Apple’s new HomeView sure seems like a good fit for the kitchen, which is why the company’s press releases, demos, and ads seem to lean into the idea that you’ll be cooking with the little guy.
But is there an ugly side to all that convenience? Here’s Dominic Preston, writing for The Verge:
The HomeView is just the latest in a long line of websites, browser extensions, and smart home gadgets with the same promise: that it can take an online recipe and strip it down to the essentials…. There’s only one group of people likely to object: the food writers who created those recipes in the first place.
So wait a second. Apple building a product that gets past all the garbage that loads up recipe sites—not just the ads but the endless, meandering bad writing that exists because search engines apparently demanded it—to get to the actual ingredients and make their users’ lives better, is a problem because it might hurt the livelihood of the people who create those user-hostile websites?
Did… a recipe blogger write this?
I would know, since I’m one of them — I have my own food newsletter where I occasionally publish recipes, so I have a little skin in the game.
Oh. I see.
My recipe app of choice is Mela, which (like many recipe apps) already has a feature that grabs the details from a web recipe while avoiding the SEO garbage. With HomeView, Apple is doing the same thing. I approve.
Of course, as a 21st-century media professional, I feel for the recipe writers who got jerked around by Google and are now reaping the consequences. Preston mentions that a lot of professional recipe sources are now moving to subscription models, and I think that’s a positive development, whether you’re the New York Times or a small content creator with a paid newsletter.
One of my big concerns about the HomeView is that it doesn’t seem to have any facility to support recipe apps. It would probably be a perfect device for an extension of Mela or Paprika, but they’re not CarPlay audio/video apps.
I hope Apple can find a way to allow users to bring their personal recipe catalogs onto the device in the future. In the meantime, if I were the developer of a recipe app, I’d be looking into creating a web version, to be loaded in HomeView’s included Safari browser.
I wondered what the entry-level, initial price of each Apple TV box at introduction was, from the March 2007 original to the Apple TV 4K (4th generation) announced October 13, 2026, adjusted for inflation. So I charted it.
Essentially, only the original, (Mac-based!) Apple TV was more expensive in actual dollars than the current model. And as recently as earlier this year, it was the second-cheapest it had ever been. Talk about whiplash.
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The biggest updates this year were about the three new AI-based photo-editing tools, as you might expect.
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Apple TV has plenty of reasons to keep on living. But it sure would be nice if Apple would show the product some attention beyond the massive price increases. Attention like new hardware, OS improvements, and (eventually) a price that makes it less of a hard sell to people who are desperate to escape the garbage of all the other streamer-box platforms.
Well, this week the Apple TV got some attention, in the form of a hardware update that came along with another price increase, up to $299. If the Apple TV’s base price of $199 made it “essentially dead” for anyone but the most die-hard of Apple customers, how much more dead could this fourth-generation model be?
While I’m obviously not a fan of the theatrical declaring of products dead because they don’t meet one analyst’s definition of success—lots of products are profitable and successful without taking huge market share—I do think that the $299 price tag puts Apple TV hardware in a really tough spot. (And to analyst Dan Rayburn’s credit, this week he made his point with a little more finesse: At $299 “it won’t appeal to the masses,” he wrote.)
These days, pretty much every TV you buy comes with an embedded computer that means you don’t really need to buy anything to make it work with streaming services. A stroll through my local Costco reveals a panoply of enormous TVs with high-quality screens, low prices, and embedded OSes from Roku, Amazon, Samsung, or Google. They all have all the apps, and all the services.
As a result, the addressable market for an external TV box just keeps contracting. For most people, what’s in their TV will be good enough. That leaves the rest of us, of course: the people who realize that the embedded systems in TVs tend to be slow and inelegant and are even potentially built on privacy-invading surveillance technology. But there are, sad to say, a lot fewer of us.
This change in the market means that cheap streaming sticks, once a mainstay, are essentially irrelevant. They’re no better than what’s in the TVs out there. Maybe there was a day when spending $20 for a Roku stick at Walmart made sense, but those days are largely over.
For the people who do care, who do want something better, the options are more limited. Amazon’s Fire TV Cube is $199. Roku’s “Ultra” is $149. The Google TV streamer, my favorite of all the non-Apple products on the market, is $150.
When you could get an Apple TV starting at $199, you could spot Apple playing its usual game—not the low-price leader, but in the ballpark. At $299, though, it becomes a lot harder for me to convince my relative who is complaining about how slow and terrible their streaming interface is to spring for the Apple one and solve their problems.
In the past, Apple has offered a second, lower-priced Apple TV model alongside the fully specced-up one—the previous low-end Apple TV 4K lacked Ethernet and had less storage space—but that’s not currently the case. I’ve seen some commentators suggest this is a good thing because it “simplifies the product line.”
I don’t follow that argument at all. Having a cheaper product is good, because not only do some people not need Ethernet or large amounts of storage on a streamer box, but lower prices broaden the market! (The iPhone product line could be simplified if we got rid of the iPhone 17e, iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and heck, iPhone 18 Pro Max, but I don’t think that would be a very good idea!)
So why only one Apple TV 4K this time? There are three possibilities. The first is that Apple just doesn’t care about trying to reach people at lower prices, and has resigned itself to the fact that tvOS is an exceedingly small niche product for its most committed customers. It’s possible, but I don’t want to believe that.
The next possibility: Given how weird chip supply and cost issues are right now, Apple has prioritized releasing its high-end product, and will release a lower-end model at some point in the future once it can make enough with the parts it has on hand. Going to market with a brand-new Apple TV 4K in the lowest-end version doesn’t make any sense… you’d always start with the high-end model that is going to be an instant buy for your hardest-core customers who don’t mind the price tag. Then you backfill later with the stripped-down model that maybe doesn’t have as much storage, or those fancy microphones, or an Ethernet port.
And finally, it’s possible that the Apple TV hardware world is in flux because Apple wants to make a different product that hits a lower price point. One that’s less full-featured than the top-of-the-line model, but different enough that it’s not just a variant of the existing product. This is the long-theorized “Apple TV Stick,” and I’m not sure that product needs to exist if the company can just make a box that’s more competitive with the high-end offerings from Google, Amazon, and Roku. But at least it’s possible, and might even be preferable if there are key markets asking for it. (I recently stayed in a hotel with Apple TV boxes on the back of every room TV. Would hotels prefer something a little simpler to install? I honestly have no idea.)
Regardless, as someone who thinks that tvOS—despite all its limitations—offers the best TV media streaming interface experience out there, I hope Apple cares enough to keep it alive and keep it relevant for the small market of people who can’t imagine being stuck with using the software embedded on their TV sets. The masses may not care, but we care, and if that’s not a recipe for a successful Apple product, I don’t know what is.
By the time the website came up over six minutes later — where you can search for other Apple Stores — my ship date had already slipped to the end of November or early December.
It seems that my work on Widgetsmith and our other apps will be constrained to the simulator a little longer. It is also nice to have the new thing when it’s new, so I can write and talk about it when it’s new.
I guess the upside is that, now that shipping dates have slipped into 2027, the iPhone Duo will be new for a long time.
Clearly Apple is struggling with Duo supply, but there’s also obviously a lot of Duo demand and curiosity out there. Put them together and you get a device that’s sold out into next year already. The Duo is not going to be the best-selling iPhone of this cycle—not even close—but I still think it will be the best-selling folding phone ever, and by a lot.
For the record: I got all the way to the final screen with Apple telling me my 256GB Night Sky order would be available next Friday. But then it slipped to Nov 9 – Nov 16.
HomeView’s simplicity may put off hardcore home automation enthusiasts, but I’d argue it’s perfect for their long-suffering spouses. I’ve tried every version of physical smart home control interface in my home, and you know who hasn’t used any of them? My family.
Because my family all have iPhones, and because the HomeView will always be there and will feel familiar, I can see them actually using it. That means I could set up a full Home Assistant instance and run a detailed dashboard on a tablet in my office, then feed the scenes and devices into Apple Home so my husband and daughter can just tap to control them on a HomeView in the kitchen.
My own thermostat, which came with my HVAC system, is a piece of junk, and I can’t replace it because it is incompatible with third-party thermostats. But I can envision putting a HomeView on the wall and making that the primary interface for it and every other smart home device in my house.
Apple’s new HomeView device doesn’t have an App Store, but it does have an app story, of a sort. There are some selected Apple apps on its (surprisingly) iPad-like home screen, but you can’t add more. What’s a person to do?
If you use apps that play audio or video and support CarPlay, though, you’re in luck: HomeView supports those apps, and just those apps, via projection from your iPhone. So if you’re a fan of Overcast or Spotify, you’re in luck.
And if you’re curious about video CarPlay, well, that’s a feature Apple added this year that lets apps play video using CarPlay when the car is parked. And the HomeView is always parked.
Beyond that, though, it seems like HomeView is at least starting life as a very limited app platform. Apple does say that if you make a Siri AI query for your personal content, it will search everything on your iPhone or iPad—and that includes apps that aren’t on the HomeView. So you should be able to query your iPhone apps, but not actually run them.
In the short term, this means that if you want to (for example) access your calendar right on your device, you will probably have to do so via Apple’s Calendar app, even if you use a different app on your other devices. (If you use an app that has a web app equivalent, you could probably open it up in Safari, which is an app that the HomeView does offer.)
In the long term, I still think it’s quite likely that Apple will eventually expand what can be run on HomeView. I haven’t used one yet, but based on what I’ve seen on Apple’s website, it feels very much like a 1.0 product with plenty of room for expansion. Whether that comes in the form of apps, widgets, or access for CarPlay apps that aren’t audio or video apps, remains to be seen.
On Tuesday as a part of its deluge of smart home announcements, Apple has launched something a bit different: a series of products called Apple Home Collection that are… not quite Apple products, but not not Apple products. Instead, they’re “designed in collaboration” with partners, in this case LG Electronics and Schneider Electric.
It’s hard to tell where one company ends and the other begins, but if you carry the weight of a brand like Apple, having Apple stand over the shoulder of some other company and sprinkle in some secret ingredients isn’t the worst approach if you don’t want to actually build and support those products yourself.
According to Apple, each accessory can be set up with one tap from an iPhone, and only requires the Apple Home app. (That describes a lot of products today, too—it’ll be interesting to see if Apple’s added some new tech just for these products or if they’re largely using standard techniques that other products in the market can offer.)
Now to the products, which will be available starting in December, and all of which share a “clean, minimal aesthetic and premium materials,” which would probably be your first clue that Apple was involved in their design.
LG’s tilt-down Indoor Cam.
LG is offering four cameras, all of which capture 2.5K video and connect directly with iCloud for video via the HomeKit Secure Video specification.1 There’s a video doorbell (with chime integrated with HomeView, HomePod, and HomePod mini), a combination camera and floodlight, a standard outdoor camera, and an indoor camera that can tilt down automatically to physically stop monitoring when a family member enters the home.
The LG smart lock and doorbell in situ.
Apple gets in the smart lock game with LG’s Smart Deadbolt Lock, which uses UWB for automatic unlocking when you approach the door, like the locks released earlier this year by Aqara and Schlage. It’s also got NFC support for non-UWB devices, a numeric keypad, and a hidden physical key slot.
And then there are the smart thermostats. There are two of these, from LG and Schneider Electric. The two thermostats support external temperature and humidity sensors as well as those built in to HomeView, HomePod, and HomePod mini. It’s unclear what differences the two products have, but Apple’s press release hints that there might be some different kinds of system compatibility, perhaps for the home heating and cooling systems themselves, though both are described as working “with a broad range of HVAC systems.”
Every one of the accessories supports Thread, which Apple has been building into its devices for a while now. While it doesn’t seem like there’s much here that hasn’t been done in other smart home products, Apple’s stamp of approval is important. If you don’t do a lot of research, even today you can end up buying a smart home product that has hidden gotchas. These devices will presumably be as standard and Apple-friendly as they come.
That said, other smart home products also seem to live up to everything Apple is describing with the Home Collection. Until these products ship, it will be hard to determine if there’s some special stuff Apple is doing with these products that’s unavailable to other products, but at a glance it doesn’t seem so.
iCloud+ storage plans support one (50GB), up to five (200GB), or unlimited (2TB) cameras. ↩
Among its smart home product announcements on Tuesday, Apple announced the new HomePod mini 2, priced at $149 and powered by an S10 chip (introduced in the Apple Watch Series 10). Curiously, its banner feature—support for Siri AI—will not be available when the product ships on October 30.
According to Apple, Siri AI will come to the HomePod mini 2 “in a future software update.” When it does, Apple’s press release hints that it will be able to tap into personal context when paired with an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone or iPad. When there’s no such device available, it’ll still have access to broader Siri AI functionality, but won’t have access to the treasure trove of data that rides with your device.
Of course, since home accessories are the order of the day, Apple has touted the HomePod mini 2’s integration with the broader home experience. Like its predecessor, you can use it to control home devices via voice commands. Apple’s also supporting a new four-speaker surround sound setup, when four HomePod minis are connected to the new Apple TV 4K.
Apple also continues to tinker with that little glowing circle at the top of the HomePod, that’s not quite a display but is… something. The new Sound Glow feature turns it into a visualizer that is based on the sound of the currently playing song, and its color scheme will match the song’s associated album art.
The centerpiece is a new smart home hub called the HomeView. Equipped with a display and an A18 chip, the product essentially serves as the Siri command center for an Apple-powered household…
The HomeView comes in two versions: a countertop model with a metal speaker base and a wall-mounted version with a flat, square base that sits against the wall beneath the display. The countertop offering will come in four colors: space gray, silver, starlight and pink, while the wall-mounted version will be limited to space gray and silver.
The name dovetails with a MacRumors report that Apple used a shell company to trademark “HomeView” last year. So much for my prediction of a re-use of the base HomePod name.
Gurman also says the new Apple TV remote will have a speaker, and the new Apple TV itself will have a microphone to enable it to receive Siri requests directly.
The announcement that Apple’s making a home-related announcement on Tuesday was hardly unexpected. Most things Apple does these days are reported in advance, usually by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Apple… is nearing the launch of a new product category: a wall-mounted display that can control appliances, handle videoconferencing and use AI to navigate apps…. The company is gearing up to announce the device as early as March and will position it as a command center for the home, according to people with knowledge of the effort. The product, code-named J490, also will spotlight the new Apple Intelligence AI platform, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work is confidential.
J490 did not, in fact, ship in March of 2025. The failed Apple Intelligence roll-out meant that the company had to push back the release of its AI-powered home products until after it could fix its AI issues and launch Siri AI last month.
It’s been a long time coming. Apple has made some runs at addressing the smart-home market in the past, but it’s never seemed to be part of a coherent, consistent strategy. (Many of us still can’t forgive it for abandoning the AirPort product line just as the advent of mesh networking would have provided the company opportunities that ended up accruing to companies like Eero, now a part of Amazon.)
Perhaps in new CEO John Ternus, Apple really does have a powerful internal advocate for the smart home. In a funny twist of fate, Apple’s intransigence in this category hasn’t really harmed its chances. Amazon and Google have been selling products similar to J490—touchscreen voice assistant home hubs—for years now, but they have failed to catch fire. I’ve used multiple Echo Shows and Google Nest Hubs in my kitchen over the years, and they have all been various degrees of terrible.
More broadly, the entire smart home market has suffered from fragmentation and mediocrity. Early devices were expensive, unreliable, and impractical. Things have gradually improved, and the tech giants have reached a detente that has made everything more interoperable. But even so, it’s really only this year that (for example) I feel like the smart lock has reached a level of tech capability that allows it to fulfill its promise, thanks to UWB support.
So is there a universe in which Apple rolls into this category at this late date and actually finds success where others have struggled to get traction? I’m not saying it’s a likely scenario, but it’s certainly possible. Apple’s track record with prioritizing user security and privacy is certainly an asset for anyone considering adding tech devices (especially ones with sensors) to their personal spaces. Apple’s tight device integration could also be a strong selling point for the many users who are fully bought in to the ecosystem.
So I’m saying there’s a chance.
The future of home is widgets?
The more I think about J490 or the HomePad or whatever it will ultimately be called—my money’s still on something with the HomePod name, possibly even just HomePod—the more I feel like it will expose Apple’s current thinking about the role of apps on its platforms. (Kind of an important topic.)
The wild success of the iOS App Store starting in 2009 transformed how Apple viewed the role of software in its operating system. Handed a big hammer, Apple saw nails everywhere. The Mac got an App Store, which exists, but I think nobody would consider a hit. The Apple Watch got an App Store, which also exists but seems kind of pointless. Messages got an App Store, which also exists, much to my surprise. And of course, tvOS was revamped under the premise that “the future of TV is apps,” but that future never really arrived.
Perhaps Apple has taken notice that the everything-has-an-App-Store strategy is really showing diminishing returns. The problem is, what do you do with a device like this forthcoming touchscreen? It doesn’t run iOS or tvOS, but apparently yet another variant of Apple’s omni-OS foundation. If it supports playing video from Apple TV but not Netflix, or podcasts from Apple Podcasts but not Overcast, or music from Apple Music but not Spotify, that’ll be frustrating. And the strength of the iPhone app ecosystem is one of Apple’s greatest assets.
So what’s Apple to do? My best guess is that it’s going to use some technology we’ve already seen to let your apps peek through on this new device from your iPhone. macOS Sequoia introduced the ability to display widgets and receive notifications directly from your iPhone—a feature that, given the timing, might actually have been invented for this as-yet-unreleased device!
In the long run, I wonder if the answer on devices that are ancillary to the iPhone—and I’ll throw the Apple Watch in here, too, since it already does this—is to allow app developers to include apps for alternate Apple platforms along with their existing App Store apps. You don’t actually need to use the watchOS App Store to download Apple Watch apps—you just get the iPhone app and your iPhone installs the app on your watch. If Apple wants real apps running on its smart home devices, perhaps they just transfer over from your iPhone.
In the meantime, projecting widgets doesn’t seem like a bad compromise to make the home hub more personal without requiring yet another App Store and all that complexity.
Of course, the next problem this product will face is that, as a device that sits in a home, it is probably going to need to interact with more than a single user. Beyond the Mac, Apple has struggled with the concept of multiple people using a single device. You can do it on Apple TV, but it’s not a great experience. You can do it, sort of, on HomePods. But if Apple is going to tie in the contents of a user’s iPhone with this home hub, it needs the device to be able to shift context on the fly and display content from a particular person’s iPhone, or (in the case of children or guests) someone without a paired iPhone at all.
Tricky stuff, and not a place where Apple has a great track record. Gurman’s reports suggest Apple is going to try a form of face recognition (that’s sub-Face ID level, but that’s probably okay for something found inside a home) in order to determine the context of which person is interacting with the device. We’ll see how it goes, and how responsive it can be if it’s got to connect to an iPhone and display widgets or load other personal data.
The Siri AI question
Then there’s the feature that has made these products all wait for their moment in the sun: Apple Intelligence. Apple has been slow to roll out iOS 27, probably to limit a surge of use of Siri AI on Apple’s servers. Numerous people have reported that Siri AI feels a little slower now than it did this summer, when the user base was smaller.
These products—not just the home hub, but next-generation HomePod mini speakers—will live or die with the functionality of Apple’s voice assistant. I’ve found Siri AI to be a pleasant surprise, an entirely functional voice assistant that replaced an entirely dysfunctional one. But if it fails me on my iPhone or iPad, I can just do things myself. That’s a lot less true on a device that’s meant to use voice as its primary interaction mode. Apple needs to get this right.
The rest of the story
Finally, there’s the question of how Apple will approach the entire smart home ecosystem. What product categories are worthy of Apple’s own brand name, and what ones can be served by preferred partners?
Gurman’s report this week that Apple is working with LG to build a smart lock and a series of security cameras, starts to answer that question. At least for now, it seems that Apple is going to approach this with three tiers: a few Apple-built products (home hub, speakers, TV box), some “second-party” products built in collaboration with Apple but released by LG and possibly others (cameras, lock), and presumably other Matter and Apple Home certified products that will receive Apple’s attention, promotion, and Apple Store placement.
I do wonder how Apple will make its decisions about what products it will decide to build itself. Will it go this far, but no further? Or do its LG collaborations give it time to figure out what categories could use a little bit of Apple magic? (Once again, I am imploring Apple to consider bringing back AirPort.)
That said, I’ve got a couple of Aqara 4K security cameras that work great, and the Aqara and Schlage UWB locks are pretty great. Apple doesn’t need to build products in new categories if other companies are making products that meet Apple’s standards. And maybe it’s hoping that its own moves here will set a direction and encourage further investment, so Apple doesn’t have to do everything itself.
After years of Apple never engaging with the smart home category for very long, this is an opportunity for a reset. What Apple announces on Tuesday will be a good start, but we’ve seen good starts from Apple before. It needs to keep its eye on the category, keep shipping new products, and continually improve its home software. If this is just a short-term lease, it’ll be pointless. Apple needs to get a mortgage and settle into its new home.
I had to listen to a bunch of TTS voices to make my final choices. An audio newsletter producer’s job is never done.
I got a weird email the other day from OpenAI that ended up causing a great deal of work for me:
As part of our continuous upgrade process, we are deprecating the following legacy audio models: tts-1, tts-hd, gpt-4o-mini-tts. Access to these models will be shut off on January 6, 2027.
I use OpenAI’s text-to-speech voice for the Six Colors Audio Newsletter. Ironically, I chose one of OpenAI’s least advanced voices for this brand-new feature of this website because it was one of the only modern text-to-speech models that didn’t occasionally omit, rewrite, or hallucinate text. I need the computer voice to speak all of our words, and our words only.
This is a bummer, and not just because I have only had six months with this feature before having to rebuild it! I was inspired to build it in the first place by the app (and, full disclosure, former sponsor) Listen Later, which is a read-it-later service that turns your saved articles into a podcast read by… you guessed it… a now-deprecated OpenAI TTS voice.
Not too long after I got the email from OpenAI, I heard from Yalım of Listen Later about this. Unsurprisingly, as someone who has built his entire business on this particular set of voices, he was a bit upset! And not just for the technical challenge he now faces.
It’s the human cost on his customers. Because, funny thing, our human brains are great at finding patterns in static and personifying things that aren’t people. Yalım’s customers have spent years listening to their chosen voice. Their brains have made connections to the sound, rhythm, and delivery pattern of those particular voices. Now those voices are being silenced.
(There’s also an accessibility angle here: As you might expect, Listen Later has a lot of visually impaired users. I’m not sure OpenAI has thought through the ramifications of what this change will mean for those users’ lives, but then again, OpenAI strikes me as a company that doesn’t think a lot of things through.)
I can’t speak to Yalım’s users, but obviously I’m also concerned about this for the Six Colors members who subscribe to the Audio Newsletter. (If you’re someone who likes this site and prefers to listen rather than read, I highly recommend becoming a member and subscribing—you’ll get the stories of the day in a podcast, chaptered and fancy like.) Unfortunately, I don’t expect OpenAI to budge on this, so I’ve spent the last week investigating other options, both local and API-based, to replace my six-month-old version.
Much to my surprise, the winner of my bake-off was the brand-new ElevenLabs v4 engine, which is remarkably good. Yes, I’m going to be spending dollars a month instead of pennies, but the results are very good. Even if the voices are not, alas, our old friends. What I have had to do is create a workflow that tests every audio file that comes out of the API to make sure it’s saying the words it’s supposed to be saying, and not hallucinating. Yes, that means articles take a ridiculous round trip from text-to-speech-back-to-text. But it means that I can use more sophisticated models while guarding against AI omissions or hallucinations. So far, so good.
Apple has announced that it’s planning something for October 13. The assumption—amplified by the “Welcome Home” slogan—is that Apple is going to roll out a bunch of new home-oriented products, most notably a touchscreen home hub that’s been rumored for a couple of years now.
My understanding is that the “experience” at Apple’s cozy building in Tribeca will focus on creators, while some other traditional press will just receive remote briefings. So I think it’s wrong to say there will be an Apple Event next Tuesday. More likely, there will be a 9am Eastern drop of a video and a bunch of press releases. Followed shortly by a bunch of influencer videos shot in Apple’s building, of course.
Late last month I got several emails from Spotify, all pretty much the same:
Hello,
Our automatic review tools determined that this podcast may contain content that infringes the rights of a third party. Due to this, we’ve removed:
Title: 14: Ribsy
Detected Content: “Ribsy” by Beverly Cleary
Why did this happen?
Spotify for Creators supports the distribution of audio and video podcasts. Our automated review process may remove any content that appears to be distributing third-party literary material.
What’s next?
If you think your episode does not infringe the intellectual property rights of a third party, or is subject to a copyright exception (such as fair use), you may submit an appeal. We’ll review your appeal and notify you of our decision.
Please note: Abusing the appeals process may result in restrictions on submitting future appeals. Under our repeat infringer policy, shows or users with multiple strikes will be removed from Spotify, and their accounts terminated. However, if your content is reinstated—either through a successful appeal or because the claim is withdrawn—we’ll update your records and remove the strike.
Klickitcast was a podcast by John McCoy and Phil Gonzales that covered every book by Beverly Cleary. Episodes were usually an hour long, and generally started with the hosts reading the first paragraph about the book to kick off their discussion.
I measured a few of them. An hour or more of critical content, and maybe 30 or 45 seconds of quoting from the work being discussed. This is the very definition of “fair use,” in which excerpts from works may be used specifically for the purpose of making editorial points about those works.
It’s very obvious what happened. Not being satisfied by its endless patrolling of podcast episodes for music that appears in Spotify’s own music libraries, the company had moved on to either:
Lazily scanning the titles of podcasts to see if they matched books.
or
Lazily transcribing podcasts and matching them to some book text, possibly even only the first portion of the book.
Either way, if a match was found, Spotify would immediately remove the podcast episode from its service and send one of those emails that I received.
On the one hand, I was offended because anyone could see that these were not pirate podcast episodes that were illegally creating audiobooks out of copyrighted works. When I use the word “lazily,” what I’m saying is that there is clearly a way to build a tool that analyzed the transcripts of podcast episodes and compared it to book text and intelligently determined whether the episode was pirating books. But Spotify didn’t bother with that. It just hoovered up anything and everything, including an episode where book text took up a grand total of 0.008% of its runtime.
On the other hand, I was also offended because this is just another example of the ruination of the legal concept of fair use. Fair use is not a copout or a loophole, it’s a fundamental understanding that copyright law has limits, and quoting a work to criticize it can’t be stifled by authors demanding that their copyright entitles them to prevent critics from quoting their work.
The problem is that fair use on the internet has been stifled by content-detection algorithms that don’t care about your fair use. It just notices that you used something that belongs to someone else. On YouTube, this can lead to account deactivation, loss of ad revenue, and even the hijacking of your ad revenue and the diversion of it to someone else who claims they own the rights to the thing you are using legally.
Let me give you an example of how this chilling effect works. Next week we’re posting the first episode of the new series of Designed in California, which is about the creation of the iPod. To set the scene, there’s an episode about the origins of the MP3 audio format, which includes an amazing story about a particular pop song that was used by one of the creators of the MP3 to fine-tune the format.
I thought it would be great to play a few seconds of the song in the podcast, when illustrating just how difficult it was to encode an a capella voice performance and explaining that the father of the MP3 estimates that he had to listen to the song a thousand times before he felt he had gotten it right.
We aren’t playing the song, though, because I’m sure it would run afoul of YouTube and Spotify’s content algorithms, and we’d need to risk the argument that it’s fair use—and potentially threaten the distribution and revenue generation of our brand-new podcast. Nothing like having episode one of a five-part series disappear from the internet because we ran afoul of content scanning.
(Yes, you can appeal these sorts of rulings. In fact, Spotify did reply the next day to my response to its rejection notices and agreed that it was in the wrong and restored the episodes. But as a content creator, you are throwing yourself on the mercy of the organization, and if they decide you’re in violation, you are out of luck.)
After all this, I decided to delete my Spotify account and sever The Incomparable’s relationship with that company. To be honest, I had only put my network’s podcasts up on Spotify because I had heard from a few Spotify users who were interested in listening to them there. But for shows like mine, the truth is that we rarely had double-digit listeners of any given episode.
And more broadly, I believe Spotify is bad for podcasting. It’s not really podcasting, of course, because it ingests the files and re-serves them. It’s not interested in the broader podcast ecosystem (hence its original plan to buy a bunch of popular shows and limit their distribution to Spotify). It’s a massive company that has decided to feed the growth beast by consuming as many adjacent pieces of content as it possibly can.
And that includes podcasts and audiobooks. (Yes! Is it a coincidence that just as Spotify began its lazy inspection of podcasts for violations of literary content, it’s also ramped up its own audiobook offerings, including AI-generated audiobooks? I assume not, while also assuming that there probably is a plague of AI-generated audiobooks out there that really do violate copyright. It’s not wrong—but it’s conveniently self-serving.)
If you listen to podcasts on Spotify, I encourage you to stop. Your iPhone comes with a free podcast app that’s pretty good, and many others are available. We all have better options.
Whatever you call it, whether it’s being a producer or product manager or something else that isn’t a programmer, creating good software in the AI era still requires the power of a human brain: being creative, solving problems, and making decisions. Some people will be better at it than others. It’s a skill, and a bit of an art. I’m excited that modern coding tools have given people with vision and desire the ability to make software.
The question, to me, isn’t how much code was written by a human. It’s how much the app was authored by a human, which I think is a more nuanced question. How much care, thought, and humanity went into the app matters far more than tabs vs. spaces or a manually-vs.-machine-built HStack.
This is the truth of it. Slapping a quick prompt into Claude is not going to get you good software. Envisioning how a product should work, in detail, is hard work—and not everyone is going to be good at it, or want to do it. If pure coding skill is no longer the differentiator it was, taste and organization and attention to detail and many other intangible features that great developers have always had will still matter.
Hello from Memphis, where we are currently hosting the 8th annual 12-hour Podcastathon. I’m here for the fourth straight year, along with Stephen Hackett, Myke Hurley, Kathy Campbell, Casey Liss, and Brad Dowdy. It will be guaranteed to be a fun watch.
Amazon on Thursday announced new Kindles, including a new base model, Paperwhite, and Colorsoft. All three models come in multiple varieties (plastic and aluminum) and in a variety of new colors.
The cheapest model is $170 ($150 with ads), and the priciest new model is the $319 Colorsoft Signature Edition. (I admit that I find it somewhat shocking that even a basic e-reader costs $170 these days, but here we are.)
More notable, I think, is that Amazon is embracing page-turn buttons again—but with a very Amazon twist. After systematically removing page-turn buttons from its Kindles over the years, it’s brought them back—on a $80 case. Following in the steps of competitor Kobo, Amazon has also added a page-turn remote control for people who prefer to read while their device is not in their hands. (I know multiple people who place their e-readers in a stand and rely on page-turn clickers.)
I gotta say that I don’t love that Amazon has decided that to use page-turn buttons, you need to pay $80 and keep your Kindle in a case. But at least they’re finally offering an option. (For the record, Kobo’s Libra Colour is priced similarly to the Paperwhite Signature Edition and has buttons right on it, no case required. It’s the e-reader I use the most these days.)
Still, I must begrudgingly admit that Amazon has provided some much-needed page-turn options for people who don’t want to endlessly tap or swipe on a touchscreen. And over the last few years, Amazon has addressed many of the limitations of the Kindle software platform, making it much more competitive with Kobo. Given the outsized place Kindle has in the e-reader world, it’s good to see that someone at Amazon still cares about Kindle.
Apple has become one of the world’s most valuable companies because of its products: the Mac, the iPad, the Apple Watch and most especially the iPhone. But the company’s product sales have been aided over the past 25 years by the presence of its iconic brand in more than 500 retail stores scattered across 27 countries and regions. Anyone who has ducked into an Apple store for a new iPhone or toted a broken Mac through the mall for a repair appointment at the Genius Bar has experienced what Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson built.
In “Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius,” Mr. Johnson details the remarkable story of how, in 1999, Jobs recruited him from Target to join Apple as head of retail and launch perhaps the biggest long shot of Jobs’s entire tenure as chief executive. At a time when computer stores were a moribund category and Apple’s brand was near its lowest ebb, the two men concocted a daring strategy: find some way to connect with the millions of consumers who had no interest in or understanding of Apple’s products.
Everyone loves the MacBook Neo. Apple’s fresh-squeezed laptop was a not-too-surprising hit with computer buyers, and presumably sales have continued to be good despite a $100 mid-stream price increase elevating its original $599 price tag to a still-good-but-not-astounding $699.
The Neo proved that Apple’s iPhone-class processor, the A18 Pro, was powerful enough to drive a Mac and the Mac’s wide-open software platform. With performance roughly in between an M1 and M2 processor, the Neo is completely capable of even somewhat difficult tasks like audio and video editing. Obviously, RAM and processor limitations prevent it from tackling the toughest jobs, but that’s why Apple makes numerous other, more expensive Macs.
A friend’s kid is moving into her college dorm—the same one both of my kids lived in!—as I write this. I have no idea what computer she’s bringing to school, but it certainly could be a MacBook Neo, and I’d wager a bunch of her classmates will have them, too.
So, hooray for the Neo, but what’s next? With the arrival of the iPhone 18 Pro and the A20 processor, the question is, will Apple release a Neo based on last year’s A19 Pro processor, or jump to the A20? I fear that the answer is the less-exciting A19 Pro, but what if it’s the A20 Pro? (And if it’s not the A20 Pro in 2027, it’ll be the A20 Pro in 2028, you could almost bank on it.)
So what’s in store for the MacBook Neo in the future? Let’s go to the charts:
In short, the A19 Pro would be an incremental update to the Neo, keeping it roughly in the ballpark of M1 CPU performance and M2 or M3 GPU performance. The A20 Pro, on the other hand, would elevate the Neo to M2-level CPU and M4-level GPU performance.
Also, in terms of differentiating the product line, next year the MacBook Air will presumably get the M6 chip just unveiled for the Mac mini. But regardless, both the M5 and M6 chips are still well ahead of the A20 Pro in everything that really matters for Mac performance.
I’m sure Apple could get away with releasing a MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro chip, and given the pressures on its margins caused by the RAM crisis, that’s probably what it will do. (It would presumably bring the Neo up to 12GB of RAM, which would be a nice boost—while raising the price, of course.)
But now that we’ve seen it in action in an iPhone, the prospect of the A20 Pro in a MacBook Neo is even more tantalizing. The question is how long we’ll need to wait to see it.
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