But instead of targeting specific examples of overreach, the EU tried to come up with a universal and far-reaching framework that freezes product development for the largest incumbents and prohibits vertical integration.

Ben Thompson explained this well:

The DMA, though, is much more far-reaching than that; the excerpt above rightly identifies the interoperability requirements as the more meaningful factor affecting Apple’s decision. Consider iPhone Mirroring: given that the iPhone is a designated gatekeeper platform, is Apple allowed to enable iPhone screen-sharing with a Mac but not with Windows or Linux? Or SharePlay Screen Sharing: can Apple allow you to jointly view apps via Facetime, but not other VoIP services? Or the big one, Apple Intelligence: can the semantic index be available to Siri, but not other voice assistants?

The internet is probably my favorite invention in the whole world.

It’s hard to compare it with penicillin or electricity, of course, but I still remember the awe I experienced when I realized I could talk to some strangers right on my computer or look up anything I wanted. Well, mostly texts since music and videos weren’t exactly available on my 45.2 kbps dial-up connection.

This was around 2005. The internet was paid by the hour. One month my parents got such a huge bill they realized I spent around 100 hours online, and believe me, it was expensive.

Arc is an alternative Chrome-based browser with a unique interface. It’s become so popular that The Verge reports on pretty minor updates. I switched to it quite early and haven’t looked back.

Browsers are the most important apps we have on our computers right now. Whether you like it or not, the application layer has shifted to the web. But as I wrote back in 2020, browsers haven’t caught up.

Look at Google Chrome right now. It’s essentially the same browser that launched in 2008. The only recent major update was Tab Groups, which happened in 2020 and they are still subpar. For one, groups aren’t persistent and I can’t understand the logic behind this. You create a “Work” group, open a bunch of tabs, close them… and the group disappears. Want to “work” again? Create it, name it, and choose the color. Every time.

People arguing about regulation tend to favor one side of the argument and believe that either the government or the market has the capabilities and the desire to standardize and solve consumer problems. Theoretically, both approaches are valid, even if they lead to different outcomes. I wanted to tell you about two particular examples I like the most. And yes, basically I will compare the United States and the European Union.

First is credit card cashback. But we need to take a few steps back first. When you buy something for $100 with a VISA or MasterCard, the seller doesn’t get $100. There are interchange fees charged by the card processing network that are shared between them, the bank operating the card terminal, and your own bank.

This creates a few challenges. The seller gets less money, but in theory, you’re more likely to spend more at their establishment if you can pay with a card. Still, they most likely keep their prices a tiny bit higher to account for this loss. The interchange fees also aren’t totally linear. The advertised Stripe US rate is a good example: 2.9% + 30¢ for each successful card charge. A brick-and-mortar business is more likely to use something like Square, which offers 2.6% + 10¢. But there’s always this fixed part, which makes fees on a small purchase much larger.

Most people tend to overvalue ideas and undervalue execution. In my experience, that holds even for many people in the tech industry. In general, this couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Now, there are some rare moments in history when getting the right idea at the right time could dramatically affect your outcome. Facebook would have issues coming up either 10 years earlier or later despite their famous ruthless execution. But it should still be true for most cases.

Thomas Edison didn’t develop an idea for an electric light bulb. On the contrary, he entered a race to invent one pretty late in the game. Many people thought of using electricity to produce light, yet nobody figured out how to do this reasonably. There were multiple attempts before him in the 1800s. Edison tried out hundreds and thousands of different combinations of construction and material until he could build a relatively affordable light bulb that could work for many hours.

Balaji started a discussion on Twitter that finally pushed me to put down my thoughts on the matter.

Some time ago, around the early 2010s, a tectonic shift happened in the media industry. Before this, it was a darling. Small and quirky companies improving our lives. Blogs like TechCrunch emerged to cover it exclusively and grew in tandem with tech. TechCrunch is now a prominent media outlet that is visited by 10 million unique people each month.

But something changed. The tech industry was taking over everything, and its champions started becoming more and more prominent in our lives. With scale came scrutiny. Journalism is the fourth power, a system of checks and balances that is supposed to question everything by design. This is a handy property. Financial Times was the one that uncovered all the fraud behind Wirecard, Germany’s favorite unicorn. Coindesk published the materials that triggered the collapse of FTX so we could learn the other side of Sam Bankam-Fried.

The European Union and Apple are locked in a fight nobody wants to cede. First was the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which made Apple create an entirely new subset of rules for iOS and the AppStore. And yesterday, Apple was fined almost $2 billion for their anti-steering provision affecting companies like Spotify and Amazon’s Kindle.

All digital purchases on the iPhone must go through In-App Purchases, which involve a 30% commission to Apple (goes down to 15% for long-term subscriptions). While certain services like Netflix and Spotify (classified as “reader apps”) can ditch IAP, the resulting user experience gets weird. You cannot sign up if you download such an app as a new user. And the AppStore rules prohibit developers from even suggesting to their users that they should go to the website instead and start their subscription there.

This is probably one of the most egregious examples of how Apple’s strategy leads to suboptimal experiences on their devices. Apple feels entitled to this tax, which you can clearly see in their statement.

Most politicians are populists, which is the natural result of the basic rule of communications: the larger your audience is, the simpler your message should be. And with politicians specifically, there’s a straightforward line from the size of their following to their actual power.

Politicians are incentivized to find a slogan that resonates with people and run with it regardless of their personal opinion on the matter. As an off-topic, I doubt certain US Republicans have a significant issue with LGBT themselves, but they adopt the message that works for people who can vote them in (or out), however cynical this might sound.

The same is happening to AI. And it’s accelerated by AI becoming a major trend covered by practically every media publication. Not only most have dedicated AI writers, but there are entire outlets (e.g. VentureBeat) that have largely shifted their focus to AI.

I saw this post on Matt Birchler’s blog and thought it was an excellent format to share what apps and services I use daily.

• ✉️ Mail service: Gmail
• 📬 Mail client: Superhuman
• ✅ Tasks: Things 3
• 📰 RSS service: Feedly
• 📲 RSS client: Reeder
• 🗞️ News: Artifact – 📚 Books: Amazon Kindle
• ⌨️ Launcher: Raycast
• ☁️ Cloud storage: iCloud + OneDrive
• 🌅 Photo library: iCloud + Amazon Photos
• 🤳🏻 Photo editing: Capture One + Darkroom
• 🌐 Web browser: Arc on Mac, Safari on iPhone and iPad
• 📆 Calendar: Cron
• 📖 Reading: Readwise Reader
• 🌤️ Weather: Carrot Weather
• 🎙️ Podcasts: Castro
• 🎶 Music: Spotify
• 🛹 Clipboard manager: Raycast
• 🔐 Passwords: 1Password
• 💸 Budgeting: Numbers
• 💬 Transcriptions: MacWhisper
• 🐘 Mastodon: Mona
• 🍿 Movie discovery/tracking: Letterboxd
• 🌮 Recipes: Mela
• 🖼️ Screenshots: CleanShot X
• 📝 Notes: Craft + Apple Notes
• ✈️ Flight tracking: Flighty
• 📦 Package tracking: Parcel

You can read the original post here.

One of the strongest moves in communications is pushing slightly wrong numbers out so that many people start quoting them and associate with your business (or your competitors) forever.

Two of my favorite examples are Stripe and Apple Music. Let’s dig in.

Stripe famously charges $2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Well, on average, they charge more. This pricing only applies at the base level and for bank cards issued in the United States. Any foreign card adds 1%. There are charges related to addon products you might use, from Stripe Subscription to something more specific.

But many people quote the advertised figure, which acts as an anchor. I know Stripe alternatives for some local markets that heavily promote the fact they’re a bit cheaper once you include all these charges.

Blogging became popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the rise of platforms like Blogger and WordPress, which made it relatively easy for people to run their blogs.

Then came social media platforms and managed services like Medium that ultimately gathered hundreds of millions of people who’d never bothered to set up their own blogs. Traditional blogs have been almost abandoned during this time.

And even though we’ve seen the resurgence of email newsletters and Substacks, they operate a bit differently: newsletters are usually more professionalized, and authors stick to one or two areas and generally write to make money out of it.

Superhuman is a productivity-focused email app initially designed for founders and executives that has massively expanded its focus since then. Its “the fastest email experience ever made” tagline is well-deserved. It’s also known as an email app that charges $30 a month and amassed over 200,000 on its waitlist, which made many people believe it’s obnoxious.

I’ve been a user of Superhuman since its early days (in fact, we invested in the company). I think it’s indispensable for people who deal with email a lot. This is enabled by many different things, forming a unique software experience I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Superhuman is fast. It’s a web app, but it’s the fastest web app I have ever seen. I mostly use it as a pinned tab, and there’s an Electron wrapper if you need one. All interactions are rapid yet smooth. But it goes deeper. Superhuman breaks the age-old concept of GUI and consciously eliminates UI elements like menus and buttons unless they’re critical. Instead, it pushes you to learn keyboard shortcuts and operate like a power user. In case you forgot or if you need to access a rare, more convoluted function, there’s a powerful Cmd-K Command Bar that has become a standard for powerful productivity-focused apps. And Superhuman’s natural language processing is genuinely one of the best.

There’s a widespread notion that Uber is getting more and more expensive. You can find multiple series of articles produced on this topic each year and entire SEO-optimized webpages for this particular query.

Some people even believe that Uber is worse than conventional taxis right now. Uber’s only advantage to them was the price, and since those prices have soared, they see no value. In fact, these people believe Uber could only grow because of its initial low prices, artificially attracting customers and taking market share, only to leverage its semi-monopoly position later.

I think they completely misunderstand what Uber actually is and what makes it an excellent service.

Uber isn’t the only ride-sharing company even though it was the first. Depending on the country, you could switch its name with Lyft, Bolt, Grab or something else. I’d keep using “Uber” throughout this story.