Based on early impressions, and without yet getting my hands on the HomeView, I think success here hinges on how much people really want to use a communal device for personal interactions. The demos I saw were engaging and fun, and its deep integration with your iPhone gives it more to work with than a device like Amazon’s Echo Show, which has a similar profile feature but less personal information to offer.

This looks like a classic first-gen Apple product, for better and worse. Apple isn’t taking big risks here, but they seem to have nailed the basics. The real draw is the ecosystem. If you’re mostly (or fully) all-in on Apple, this should slot in nicely, even though it doesn’t push much past what Nest and Echo Show already do. And yes, it’s $300.

We have a first-gen Google Nest Hub that’s getting long in the tooth, and I’ve been waiting a while for Apple to announce something like this. An Apple-centric device should tie our smart home setup together better and play nicer with the personal devices and services we already use.

Before I actually buy one, I’ll wait for the first reviews to see how it handles things like widgets. The recaps say CarPlay apps will work well, but can different people in the house see their own widgets when they interact with it?

This is a real milestone, and I don’t want to undersell it. Gas-only cars went from 73% to 49% of the market in less than five years, and nothing in the data suggests they’re getting that share back. The last time gasoline wasn’t on top was the early 1900s, when steam and electric cars outsold it in the US.

We bought a Kia Telluride this year and I firmly believe it will be my last gas powered vehicle. The progress we’ve seen in the past 5 years is simply remarkable.

I’m a lifelong Florida State fan. This means I’ve spent the last ten years watching one of the sport’s proudest programs make me anything but. Other than a national title in 2013 and the snub in 2023, the team has been hot garbage more often than not. That’s not why I’ve fallen out of love with college football, but it certainly hasn’t helped.

The real reason is a bit more complicated. The CFB industry has decided, over roughly the last ten years, to do two very different things at once. First, it went chasing the money and reach of a pro league: bigger conferences, an expanded Playoff, television deals that stretch a schedule from coast to coast. That part was a choice by conference and university leadership. Second, the courts and legislatures finally forced the sport to pay its athletes for the use of their name and likeness, call it NIL, and let them move freely between schools through what’s known as the transfer portal. That part wasn’t a choice, it was overdue and it was coming no matter what anyone in the NCAA wanted. Neither shift, on its own, would have broken the sport for me. Together, with nobody coordinating how they’d interact, they did.

The clearest symptom is that I can no longer recognize my own team, or really any team. Rosters used to be built over four years. A kid committed out of high school, sat behind an upperclassman for a season or two, and by the time he started, he’d absorbed the culture, the rivalries, the history, whether he loved it or not, because he was stuck there. That forced buy-in is gone. Now the roster turns over every offseason in a genuine free agency market, and the four-year arc that used to build a fan’s attachment to specific players just doesn’t happen the same way anymore. It makes it extremely difficult for casual fans to move past that any longer.

To be clear, there is real upside. Indiana went from a Big Ten punching bag to a championship-winning team essentially overnight, and that’s the kind of story unlimited movement makes possible. I don’t think that story happens in the old system. But for every Indiana, there are programs that implode the moment things go sideways, because there’s no cost to leaving anymore, and no forcing function that makes a team stick together through a bad season. The volatility cuts both ways, and I think the bad outcomes outnumber the good ones.

The data backs up a version of this, though not the version I expected. Elite programs are actually playing each other closer than before. SEC games this season are seeing their tightest margins in years. But the gap between the top of the sport and everyone else has widened, because the best players at smaller programs keep getting bought away by bigger ones the moment they prove themselves. So the top of the league got more competitive against itself while the sport as a whole got more top heavy. The middle class got hollowed out, and the have nots got left further behind than they’ve ever been. Sounds a bit like something else I’ve been hearing, but that’s a different post.

Then there’s the part that has nothing to do with players at all. The ACC, originally built around a stretch of the actual Atlantic coast, now has a team in Northern California, a team in Texas, and a team in the mid-Atlantic, all in the same conference. The Big Ten has a potentially even more comical assortment of teams. Realignment gutted the regional rivalries that made this sport feel like it belonged to a place instead of a television contract. That’s the self-inflicted half of this story, and it’s the half I have the least sympathy for, because nobody forced the Big Ten to be a national brand instead of a conference.

The Power 4 conferences have basically become a shittier version of the NFL.

I’ll admit a direct comparison to the NFL isn’t fair. A 32-team salary-capped pro league and a 130-plus team “amateur” ecosystem with no central authority aren’t the same sport, structurally. But I think the comparison is worth making anyway, because college football spent the last decade adopting the trappings of a pro league, the size, the money, the playoff, without adopting any of the governance that makes a pro league actually legible to a fan. It picked up the costume and skipped the part where you build the thing underneath it.

I don’t have a fix, and at this point I’m skeptical anyone in Washington does either. Most of what’s moving through Congress treats NIL and the portal as a plumbing problem, cap this, restrict that, when the actual issue is that college football tried to become two incompatible things at once and never picked one. Legislation can’t put that genie back in the bottle.

I think there are really only two ways out of this. Either the sport admits what it’s already become and goes full pro league, real free agency, real contracts, real governance, and stops pretending any of this is amateur athletics. Or it finds a way to claw back some of what made it strange and regional in the first place, and accepts that means less money, not more. Right now it’s stuck in between, with all the chaos of the first option and none of the charm of the second. Crazily enough, most schools aren’t even making tons of money in this brave new world.

It’s a strange place for a sport to be when the answer to “who’s in charge here?” is “hopefully, someday, the federal government.” Mostly, it’s just sad. This was a weird, fun sport once, and I miss it more than I expected to. For now though, I’m enjoying way more free time on Saturdays to do other things.

Will immersive sports amount to anything? I don’t think anyone knows, but this latest experiment suggests that the people producing Apple’s immersive sports are actually learning and experimenting. I’m encouraged, and I’ll tune in next week for sure.

Immersive sports feels like one of the killer use cases Vision Pro has been waiting for, and I’m rooting for it to actually go somewhere. Cosm is already proving the appetite exists, just with a domed screen instead of a headset strapped to your face. Superfans will pay real money to feel closer to the game.

None of that gets me closer to buying a Vision Pro, though. I don’t have a use case that justifies the price tag yet. But the day the NFL or EPL figures out how to put me in a virtual seat for the Bucs or Liverpool, that’s the day they get my money.

We’ll get back to normally scheduled programming soon.

Behavioral evaluation becomes practical at scale: Thanks to AI, the previously high cost of retrieving and analyzing the pertinent evidence has collapsed. AI systems could analyze patterns of employee interaction to surface evidence of higher-order competencies that traditional metrics miss entirely. They could examine communication networks to identify employees who consistently help others solve problems, analyze decision-making patterns in project discussions to spot strategic thinking, or map influence flows across email threads and meeting transcripts to reveal leadership in action.

Earlier this year, we built a rudimentary fact-gathering bot for managers. Its job was simple: pull together evidence of our team operating at their given skill level, without making any judgments, just finding concrete examples of when someone did a certain thing and linking to that data. For each area of the skills map we use for career progression, it would build out a list of evidence it could find, with a link to the relevant PR, conversation, document, or whatever else. It saved us a ton of time and led to a much more equitable set of reviews.

Assuming you have things wired up in a way that’s AI friendly at your org, this kind of tool can make the review writing process a lot easier and fairer. I even took the evidence documents to my individual team members and asked them to validate how accurate it was, and with a few exceptions, people thought it was pretty amazing.

Lots of caveats here, but as long as you’re accounting for the tooling’s blind spots and doing your best to bust the bias that gen AI tools always seem to have, this can be a powerful addition to your tool belt, one that saves you a ton of time.

There’s also a noticeable sharpness to the icons, along with a flattening of the Liquid Glass effect. I’m not sure yet whether this is simply an early-beta artifact or the intended final look. For example, while I really like the redesigned Finder icon, the sharp black edges around the nose currently feel a little unrefined.

Thank goodness – I felt like I was going blind looking at Tahoe icons on the Mac. The glassy, blurry nature of the style seems to be on the way out.

So well done to the Webkit team for Safari 27. And shame on the Chrome team for Chrome 148.

It’s nice to see the “Snow Leopard” year has extended beyond just the OS platforms and over to WebKit as well. Jeremy Keith gives a brief rundown of some of the features he’s most excited about and catalogs a number of the 500+ bugfixes coming our way as well.

SignalTrace “links devices that regularly travel together, correlating them to license plate.” It is a surveillance product that will sweep up and add all sorts of Bluetooth and other data to license plate readers, linking specific devices—and people—to cars.

We already know about the pervasive spread of Flock Safety and other Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras. But Motorola’s Vigilant Solutions is actively pitching a handy upgrade for any budding authoritarians: adding Bluetooth and RFID sensors to these street cameras.

This means they aren’t just logging your car anymore. They want to sniff out the unique MAC addresses of your phone, your smartwatch, and your AirPods as you pass by, tying your digital footprint directly to your vehicle’s location.

The kicker? The pitch documents explicitly mention tracking RFID pet microchips. They are literally turning neighborhood security cameras into a giant, unified surveillance database that logs everything from your daily tech, to your commute, to your daily dog walk. It is a total privacy nightmare.

I always enjoy Michael Tsai’s roundups of WWDC wishlists as well as the reaction posts afterwards as well. I’ve found a handful of new voices to follow as a result.