This is Ian Betteridge’s response to Jason Snell’s article on the future of the iPad Pro.

Jason Snell thinks the iPad Pro could run macOS in some kind of virtualized environment when connected to a keyboard and mouse, but I doubt Apple would go that route. They would have to make some major changes to have ipadOS and macOS be more seamless (otherwise it’s too jarring to have two disparate operating systems running on a single device at the same time), but it’s an interesting thought (and the only thing that would make me even consider buying iPad over a MacBook for portable computing).

Ian Betteridge¹ says that what Jason really wants is the iPad platform to be more open to get around all the inherent limitations of ipadOS (but doesn’t think Apple would do that—I agree).

My take is: I don’t think any of this is going to happen. If you think about it, why would Apple—who is selling both the iPad and Mac to the same people—want them to instead buy a single device? Sure there’s some people who only buy one, but I suspect the limitations of each platform only help push sales for the other. The two options are:

1. Sell either an iPad OR a Mac separately (of which many will buy the other at some point in the future).
2. Sell a single device to both would-be iPad or Mac users.

Option 1 is where we’re at today, with the hypothetical option 2 seeming to make the least business sense to me. The price of 2 could be higher, but it would be a risky bet to sell enough of those to make up for all the people who buy both an iPad and a Mac right now. Some power users would buy both the hybrid device and a MacBook, but I think most customers wouldn’t even consider a MacBook if their iPad did the same thing.

Apple always finds a way to differentiate the “Pro” line from the non-Pro models, and that’s a much easier (and more lucrative) problem for them to solve than combining both devices into one.

AI seems like a natural fit for search engine. Here’s hoping that OpenAI gets this right and prioritizes high quality content over SEO-Spam. If they want a fighting chance against Google (who has certainly been scaling up its own AI efforts), they need to provide better results, period. The fact that Google’s quality seems to be on a decline in recent years may open up an opportunity here. As I said, competition is good.

But here’s an interesting thing to ponder: will an AI search engine demote AI-generated content in favor of high quality user-created content?

Update 5/13: Turns out it wasn’t a search engine (at least not at this time). Today’s announcement was for GPT-4o.

This article is is fascinating. In fact, everything Ed Zitron posts on his website/newsletter is absolute gold—well written, amply sourced, and very thorough. He’s not afraid to call out bad actors (by name!) and goes into extreme depth with his findings.

I’m in the process of drafting my own post about my thoughts on these new AI devices that’ll hopefully be done soon.

UPDATE: The article I was writing has been published: AI gadgets are (and will continue to be) absolutely useless.

UPDATE: New features are barrel roll, squeeze, haptic feedback, and Find My support.

In simpler times, people would use their own website (such as a blog) to share things with the wider web, and social media was primarily used to connect with “real world” family and friends. Then social media replaced blogs as the premier place for people to post their content, so it seems like bot spam is a natural progression of that.

Will the flood of generated AI content push people away from social media and back to web properties that they control? I think that’s unlikely for a few reasons:

• Building your own personal website is still very much in the “nerd” realm, or at least the more tech-savvy or design-oriented of the population.
  • Although the barrier to entry here is lower than it’s ever been, most people don’t want to go through the trouble (or are willing to pay).
• There’s ways to host a website for free (such as with a static site and Netlify or GitHub pages), but that route requires more technical skill, so free options aren’t really an option for most people.
• Building an audience is hard and takes a lot of time and commitment. What’s the point of posting to the “wider world” when nobody will see it?
• Social media makes it easier to be (or at least feel) “heard” (until bots make too much noise and drown all the people out, that is).

Where do we go from here? I’m not sure. It’s not looking pretty though.

Despite its issues (speaking in terms of game design—on the technical side the game’s been solid for me), this is one of my favorites right now. I played through the campaign on launch, skipped the first season, had some fun with season 2, and skipped season 3 because I wanted the game to be fresh again for the loot changes that were confirmed to be coming in the fourth season.

I’m looking forward to it.

UPDATE 5/3

I just realized that May 14th is on a Tuesday. Looks like I’ll be saving this until Friday the 17th. Oh well. If there’s server capacity issues due to the influx of players hopefully they’ll be resolved by then.

Thankfully my kids are too old for Blippi, but I have seen some of my toddler relatives watching this and I didn’t like it at all. I thought it was because he was extremely weird and creepy to me, and that maybe I’m just out of touch with today’s kids culture, but this confirms there was more to that gut feeling.

Side note: The article’s comparisons to Trump are not incorrect, but I think they were unnecessary in the context of the article (the other arguments were strong enough). However, Current Affairs is a political magazine, so I guess in that context it makes sense.