The Case Against Streaming TV Shows

New streaming TV shows ask for a 20-30 hour time commitment. Unlike network TV, you will often be binge-ing alone and may never even get a pay-off (or the pay-off will suck).

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Today, we are talking about why you probably shouldn’t watch the hot new streaming TV show that everyone is telling you to watch.

Also this week:

• YouTube turns 20

• Apple Intelligence’s Massive Failure

• …and them fire posts (including the Ralph Lauren Bear)

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People keep telling me to watch Apple TV+’s show Severance (which is on its second season).

I mean the reviews are great and the memes look funny based on how many “😂”- emojis I see when they are posted. But I refuse. I will not watch Severance until the narrative arc is completely done (or if the show gets cancelled, then I will have saved 20-30 hours of my time).

As a blanket policy for 2025, I implemented a “no new streaming TV show” policy.

Why? I’ve been burnt way too many times in the past 5 years with people telling me I have to watch a new show:

• “Dude, The Bear is sooooo good!”

• “Bro, you seriously HAVE to watch Ted Lasso!”

• “Trung, have you seen Bridgerton? YOU HAVE TO!!”

• “Man, this GoT spin-off House of the Dragon is INSANE!!!”

• “Trung, I’m telling you. Yellowstone will make you shit your pants.”

• “Are you watching The Mandalorian? It’s unreal! You have to! I’m serious!”

• “Dude, dude, dude. 3 Body Problem is amazing. You gotta watch it. Seriously!”

So, I did. I watched all of them and every single one had the same outcome: started strong with some laughs, suspense and well-timed cliffhangers…but then storylines became circular or didn’t make a lot of narrative sense (either within a single season or between seasons).

These two posts nail the vibe of the current streaming TV experience.

Take Ted Lasso, which was the original Apple TV+ hit show. I loved the first season and pumped the show’s tires so hard that even the official Apple TV+ Twitter account was re-tweeting my pumps. Season 1 was an easy A+. But the second season was B- and the third season was a solid D (I gave up after two episodes).

Don’t even get me started on Season 3 of The Bear or Westworld. FML.

It’s not just that so many new streaming TV shows seem to get progressively worse as the story unfolds, but there is also the risk of getting invested into a new show and then watching it get cancelled because streaming economics are vicious.

Example: I was really feeling Tokyo Vice and — boom! — cancelled after two seasons.

In my unprofessional opinion, HBO’s Succession is the only multi-season show from the past decade that has truly earned its keep. I have zero regrets watching those 36 hours of runtime.

So many banger quotes. So many incredible memes.

Now, I understand that not every streaming TV show is meant to be prestige and in the same league as Succession. Most of the time, viewers just want to throw something on the screen and turn their brains off.

I get that. I’m not some paragon of productivity that needs to optimize every minute of my life. The specific problem I have with new (or new-ish) streaming TV shows is that they often ask for a double-digit hour time commitment to receive a pay-off (and those pay-offs either don’t come or just straight up suck).

When someone tells you “seriously bro, you HAAAVVEEE to watch [new narrative TV streaming show X]”, they’re about to tie up 20 hours of your life.

Other TV formats are much easier to start and stop. Cooking shows. Home-hunting shows. Dating shows. 1990s sitcom shows.

Same with film. A 2-hour watch and you’re done.

What about social apps like X or Instagram or TikTok? These are definitely a time-suck — and the media equivalent of Doritos — but seems we all know they are a time suck and often respond to the “time sucki-ness”. When I’m deep in the doom-scroll, my brain says “wow, I’m fried and need to take a break” (at a minimum, I feel awful after).

Or any other type of popular internet media, really. NBA highlights on YouTube, newsletter essays, memes and even podcast interviews are all shorter asks of your time (and you can multi-task with long-form podcasts).

So, no “bro”, I’m not going to “check out” the show you want me to watch. Quit telling me things I “have” to do. You do it, “seriously!”.

Anyway, let me firm up my case against watching new TV streaming shows with a few additional thoughts:

• How streaming changed TV economics and incentives

• Matt Stone on how streaming distorts the art of TV

• Quentin Tarantino on why TV isn’t memorable

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How streaming changed TV economics and incentives

So, Netflix is obviously the elephant in the streaming room.

It has a $380B market cap and is more valuable than Disney+, NBCU, Warner Bros. Discover and Paramount combined. Apple and Amazon have different business models than the pure play streamers but compete for talent and ideas all the same.

While not every streamer has the exact same strategy — especially after the shakeout in recent years — Netflix is the industry’s pace-setter.

In 2023, The New Yorker’s Rachel Symes had an eye-opening profile on Netflix’s Chief Creative Officer Bela Balajaria. Along with co-CEO Ted Sarandos, she is a key decision-maker on Netflix’s ~$20B a year content budget.

Here are three excerpts that define the Netflix approach, which is very much about volume:

• Netflix is a “Gourmet Cheeseburger”: Bajaria [says] that the ideal Netflix show is what one of her V.P.s, Jinny Howe, calls a “gourmet cheeseburger,” offering something “premium and commercial at the same time.”

• The New Cable Bundle: Bajaria’s team more readily embraced the company’s new objective, the executive said: not only to compete with cable but to “replace all television.” Sarandos [said] that Netflix’s strategy today is to function as “equal parts HBO and FX and AMC and Lifetime and Bravo and E! and Comedy Central.”

• Old Network TV vs. Netflix: Sarandos invoked the “Golden gut”, the idea that for old school TV executives “things worked because they picked them and they made them work.” The role of Netflix leader’s today is entirely different. When you’re trying to grow as quickly as possible in as many places as possible, you can’t afford to get bottlenecked behind one sensibility.

An industry producer quoted in the article calls it the “Walmart-ization of Netflix”.

Sarandos sums up the strategy as “saying yes in a town that’s built to say no.” By trying to capture all types of content, Netflix gets the entire spectrum of quality.

That’s fine. I watch a lot of low-brow stuff and enjoy it. The issue is how the viewer is trained. How much of Netflix is just meant as background viewing like the majority of cable TV? How much of Netflix is being watched while scrolling social media or doing chores?

Probably a lot.

This reality informs the creative process. According to Will Tavlin in N+1 Magazine, Netflix categorizes content into 36,000 micro-genres. One category is called “casual viewing” (eg. something people can watch while doing other things and without full focus).

Tavlin writes this type of content was traditionally made as “breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries” and now serves as a cornerstone of Netflix’s playbook.

Netflix execs (allegedly) provide script notes for screenwriters to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

I get the rationale but the approach is the opposite of the classic screenwriting rule to “show, don’t tell”. Here is one example from the Lindsay Lohan film Irish Wish with overly-explanatory dialogue:

• Lohan’s character: “We spent a day together, I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.”

• Lohan’s side-piece: “That will be the last you see of me, because after this I’m off to Bolivia.”

Granted, that is a C-level film and not a TV show. But if the micro-genre categorization is true, would it be surprising if TV creators were getting similar notes from Netflix? Talent on uber-prestige TV projects probably get free creative rein but that’s a fraction of the total content on Netflix (and all streaming platforms).

Balajaria was recently asked about these supposed script notes by Matt Belloni on The Town podcast. She doesn’t seem to directly deny it (~17 minute mark):

Matt Belloni: “There's been some news coverage [that] if you watch some of the lesser prestige or not prestige shows [on Netflix], you do notice that the characters will constantly inform you what's going on. If you're doing laundry or on your Hinge account, you will continue to watch.”

Bela Balajaria: “You fundamentally think that's different on Netflix than if you're watching a procedural show or something else somewhere else.”

Matt Belloni:“Maybe. I'm raising the issue. That is part of the Netflix narrative.”

Bela Balajaria: “I totally disagree with that…it's also so disrespectful to so many creators we work with, and that's not true.”

To be clear, I don’t think creatives are out there trying to make slop but — as the late Charlie Munger used to say — show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.

Since the new era of TV began with Netflix producing House of Cards in 2013 — which also had a massive drop-off in quality in the final two of its 6 seasons — a major battle for the industry in the age of streaming has been how to structure the compensation.

During the network TV hey day, a top-tier creator could bank on numerous income streams including: 1) payment to make the show; 2) profit participation in cable syndication deals on re-runs; 3) international rights; and 3) home video or DVD box set sales.

These payments were also based on straightforward metrics (viewership, DVD sales etc.).

Today, Netflix’s prodigious content spend is mostly structured as a one-time upfront payment with little upside participation. In an op-ed for the New York Times in 2022, horror super-producer Jason Blum touched on how the streaming model may hamper creativity:

When the financial incentives of the people paying for the movies and TV shows are aligned with those of the creators, the overall system is much more cost-effective — and often the movies and TV shows are better.

So what does this have to do with Netflix and streaming? The streaming platforms have, until very recently, balked at any kind of visibility into the success of movies and TV on their platforms (though that could change at Netflix if it adds an advertising-supported tier). This is understandable: Having spent hundreds of millions of dollars building their algorithms and distribution platforms and billions more licensing Hollywood’s movies and TV shows to draw subscribers, they absolutely have the right to protect that proprietary information.

But the system leaves creators with precious little visibility into whether their works succeed in drawing viewers. By typically paying an upfront flat fee, Netflix buys out the usual success-based incentive compensation (known as the back end in Hollywood). This effectively treats every creator as a part of a hit movie or TV show before the camera ever rolls. An actor who might typically make a million dollars upfront with a healthy back end if the film does well will instead get $3 million upfront and no back end participation.

Streamers have improved data transparency since this article (especially Netflix with its engagement reports). But TV talent and the platforms are still not totally aligned. Without a real feeling of ownership, creators may understandably care a little bit less about the final product.

The streaming economics are also hurting the industry’s talent pipeline for writers. Since syndication fees on re-runs were so lucrative in the network TV days, young writers could count on longer seasons (eg. more episodes) with steady work and an opportunity to hone their crafts under more senior creatives.

Conversely, streaming TV has shorter (more binge-friendly) seasons and smaller writer rooms. Many writers are now forced to patch together multiple odd writing jobs instead of focusing solely on a single show.

It is not hard to see how these changes would eventually affect the product’s quality…and I think people are noticing.

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Matt Stone on how streaming distorts the art of TV

The year of Blum’s op-ed was the same year of “Peak TV”, when the number of original scripted TV series hit a record of 600. While the figure has since trended down, there are still thousands of new cumulative shows in recent years that no single person — even if their entire diet was just 5-Hour Energy and Starbucks Nitro Cold Brew — could conceivably finish.

Moving forward, the industry should be more rational with streamers bucketed into a few tiers:

• Must-have: Netflix

• Must-have if you’re a parent: Disney+/Hulu (Bluey is ~10% of viewing on this app)

• Must-have if you hate triple back-to-back unskippable ads: YouTube Premium

• Will be fine because they getting bankrolled by Beaucoup Big Tech Bucks: Apple+, Amazon Prime.

• Too small and will probably need to consolidate: Max, Peacock, Paramount+

That’s still enough competition to keep new shows coming, though.

South Park’s Matt Stone nailed the situation during an interview with Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw. He was commenting on how streaming’s thirst for content was distorting the artistic process. Borrowing a line from J.R.R. Tolkien, Stone said that the streamers were making too much “bread” (new shows) when the world only had so much “butter” (actual good ideas worth making into TV shows):

“I feel like part of the butter and bread equation [has] gotten screwed up in the 2010s from streaming. Let's make the bread. We got this [amount of bread] and there's [a lot less] butter in the world. So, it doesn't work. There's just not that much good stuff out there…the technology made it so with editing and photography, everything looks glossy and it looks good and feels good. Then they fool you and then episode 7, you realize they’re wasting my time.”

The reference Stone makes is to a Star Wars show on Disney+. He was watching it and enjoyed the first few episodes but then got hit by a complete clunker. He quit the show and said whenever there was one of these dud episodes, it felt like “a betrayal”.

Streamers are making all this bread because there’s a high correlation between subscription churn and engagement. By one measure, “seven hours of extra engagement per month reduces churn by 1%” on average according to Hernan Lopez, founder of media consulting firm Owl & Co.

Stone made these comments and fully acknowledged it was funny coming from someone that is running a show that has gone on for 27 seasons. But he and South Park co-creator Trey Parker definitely earn their stripes and know what they are talking about (in fact, they earned their stripes so much that “South Park Controversies” incredibly has its own Wikipedia page).

A bit earlier I mentioned my frustration with Season 3 of The Bear (after really enjoying the first two seasons). The show seemed to be dealing with this butter-bread problem. My specific beef was that each episode was either slow or circular with the characters going through the same type of struggles without the story advancing much and nothing really happening. Well, apparently, the show’s creator Christopher Storer only intended the entire narrative arc to be 3 seasons but FX offered more money for a 4th season and the writers basically stretched the narrative.

If we tease apart Stone’s argument, there are two ways that too much streaming TV can “distort” the art:

• Filler episodes: If shows are created at volume and paid up beforehand — based on the streaming business model — then there is less incentive for every episode to be solid. Rather, the incentive to just get the project done and that means there will be some duds along the way.

• Lower completion rates = cancellations: One of the key metrics for streamers is “completion rate” (which is the % of people who start and finish a show). Filler episodes are probably annoying a lot of viewers and leading them to quit a show. That lowers the completion rate and incentivizes the streamer to cancel the show, thus leaving the entire narrative arc hanging (which is incredibly annoying as a viewer).

The cancellation of streaming TV shows has become such a meme that fans have created theories on how to predict if a show will get canned. One heuristic is that “a new Netflix live-action series has to accrue 100 million hours watched in its first full week on Netflix” or it will get taken out to pasture like my Ed Hardy t-shirts when I moved in with my now-wife.

Of course, TV cancellations also happened a lot in network TV days. However, the on-demand and ubiquitous nature of streaming means there are endless (and hyper-targeted) options for someone to get rugged.

The worst part is that you’ll get rugged and might not even remember any of the hours you put into the show.

Let’s discuss why in the next section.

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Quentin Tarantino on why TV isn’t memorable

Aside from the “bread” and “butter” analogy, let me zero in on another bit from the Matt Stone interview: “the technology made it so with editing and photography, everything [on TV] looks glossy and it looks good and feels good.”

Quentin Tarantino was on the Joe Rogan podcast and made a similar observation. He was doing it as part of a larger spiel about why film is better than TV. We obviously have to take this with a grain of salt because Tarantino is a film guy (you may have seen his movies) but it hits pretty hard.

Tarantino used Taylor Sheridan’s hugely successful show Yellowstone as an example:

“A lot of the TV now has the patina of a movie. They're using cinematic language to get you caught up…while I'm watching [Yellowstone], I am compelled…but at the end of the day, it's all just a soap opera. They've introduced you to a bunch of characters. You actually kind of know all their backstories. […]

You don't remember it 5 years from now. You're caught up in the minutia of it at the moment. The difference [with film] is I'll see a good western movie and I'll remember it for the rest of my life.

I'll remember the story. I'll remember this scene or that scene. It built to an emotional climax of some degree…it's not just about interpersonal relationships. The story is good itself but there's a payoff. There's not a payoff on [a lot of TV]. It's just more inter-connectional drama. While I'm watching it, that's good enough. But when it’s over, I couldn’t tell you anything about the show.”

Just to be clear: Tarantino is referring to quality film and TV (Tarantino cites Season 1 of Homeland as a piece of TV with an quality film-calibre arc).

There are clearly a lot of shitty films that are instantly forgettable. However, Tarantino’s larger point is tapping into basic human psychology when he talks about how films are more memorable than TV. Even before our attention spans were shot from social media and doomscrolling, the 90-120 minute film format was an ideal capsule to tell a story and elicit emotion.

Legendary director Alfred Hitchcock used to say, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." People can stay focussed for that timespan and digest the ubiquitous three-act story structure that has been refined over thousands of years (usually in some form of the Hero’s Journey).

Because of tech advances, TV has all the “patina” and “glossy” look of the film experience, but it is packaged in a smaller and much more open-ended format which doesn’t lend itself to being as psychologically impactful. This is doubly true if you’re comparing the experience of watching a film in theatre (big sound, full focus, no phone, shared experience sitting next to other people) vs. watching TV in bed on a laptop (while meme-ing an NBA game on X and laughing at cancel-able memes in various group chats).

One analogy that popped in my head: a lot of narrative streaming TV is like an elliptical cardio machine. It kind of looks like a workout. Your arms and legs are moving. You might sweat. But let’s be real, a run — aka watching a film in this comparison — is a superior workout.

Anecdotally, I’d say that 80% of my quotes and cultural references from screen-based media comes from film. About 5% come from classic my favourite sitcoms including Silicon Valley, Seinfeld and The Office. The final 15% comes from the best-of-best TV shows that really stuck the landing and completed a full narrative arc with iconic characters including The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, The Shield, Succession and Game of Thrones before Season 8 (definitely watch all of those before jumping into a new network TV show).

Back to Taylor Sheridan. I’m a fan. Landman was the last show I started before my “no new streaming show” policy. Previously, I was very invested in Yellowstone. It did actually make me shit my pants with excitement. But I quit when Kevin Costner left and — like Tarantino — actually don’t remember a single quote from all the hours I put into the show.

Perhaps unsuprisingly, favourite piece of art from Sheridan is a film: Sicario, which I love love love and liberally quote out of context.

Sticking the landing it obviously hard AF. To do it over a multi-season TV show with multiple storylines is understandably a harder task than wrapping up a 120-minute film narrative. When narrative arcs are left hanging or the payoff is weak, then the entire product become much less memorable. Probably helps to explain the emotional resonance of films over TV (at least in the N=2 case for me and Tarantino).

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Final Thoughts

If I were to critique my rant against the state of streaming TV, an easy riposte would be, “Dude, you think network TV was better than this? Do you know how much slop we had in the 1990s and 2000s?”

I’ll admit that the previous era was also a time suck and very capable of screwing the viewer (*cough* Lost *cough*).

However, streaming TV is a different beast. It all looks so good now and the storytelling techniques are perfectly honed to manipulate your emotions with cliffhangers, mysteries and hanging storylines. Perpetual blue balls to keep you coming back. There’s endless content to drive engagement, which is the streaming platform’s #1 priority. It’s all algorithmically served to a person’s specific interests.

And it’s all on-demand!

You feel compelled to keep watching and time washes away.

One final and important difference worth pointing out is how anti-social it is to binge on streaming TV. How many people watch alone on their phones or laptops? All at different speeds and paces.

At least with pre-streaming TV, there was a higher likelihood of a broad shared experience. Whether that was NBC’s “Must-See TV” line-up (Seinfeld, Friends) or ABC’s "Thank God It's Friday" (Full House, Family Matters, Boy Meets World) or HBO's "Golden Age of TV" (that started with Oz, followed by The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex & The City etc.).

You knew that millions of other people were watching at the exact same time.

Below is a photo photo of people congregating in Times Square for the Seinfeld finale in 1998. With 76 million viewers, it was the largest non-Super Bowl (or Presidential Debate) TV event of the past 30 years and nicely encapsulates the peak water cooler shared experience from network TV days.

Last year, I wrote a whole piece comparing the two most popular children's streaming shows: Cocomelon (algorithmic slop) and Bluey (the work of a true artist, Joe Blumm).

The piece was recently resurfaced on Hacker News and this comment feels relevant:

My favorite thing about the Cocomelon phenomenon is how outraged we get as adults, while simultaneously failing to realise how TV has been doing the same to us for the longest time. When I moved out of my parents' house I got an apartment with no TV, and I hate watching shows on the smartphone or on desktop, so I ended up dropping the habit. Now every time I go back to my folks' place I'm shocked by how zombied they get in front of the TV, and how normalized it is between adults in 2025 to waste away whole days bingeing shows on Netflix. If you know what to look for you can see these "long format TV" shows use similar patterns to zombifying kid's media

If I go hard on Cocomelon, then I should also go hard on myself for previous mindless binge-ing. Is there really that much of a difference for a pre-schooler watching "Wheels on the Bus" over 100x while I finish an entire season of a show in one weekend? Honestly, the kid will probably remember more lyrics from that song than I will quotes from the show.

From a cultural cache, at least Apple TV+ and HBO Max are keeping the “same time, once-a-week” release schedule for new shows (compared to Netflix’s "every-episode-at-once" approach).

This weekly cadence maximizes the likelihood of a shared viewing experience. I do get jealous when people start using new meme formats from shows I’m not watching. Thankfully, I get enough meme material from the daily business and tech news cycles that I don’t have to waste time watching every new show.

Speaking of which, I do have one confession to make: I am currently watching Season 3 of HBO’s The White Lotus. I’m technically not breaking my “no new streaming TV show” policy since it’s an anthology series. Each season — about American tourists acting a fool in a tourist hotspot (Hawaii, Sicily, Ko Samui) — is largely a standalone and can be viewed without having seen previous seasons.

The show’s main attractions are the luxury destinations, the general vibes and creator Mike White’s wild writing. It’s only an 8-hour commitment and I know I’ll get a completed narrative arc by the end. That’s a reasonable ask of my time.

The season is at the halfway mark and has been quite good. So, if you’re in to Thailand and dark humor, you HAVE to watch it...bro. Seriously!

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YouTube at 20

Speaking of video time sucks, YouTube is obviously infamous for its multi-hour rabbit holes. I’ve written about how the video sharing platform is the greatest learning tool since the printing press (when used the right way), but am cognizant that a lot of viewing is just mindless slop.

Here’s the key: do NOT under any circumstance look at the “For You” recommendation sidebar on the right of the video. Last night, I was watching Lebron and Luka highlights, then was recommended an Ed Sheeran and Andrea Bocelli duet…then watched a Hot Ones interview…then a bad-ass figh scene from The Bourne Identity...and an hour later was deep into a Vietnam War documentary. WTF.

Anyway, YouTube is celebrating its 20th anniversary. It was founded on February 14, 2005, by three former PayPal employees including Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. Variety dropped a solid long-read on the platform’s evolution from pet videos to the world’s largest video site and 2nd largest search engine (after Google):

• The original idea: “The founders actually launched the platform as a site for video dating. But after one week, not a single person had uploaded any videos. So they pivoted to promoting YouTube as a general-purpose video-sharing platform.”

• First video: “The very first video was uploaded April 23, 2005, by Karim; titled “Me at the Zoo,” it was a 19-second clip he shot in front of the elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo.”

• First viral videos: “In YouTube’s first year, its primary traffic driver was viral videos. Two stood out: In November 2005, a Nike ad featuring Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho improbably hitting a goal’s crossbar with a ball four times in a row became the first YouTube video to reach 1 million views. The following month, fans of “Saturday Night Live” and Andy Samberg uploaded copies of the Lonely Island’s mock-rap short “Lazy Sunday.” It racked up 5 million views before NBC’s lawyers demanded the three-minute clip be pulled down.”

• YouTube is “TV” now: “According to Nielsen, for two years running, Americans have spent more time watching YouTube on their TV sets than any other streamer, including Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.”

• Backstory on Google’s $1.65B acquisition price: “Google ultimately closed its acquisition for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006. (The YouTube founders landed on the price tag because they thought it would be cool to sell the company for 10% more than eBay paid for PayPal in 2002.)”

• Power laws among creators: “Never mind that only about 4% of an estimated 50 million creators worldwide earn more than $100,000 per year, according to Goldman Sachs research.”

• What would YouTube be worth on its own? “As a stand-alone entity, apart from Google, YouTube would be worth more than $400 billion, Wall Street analyst firm MoffettNathanson has estimated — more than Disney, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global combined.”

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Apple Intelligence’s Massive Failure

We recently talked about the failed rollout of Apple Intelligence. A number of the features that it showed during its developer conference (WWDC) in June 2024 still haven't shipped...and aren't expected to until 2026 (they even had to pull a Siri ad that was straight vapourware).

One of Apple's top observers Jon Gruber bodied the company in a long peice titled "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino". It's a must read and the jist is that Apple has seriously burnt its credibility and the organization will need a massive shake-up:

"What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis…Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features. […]

The Apple of the Jobs exile years — the Sculley / Spindler / Amelio Apple of 1987–1997 — promoted all sorts of amazing concepts that were no more real than the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, and promised all sorts of hardware and (especially) software that never saw the light of day. Promoting what you hope to be able to someday ship is way easier and more exciting than promoting what you know is actually ready to ship. However close to financial bankruptcy Apple was when Steve Jobs returned as CEO after the NeXT reunification, the company was already completely bankrupt of credibility. Apple today is the most profitable and financially successful company in the history of the world. Everyone notices such success, and the corresponding accumulation of great wealth. Less noticed, but to my mind the more impressive achievement, is that over the last three decades, the company also accumulated an abundant reserve of credibility. When Apple showed a feature, you could bank on that feature being real. When they said something was set to ship in the coming year, it would ship in the coming year. In the worst case, maybe that “year” would have to be stretched to 13 or 14 months. You can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can’t maintain credibility with bullshit. And the “more personalized Siri” features, it turns out, were bullshit.

Keynote by keynote, product by product, feature by feature, year after year after year, Apple went from a company that you couldn’t believe would even remain solvent, to, by far, the most credible company in tech. Apple remains at no risk of financial bankruptcy (and in fact remains the most profitable company in the world). But their credibility is now damaged. Careers will end before Apple might ever return to the level of “if they say it, you can believe it” credibility the company had earned at the start of June 2024 [WWDC].”

It may take Apple Intelligence Siri over two years to get to market. That's longer than it took Apple to ideate on and ship the iPhone. I'm not saying that this wouldn't have happened under Steve Jobs. But I'm also not not not not not not saying that. Well, based on what Gruber wrote in the article...I am saying that.

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Links and Memes

Some other baller links for your weekend:

• Google DeepMind released demo of its Gemini Robotics platform...and it showed some impressive dexterity for household tasks including packing lunches, organizing toys and folding origami (not really a house thing but impressive). Gemini Robotics can take natural language instructions can "see" with its mechanical hands (a "vision language action model"). Look, if this thing can fold laundry and do dishes it scale, it's a $1T business and will save countless marriages.

• A $95m lottery arbitrage: A Texas lottery with bi-weekly draw saw its jackpot hit ~$95m in Q1 2023. The draw only had 26 million possible numbers. Someone sniffed out the arb ant bought 26 million tickets at $1 each. The risk is that the pot would be split if there were multiple winners. The scheme ended up scoring $58m. There may have been some tomfoolery (including the involvement of a state lotto commission) and it’s all under investigation now.

• Next-level husband move…some dude made his wife a multi-course sashimi Omakase meal with a giant fresh tuna (presumably flown in from Japan) that he carved with a sushi sword that he blessed by spitting sake on it while wearing a Krispy Kreme hat. That previous sentence has never been written before now. Nice gesture and all but Sushi Husband Guy completely broke the Bro Code and posted the video on social media, thus shaming all other husband gifts. C’mon man.

• Manus is an AI agent tool out of China…that some are calling a “second DeepSeek moment” after it went super viral last week. It also became a sensation because people weren’t really expecting a Chinese startup to create leading consumer AI startups in the West. Here is a 14-minute demo of the tool (and a good ChinaTalk podcast on whether the hype is justified and the geopolitical implications of the release).

• Who is the luckiest musician in the world? The Coldplay drummer according to this old classic bit from comedian Nish Kumar. TLDR: Coldplay splits its royalties four ways…so the drummer is rich AF…can do anything he wants (like get a cameo in Game of Thrones)…but also gets to stay anonymous because most people only know Chris Martin…and he gets to sit while playing music while the two other Coldplay guys have to stand.

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…and them wild posts (including President Trump injecting another wild new phrase into the lexicon, “Everything’s computer”…that came with this Daily Show riff on a "White House Tesla Dealership"):

Alright, so last week’s meme of the week was the Rare Vances (aka hundreds of random photoshops of Vice President JD Vance). The entire trend reached its apex when Vance himself posted a meme of him as Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood pointing at the TV screen as if to say “hey, that’s me”. Of all the Rare Vance memes that he could have chosen, this was on point. Very well played.

Here is decent collection of Rare Vances. Here is SatPost reader Paul C. taking a viral captcha challenge I made of Rare Vances and turning it into an actual website JD Captcha (thank you and lol). Since Vance posted the meme, it’s probably over now but I’l share another popular one. It’s also of Leo and I wonder if Leo knows he’s the subject of two of the best Rare Vances.