Ben Thompson with cutting commentary about Anthropic and Fable:
...truistic and culture-affirming reasons. It's impressive!" Kind of reminds me of Apple's strategy credit of privacy.
Topic: Apple
64 mentions · 44 chunks · 36 episodes
0.3× distinctiveness vs baseline
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How much more common this term is here than in ordinary English. Higher values mean the topic is more characteristic of this corpus.
2.3x burst in 2024 Q1
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- Apple appears in 44 chunks across 36 episodes, from 2023-11-06 to 2026-06-15.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 6/17/24 (2024-06-17), with 4 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with Microsoft, Gemini, and Ben Thompson, while by chunk count it sits between tech industry and coordination cost; its yearly rank moved from #8 in 2023 to #34 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
The iOS "no dynamic code" policy is precisely to prevent the next great OS from emerging out of Apple devices.
...mic code" policy is precisely to prevent the next great OS from emerging out of Apple devices. But at a certain point something new will emerge, and when it does it will blow past iPhones.
Apple Pulls 'Anything' App in Growing Clampdown on Vibe Coding Apps.
Apple Pulls 'Anything' App in Growing Clampdown on Vibe Coding Apps. The app distribution model is a poor fit for infinite software. See also: The Wrapper ...
This week in the Wild West Roundup.
...ard traffic to us. Within several hours, we can directly take over ~400 hosts." Apple Intelligence AI Guardrails Bypassed in New Attack. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini Among 11 AI Models Vulnerable to One-Line Jailbreak. The idea that you...
Why doesn't Apple seem to optimize for short term engagement as much as other big tech companies?
Why doesn't Apple seem to optimize for short term engagement as much as other big tech companies? Other companies have cloud services that make money based on usage. T...
Apple could never build OpenClaw.
Apple could never build OpenClaw. It requires emergence. It requires messiness to the point of recklessness.
Jake Quist: OpenClaw is What Apple Intelligence Should Have Been.
Jake Quist: OpenClaw is What Apple Intelligence Should Have Been. Though OpenClaw's security model also demonstrates why Apple could never have done it. It's just too catastrophically ...
Every innovation starts off as a delusion.
...be viable, are revealed to be innovations. Does the startup idea cohere into an Apple… or a Theranos? Hallucinations, delusions, are where the capacity to imagine something different comes from. Without hallucination, nothing outside o...
Imagine an outsider visits Eden.
...ike the serpent the naive residents will have them killed. But perhaps being an apple farmer can help.
Google's Private AI Compute is a great development.
...I, Anthropic, every frontier lab: make this the new baseline. This is like what Apple did with Private Cloud Compute, but with a frontier model. Anthropic does use Confidential Compute for inference, but mostly to protect their weights...
NYTimes Opinion: "From Apple to Meta: How Silicon Valley Lost its Spine."
NYTimes Opinion: "From Apple to Meta: How Silicon Valley Lost its Spine." Hard to argue with.
Back in the 80's, mainframes felt like Big Brother.
...ther. There's an interview with Steve Jobs in 1981 on Nightline. This is before Apple did the famous Big Brother ad. The interviewer, David Burnham, pushes back on computing and says "mainframes are evil they reduce everyone to just li...
This week in "we're in the wild west era" of LLMs.
...pply chain attack. A distillation of the top 25 MCP vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, Apple is planning to integrate MCP into the OS. What could possibly go wrong? Remember: LLM attacks are possible to be automatically constructed for any mo...
In the war for context, lots of companies are going after the browser cookie jar.
...ngerous (you could take an action that changes state). It's kind of similar for Apple to "activate" all of the illegible state locked up in the various 3P apps on your device. Google does have a lot of 1P context on you in their servic...
AI is to Apple as the internet was to Microsoft.
AI is to Apple as the internet was to Microsoft. From Strachery this week: "Everyone used the Internet on Windows PCs, but it was the Internet that created the cond...
Great quote from Stratechery this week:
Great quote from Stratechery this week: "The danger for Apple is that trying to keep AI in a box in its current paradigm will one day be seen like Microsoft trying to keep the Internet locked to its devices: fru...
Emergent processes don't do a good job counting.
Emergent processes don't do a good job counting. A few apple-related emergent process examples: Which bud on the apple tree should grow into an apple. Where to locate an apple orchard to have a viable business....
I thought the Stratechery interview with Ben Evans on AI was interesting.
... Linux approach, you start with the tech and then put buttons on the front. The Apple approach, you start with the buttons and then build the tech behind it" "LLMs just give you the answer, unlike a Google, which there was a two-way re...
The last era of software was based around zero marginal costs.
...ritical mass. This is a heavily centralizing force, especially with things like Apple's ATT which traded off a small increase in privacy for massive centralization. The ads business model leads, inevitably, to engagement farming. Givin...
Humans will imbue anything with agency and anthropomorphize it easily if it has a face.
...telligence. But LLMs put a face on pond scum intelligence. You don't trust your Apple computer, you trust Apple. But now with LLMs we feel like we trust the LLM, because it has a "face" and we can talk to it.