Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Incogni.
On the eve of Thanksgiving Eve, I have some very personal thanks to give.
Today is my 60th birthday — holy moly, 60!!! — and I’m thankful for one small thing: I’m still kicking!
Turning 60 is a weird one. I never imagined I’d be this old. It’s mind-boggling. And yet, 60 is not that old, I guess. It really is the new 40 in this day and age. It’s sobering, though.
I’m thinking about my dad, who died not that much older than I am now, about 30 years ago.
He was a professor of AI at the Open University in the U.K., and he’d be thrilled out of his mind about how his field has exploded and become the white-hot center of the universe.
In the late 1990s, when he passed, AI was a fascinating but largely theoretical field. The big breakthrough at the time was expert systems, an early but relatively primitive form of AI that preceded the success of neural networks (which he largely dismissed as interesting but mysterious black boxes).
I know he’d get a huge kick out of voice-controlled smart speakers (he loved rock music) and robot vacuums (he was a bit of a slob!).
But Google’s new Nano Banana Pro image generator?
Even though AI is generating a lot of “slop,” it’s also conjuring up images the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
Also in today’s newsletter:
This past weekend, I spent a long time on the phone troubleshooting a relative’s malfunctioning iPhone. My first question was: “Have you tried restarting?” I was assured that, yes, they had. We spent a fruitless hour fiddling with it before I gave up. “Take it to the Apple Store” was my advice. Today, the phone is back to normal. How? They RESTARTED it!!! And they didn’t even check out our guide to this surprisingly effective maneuver!
The entry-level iPad 11 hit its lowest price to date yesterday, and today it’s even cheaper — down to just $274, a crazy bargain for a great device. An AirPods 4 deal makes the earbuds shockingly cheap — $69, or about half off — and a subscription to Apple TV has also been cut by more than half. And Black Friday’s not even started yet! This, unfortunately, is lost on you guys. See yesterday’s poll results below.
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I have this exact portable CarPlay screen in my old jalopy, and it’s great — it’s about the only thing in that car that still works properly! It’s big enough to see clearly, yet small enough to stash out of sight of San Francisco’s notorious smash-and-grabbers.
This is a pity. SoundPeats makes some very good and very affordable audio products, but the company’s latest would-be AirPods killers, well, aren’t. See our hands-on review.
— Leander Kahney, EIC.
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Tweets of the day
Wallpaper of the day
One more thing ...
[On the origin of the name “Apple”] I was on one of my fruitarian diets. I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited and not intimidating. “Apple” took the edge off the world “computer.” Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.
Today’s poll
Do you like Nano Banana and other AI image generators?
Results from yesterday’s poll: What are you shopping for this Black Friday?
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