That immediacy is only part of the story. The deeper shift is about where the intelligence lives. With ChatGPT or Claude, you still have to open a new tab, copy and paste some content, and work around the model. It’s detached from your workflow. AI browsers purport to fix this by embedding intelligence into your actual browsing experience. The browser becomes the assistant. That’s a critical shift, since most computing already happens in the browser. These tools aren’t just smarter search engines; they’re beginning to feel like the OS layer for modern work.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Perplexity’s new Comet browser. It doesn’t just find you a page, it works with the page you’re already on. Ask it to pull up a video clip of Steve Jobs talking about MobileMe, and it won’t just dump a YouTube link into your lap — it finds the keynote, loads it, and jumps to the exact timestamp. It feels a bit like magic.

Comet builds on what Perplexity already did well: real-time search, clean summaries, and transparent citations. But now those capabilities are paired with agency: the ability to execute, not just inform. It’s the first application I’ve played with that aligns with what people have been calling “agentic AI.” The intelligence doesn’t live in some separate chat window. It’s right there, baked into the canvas of the web.

While Comet is focused on acting on the open web, The Browser Company’s Dia takes a more introspective approach — it works within your browser environment. Instead of just crawling the internet for external answers, it pulls from your tabs, your history, your open apps. Ask it to summarize the five pages you’ve got open about a trip to Tokyo, and it will pull the highlights from each and build an itinerary. Need to check your calendar, grab availability, and draft an email? Dia can do that too, using your actual browser tabs as its data source.

That difference in orientation matters. Comet is reaching outward, trying to automate search and execution. Dia is looking inward, trying to amplify whatever it is you’re already doing. Comet might draft and paste your email in full. Dia will help you piece it together from your context, but stop just short of pushing it into the interface. It’s more assistive than autonomous. Dia almost feels shy, in a way. Dia will give you a draft and ask, “do you like it?” Comet is much more confident - it will click reply, fill in a draft, and send it if you ask it to. They have the same goal but clearly these are two very different philosophies about how far to push the agent. One just feels like an overconfident Type A first year consultant who thinks they can do anything and the other is a bashful intern. I’ve spent way too long thinking about this analogy.

Both are undeniably powerful. But neither is untouchable. And that’s where the bigger question starts to take shape. Are these full products in their own right — or are they just features waiting to be copied?

That question cuts to the heart of the current AI browser boom: is this the beginning of a seismic shift, or just a flashy wave of experimentation that Big Tech will absorb the moment it proves viable?

Right now, these feel like features, not full products. There’s nothing stopping Apple from integrating this kind of intelligence directly into Safari, or Google doing the same with Chrome. In fact, Google’s already working on something similar: Project Mariner, their browser-native agent. But from what I’ve gleaned from demoes, it’s flawed in a fundamental way: it spins up a sandboxed browsing environment, not your actual tabs. So it can’t access your login states, saved credit cards, browsing history, or personal accounts. That extra abstraction adds friction instead of removing it. It’s clever, maybe even too clever, but it misses the point.

What complicates things for Google even more is that it might not have the luxury of just buying its way out of the problem. Between DOJ lawsuits, EU regulation, and the looming threat of forced divestitures, Google’s dominance is under serious pressure. It might be forced to sell off parts of its ad tech stack. It might even have to spin off Chrome itself. And if Google loses control of both the search engine and the browser, then yeah, it’s vulnerable. Not immediately, but structurally. Because if it can’t own the place where people ask questions, and it can’t own the place where they find answers, what else is left?

The advantage Comet and Dia have right now is proximity: they live where the user already works. That’s powerful. But it’s not necessarily defensible. If Chrome or Safari or Edge rolls out the same kind of ambient intelligence natively — no install, no new app, no barrier to entry — the game changes overnight. And the most likely endgame for startups like these is acquisition. Except in this case, that kind of exit might not even be on the table. Google is tied up in antitrust litigation from here to Timbuktu. The chances that regulators allow them to buy a category-defining AI browser? Calling it a zero percent chance is being generous.

That leaves a thin path for survival: get big enough, fast enough, sticky enough, or die trying. (A bit dramatic, I know.)

Still, for all the hype around this category, we’re early. Right now, AI browsers are squarely in power-user territory. These tools are being adopted by people who already use GenAI daily, who know how to pick the right model for the task, who think in prompts. That’s not the average web user, not yet anyway.

But that’s how it always starts. Early adopters pull the tech forward, then the adoption curve hits the Chasm until an inflection point forces mass adoption. What triggers that shift in this case probably isn’t a viral demo — it’s distribution. If Apple were to buy Perplexity and bake Comet-like features directly into Safari, that’s the moment things flip. Suddenly, hundreds of millions of users have ambient AI by default, and the expectation shifts. That kind of integration would be especially potent on desktop, where Safari still trails Chrome. With AI as the wedge, Apple could start clawing back market share.

There’s a complication, though. Apple doesn’t make Safari for Windows anymore, so this kind of rollout would still be Mac-only. Unless it ships cross-platform, the power-user tools might stay siloed for a while longer. The more I think about that, the more I think that’s a benefit for the folks down in Cupertino. But the strategic logic is there — AI as the feature that reinvents the browser and tightens the ecosystem. Whether Apple or someone else moves first is an open question.

As the models themselves continue to improve, the question of which one you’re using starts to matter less. GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Gemini 2.5 — they’re all converging toward a baseline of “good enough” for most general tasks. The intelligence is becoming commoditized. What actually differentiates the experience isn’t the model — it’s the product. Gee, that sounds familiar.

This is where Comet and Dia take different bets. Comet leans into openness. If you’re a power user, you can pick the right model for the job: research-heavy? Use Gemini. Coding task? Use Claude. This flexibility makes Comet especially appealing to people who already understand the strengths and weaknesses of different models. Dia, by contrast, leans into the User Interface. It’s not necessarily about which model is under the hood, it’s about how smoothly the experience integrates into your tabs, your browsing flow, and your day. (For the record, Dia uses either ChatGPT 4o or o3. The user is able to choose what model is undergirding their “Skills,” Dia’s branded custom instruction sets.)

Both approaches make sense. But they’re appealing to slightly different audiences. Comet is a tool for people who want to control the intelligence. Dia is a tool for people who want it to disappear into the background.

After seeing Stephen Robles’ most recent demo comparing Perplexity Comet, Dia, and ChatGPT Agent, one thing is clear: Comet leaves the others in the dust. Stephen walks us through Comet researching discount codes and actually testing them in a live cart — it works so well that users might finally ditch Honey (especially given Honey’s recent affiliate scandal). He also shows Comet scraping a government site to find the right form, interpreting analytics dashboards, doing a complex search and browse on LinkedIn, and browsing for homes on Zillow. It even had a moment where it tried (and failed) to beat Wordle faster than Stephen — a brief failure that makes it all feel a bit more real. It’s still in beta, after all.

But there’s a glaring drawback underneath the surface: privacy. Perplexity’s CEO has openly said that the Comet browser is meant to track everything users do online to sell hyper personalized ads” (TechCrunch). While some data is stored locally, users effectively sign away all of their browsing data in exchange for utility. That’s a massive tradeoff, but does anyone even care about that sort of thing anymore?

There’s also the compute cost. Comet’s promising utility comes at a price — each user action costs Perplexity real GPU dollars. That may explain the invite‑only beta and its slow rollout, even for paying customers. Unless Perplexity can monetize enough or scale efficiently, this may stay gated for a while.

Battery drain is another concern. Running multiple tabs with active AI agents in parallel could seriously wipe out some laptop batteries. Users might hesitate once they notice their machines heating up faster or lasting fewer hours between charges. Then again, people use Chrome all the time and that’s been a notorious battery hog for years.

Still, Perplexity Comet feels much further along than Dia in terms of its usefulness. It works today in ways mainstream browsers simply don’t. That being said, it’s not for everybody just yet. Unless you’re paying $200 USD per month, you have to join the waitlist. Time will tell if this browser war really starts to heat up, but it feels like it’s just getting started.

Perplexity Comet: 8/10 - Powerful, innovative, and a really promising start

Dia: 6/10 - Great UX, but trailing Comet in sheer capabilities

Another great demo of Comet:

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Every few months, the AI world erupts with a new wave of competition. One company claims their model is the fastest, another touts unparalleled accuracy, and yet another boasts about having trillions of parameters. These advancements sound impressive, and in many cases, they are—on paper.

However, in reality, none of this technical jargon matters to the average user. Most people don't care if an AI model is 10% more efficient or if it has double the parameters of a competitor. What they care about is how easy it is to use, how seamlessly it fits into their daily workflow, and whether it actually helps them solve problems. A model can be state-of-the-art, but if it’s locked behind a terrible user experience, people will abandon it in favor of something more accessible.

The ChatGPT Phenomenon: How OpenAI Won the User Experience Game

Take ChatGPT as an example. OpenAI has undoubtedly led the way in AI chatbot adoption, but it’s not necessarily because their model is the absolute best in every possible way. Other models might be more powerful in specific domains, but ChatGPT dominates because of how effortlessly it integrates into people’s lives.

• The interface is simple and intuitive.

• There are no complicated configurations or settings to adjust.

• You ask a question, and it responds—no barriers, no confusion.

• It remembers context reasonably well, making interactions feel natural.

Even when competing models outperform ChatGPT on technical benchmarks, they often fall short in terms of user adoption. This is because people value convenience and accessibility over pure performance. It’s not just about having the smartest AI—it’s about making that intelligence frictionless to use.

The Perplexity Approach: Specialization and Purpose-Driven Design

Another compelling example is Perplexity AI, a company that took a different approach. Instead of trying to be a generalist chatbot, they designed their AI as an AI-powered search engine. This focused approach allowed them to create a highly effective and reliable product with clear use cases:

• Providing accurate, sourced responses rather than generic chatbot replies.

• Mimicking the functionality of a search engine rather than an open-ended AI assistant.

• Catering specifically to users who need credible, research-driven answers.

This specialization makes Perplexity a sticky product for users who need authoritative information, rather than just casual conversation. Again, the lesson is clear: it's not just about how good your AI is—it’s about how well it serves a particular need.

Product Stickiness: How Good Design Creates Habits

One of the most overlooked factors in AI adoption is habit formation. People don’t just use products because they’re powerful—they use them because they’re easy, reliable, and habit-forming. A great AI product becomes second nature, integrating seamlessly into daily life.

Consider the following examples:

Spotify vs. “Better” Alternatives

Spotify’s music recommendation algorithm might not be objectively superior to every competitor (YouTube Music and Apple Music have their own strengths), but its product design, cross-device integration, and frictionless experience make it the default choice for millions. People don’t stick with Spotify because they’ve scientifically determined it has the best AI—they stick with it because it just works.

Google Search vs. Other Search Engines

Google is not necessarily the “smartest” search engine in every sense. Other engines like DuckDuckGo prioritize privacy, and some AI-powered alternatives offer more structured responses. But Google's dominance isn’t about pure intelligence—it’s about speed, familiarity, and the sheer habit of typing “Google.com” into a browser.

iPhone vs. Android Spec Wars

The iPhone has never been the most powerful phone in terms of raw hardware specifications. Android devices often have better cameras, more RAM, and higher refresh rates. But Apple’s iOS experience, ecosystem lock-in, and seamless UI make the iPhone the preferred choice for millions.

Again, the message is clear: users don’t gravitate toward the most powerful technology—they gravitate toward the most frictionless experience.

The UX Bottleneck: When AI Models Fail to Gain Traction

This is why so many AI startups fail to gain users despite impressive technology. They focus too much on raw performance metrics while neglecting user experience, reliability, and ease of access.

Imagine a company builds an AI chatbot that is 25% more accurate than ChatGPT. It could theoretically be a game-changer, right? But then they release it with:

• A confusing and cluttered UI

• An unbearably slow website

• A login process that requires excessive verification steps

• No clear differentiation in product value

Nobody will use it. Meanwhile, OpenAI, Google, or another tech giant can launch an inferior model with a seamless experience, and that’s the one people will adopt. Because usability trumps raw intelligence every time.

The Future of AI: Winning Through Product Experience

As AI continues to evolve, the companies that dominate won’t necessarily be the ones with the most advanced models. Instead, they will be the ones that build products that are:

• Seamless and intuitive

• Reliable and easy to integrate

• Focused on solving real-world problems

• Designed with user habits in mind

We’ve seen this play out in every major technological shift. The winners are rarely the ones with the most power—it’s the ones with the best design and accessibility.

Lessons for AI Builders and Entrepreneurs

If you’re working on an AI-powered product, keep these principles in mind:

1. Performance matters, but usability matters more. A slightly worse model wrapped in a great product experience will always outperform a cutting-edge model trapped in a bad UI.

2. Habit formation is key. Products that become daily habits create loyal users, even if they aren’t technically the “best.”

3. Differentiate through experience, not just AI capability. Perplexity AI didn’t win by having the best chatbot—it won by focusing on a clear and valuable use case.

4. Friction kills adoption. If your AI tool is even slightly frustrating to use, people will abandon it for something easier.

5. Simplicity scales. The more effortless your AI feels, the larger your audience can be.

Conclusion: The AI Race is a Product Race

The AI landscape is not just a competition of intelligence—it’s a competition of accessibility, usability, and habit formation. The companies that focus purely on model performance will struggle to gain users, while the ones that focus on delivering a seamless experience will dominate.

At the end of the day, the best AI model is the one that people actually use. And to make that happen, companies need to think less like researchers and more like product designers.

10/10 - The Best Product always wins.

It can be easy to focus on some of the “flashy” bits of newness bombarding the technology news cycle. AI, augmented reality, wearables, etc. These are new and nascent categories that are a breeding ground of new innovation, which subsequently breeds excitement and attention. But what about something that isn’t nearly as flashy? What about something that people don't normally look at for exciting new ideas and paradigms? Something boring, like a web browser.

Odds are that you’re reading this on a web browser from either Apple or Google (unless you’re one of the many brilliant people who have signed up to receive these in their inbox - if that sounds like you and you’re still reading this in a web browser, sign up here!). Almost all web traffic is routed through a web browser made by Apple or Google - the data on that is very conclusive. On desktop, Google Chrome accounts for over 65% of all web traffic, and on mobile over 92% of iOS users use Safari and around 80% of Android users use Chrome.

This duopoly has not left much room for interesting investment by either company. Every year they come out with a couple of quality-of-life improvements, make the browsers faster and more efficient, and that’s the ballgame. No more, no less.

As a result, this has left a lot of breathing room for fresh ideas from something new. Something like The Browser Company. It’s a very on-the-nose name for the company, but they do one thing and they do it excellently.

Arc is a web browser, built by The Browser Company, that has completely upended my expectations for a web browser and as a result, it has become my new default browser on my laptop and phone. I won't bury the lede - Arc is fantastic, and improving at a pace I find fascinating. Let me explain.

First and foremost, Arc is beautifully designed. Too often, we get comfortable in the way that certain pieces of software ought to look. All of the competition looks like a different flavour of the same thing. URL bar on top and in the middle, tabs and favourites across the top, content underneath. Clicking a link opens a new tab, and new tabs pile up so much that they become indistinguishable cubes across your tab bar. I can't be the only one this has happened to.

Arc throws all of that comfort out the window and opts for something new. The Browser Company believes, rightly, that there is a better way to browse. Tabs live on a sidebar on the left, clicking a link in an external application opens a smaller, external, temporary window called a Little Arc (how cute), and on and on it goes.

Arc is full of so many small touches that you can feel the care and attention that was put into making it. For example, when you download a file, it might have a nonsensical name like “saved-links-23486535.csv” and rather than dumping that file in your downloads folder to rot and blend in with every other random downloaded file, Arc will rename the file intelligently to be more readable and easy to understand. For this particular file, it renamed it to “Saved Links.csv” - my downloads folder has never looked so clean.

Those Little Arcs I mentioned? You can set them to automatically archive (or put more simply, close) within a certain timeframe. When I unsubscribed to an email newsletter I no longer wanted (oh, the irony), I clicked a link in my email application, the Little Arc window opened for me to confirm my choice, and I carried on with my day. An hour later, it was gone. How neat! And if something is archived by mistake, Arc keeps a running list of all of your archived tabs and windows for easy retrieval.

If you’re watching a YouTube video and you navigate away from that tab to look at something else, Arc will automatically pop out a Picture-in-Picture window so you can keep an eye on your video while you multitask. This even works with Google Meet! You can pin two websites together to browse them in split-view. Opened tabs that aren’t in your favourites can be sorted in categories for you using AI. You get the point. Arc is bursting at the seams with these quality of life features and I discover more and more every day. But my favourite thing about Arc isn’t a feature or a setting in the browser, it’s The Browser Company itself.

The Browser Company is a rare breed, and a company that I find truly admirable. To put it simply, these folks ship. Often. Shockingly often. Arc receives a substantial feature update once a week, in fact. Every week. For over three years. This link will take you to their catalogue of release notes, dating back to April 2021. It’s so predictable that I’ve begun looking forward to the weekly release to see what new upgrade my browser got. From a capital-P Product perspective, this team rocks.

Writer’s Note: I’ve actually been meaning to post this for a while but The Browser Company keeps putting out such substantial updates that I have to rewrite a lot of this post. They’re so good it’s actually becoming a little frustrating!

Not only do they ship new features and improvements on a weekly basis, but they also un-ship things that didn’t work. Not every at-bat can be a homerun, especially at the rate this team ships updates, so to prevent bloat or feature abandonment, they will proactively remove features or changes that users didn’t like or aren’t using. It’s brave, bold, and downright commendable. A while back, Arc received an update that gave it a notes feature - basically a mini notes application that you could use while browsing the web. It wasn’t overly useful and kind of hard to find, so last week they got rid of it completely. It wasn’t a surprise removal or anything like that, they told users well in advance so they had time to export their notes, if they had any, but that approach is so refreshing.

There’s another 1000 words that I could write about their companion iOS app called Arc Search, which is genius in its own right. The Coles Notes version is that it’s a browser app predicated on search that leverages AI to scrape the web and answer your questions quickly without having to click around to 17 different webpages optimized for SEO before you get to your answer. You can pick the underlying search engine that powers it, but it’s so fast that I find myself using it all of the time. (And yes, their mobile app is updated just as often as the desktop version of Arc).

Despite my glowing impressions, there are still a few things they don’t get quite right (yet, anyway). Browser Extensions can be a little finicky, despite supporting any Chrome extension you would want. I’ve had trouble with my iCloud Password extension but your mileage may vary. The mobile app is hard to use if you like to keep tabs open to save things for later - it’s geared more towards ephemeral searches that I suspect are the way most people use their web browsers most of the time. And their organizational paradigms can take a little getting used to. There are favourites and tabs and profiles and spaces - it can be a bit overwhelming. Thankfully, they publish regular videos to their YouTube channel with tutorials and explainers of their new features and updates - they’re worth a watch to help you get started!

With all that said, I was more than happy to change my default browser - and that’s a lot from a Safari-diehard like me. It’s been a blast to use, I look forward to new features every week, and the team behind it is downright awesome. If you use a Mac or iPhone, you should check it out! If you exclusively use Windows, they just launched the Windows version, so you’re in luck! It’s actually the first major Windows application built almost entirely in Swift and shares about 80% of the codebase with the macOS version.

9/10 - a refreshing new take on web browsing won me over immediately, even if it’s not quite perfect just yet.

Every year, new smartphones come out. The processors get a little bit faster, new features are added, and the cameras improve. Every time someone upgrades to a new phone every 2-3 years, the device in their pocket gets a fair bit better, faster, and more capable. When it comes to photography, smartphone cameras have come a long way from the days of Blackberry and even the original iPhone. The sensors are much larger, the megapixel count has gone up, new lenses and focal lengths have been added, and there are new software tricks to make our day-to-day photography look better than ever. This 1st-gen iPhone camera retrospective from CNET is very telling. That 2-megapixel camera did not age well.

However, 17 years after the original iPhone was announced, smartphone photography is still no match for a dedicated camera with a full-frame sensor and some high quality optics.

Let me take a step back. A few weeks ago, my wife printed out a bunch of photos from our wedding taken by our photographer and stuck them in frames which I mounted on the wall. For whatever reason, this got me thinking.

As someone who loves playing with all of the latest gadgets and gizmos, particularly from Apple, the launch of the Vision Pro has left me and my fellow non-Americans headset-less, wandering through the world tapping our fingers together at imaginary floating windows.

To stave away the waves of depression-inspiring FOMO, my only alternative was to read and watch and listen to everything I could get my hands on in order to develop a sort of proxy opinion for the Vision Pro’s potential, as well as its potential impact on the world. (And yes, before you ask, I did consider driving across the border to buy one, like I did with the original HomePod, but Apple has region-locked the headset to only work with the US App Store and the US iTunes Store, so my library of apps, movies, TV shows, and music would be completely useless.)

I won't bury the lede, I think the Apple Vision Pro is the dawn of a new age of computing, and we could potentially look back at this moment in the same way we do the launch of the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, or the Apple Watch. There are a startling number of similarities, even though this might be Apple’s most ambitious product launch since the first Mac in 1984. Let me explain.

Apple excels at entering existing categories, upending them with refined user experiences, elegant design, and novel user interaction models. Apple is never first to enter a new market. They famously let other companies test the waters, make a bunch of mistakes, and then burst in like the Kool-Aid Man with a polished, complete thought.

The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch. Each and every one of these have become massive category-leading products that generate tens of billions of dollars each year.

That being said, it’s important to remember that Apple is not afraid to ship major new products with massive compromises at high prices to a relatively small number of buyers.

It’s time for a bit of a history lesson. On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs stood on stage at Macworld and announced the first iPhone. It had an all-new way of interacting with your phone, called a capacitive touchscreen, that used the electrical heat from your finger to navigate the user interface.

The iPhone famously lacked a stylus, a popular accessory included with most smartphones shipping at the time that had a resistive touchscreen, or a screen that responded to pressure. It also lacked a keyboard, one of the flagship elements of the most popular phones at the time, namely from Blackberry.

The first iPhone was made almost entirely from metal and glass, while a majority of the competition was shipping plastic rectangles with removable batteries. It was far more expensive than the competition, coming in at $500 on top of the monthly subsidy included in your monthly phone plan. At the time, competitor’s devices would top out at $199 or even $0 with a plan.

Here’s Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft at the time, commenting on Apple’s new entrant into the smartphone market, noting that Apple is about to be selling the most expensive phone ever, despite not even having a physical keyboard:

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg reviewing the Apple Vision Pro, commenting on Apple’s new entrant into the headset market, noting that Apple’s headset is 7x more expensive despite not having controllers:

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A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck)

I’ll present both of these without comment, make your own judgements!

In my humble opinion, the true key to Apple’s success has been an almost pathological pursuit of perfection through continuous iteration, improvement, and innovation.

As I’ve already mentioned, Apple’s first iPhone shockingly shipped without a stylus and a keyboard, but it also lacked genuinely useful things like the ability to Cut, Copy, and Paste. It couldn’t shoot video. You couldn't change the wallpaper. It didn’t have a GPS and couldn’t be used for turn-by-turn navigation. If you got it wet, your best hope was a bowl of rice and a lot of praying. It didn’t even have an App Store.

Can anyone imagine their iPhone not having any of those things today?

When Apple unveiled the iPad, reviews claimed it was too heavy to be used comfortably for long periods of time, there were very few apps optimized for the form factor, and the software felt incomplete. Sound familiar?

When the Apple Watch was launched, reviews noted that the battery life was insufficient, the interface was confusing, and it was notably more expensive than it’s competitors in the market. Sound familiar?

A lot of reviewers have pointed out some of the key shortcomings with Apple Vision Pro, as they rightly should.

Nilay Patel from The Verge notes that “two people in Vision Pro headsets sitting in the same room can’t see the same things floating in space at the same time.”

Mark Gurman from Bloomberg points out that watching a movie in a pitch black room throws off the device’s room/hand tracking and causes error messages to show up.

Joanna Stern from the Wall Street Journal warns us that your digital Persona, Apple’s brand of digital avatar, “will haunt your dreams.”

It can be easy to write off these and a lot of other criticisms as deal-breakers. And maybe for this first version, they are! Apple’s iPhone business only went supersonic after the launch of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus gave people bigger screens and elevated Apple’s bottom line to an eye-watering extent.

In 2015, Apple allegedly sold “only” 15M Apple Watches - in 2021, that number is estimated to have exceeded 100M. The first version of the Apple Watch was a deeply flawed product, with slow apps, weird ideas about heartbeats, and a finicky notification system. In a hilarious turn of fate, The Verge’s Nilay Patel gave the first generation of the Apple Watch a 7/10 in 2015, and in 2024 he gave Apple Vision Pro an identical score of 7/10. I got the World of No Sevens idea from him!

In no way am I attempting to persuade you, my dear reader, that it is inevitable that Apple Vision Pro becomes a massive success and we’re all doomed to a future dominated by giant face computers. I’m not even trying to tell you that you should buy one! I haven’t used one yet, and even with all of my enthusiasm, I know it’s probably best to hold off until the next few iterations start to alleviate some of today’s major concerns.

However, they say those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it, and I think a lot of people will be surprised when Apple Vision Pro, and spatial computing as a category, looks a lot different 10 years from now.

10/10 - I can’t review a device I haven’t tried, but the folks who put countless hours into their reviews are amazing. All of them are incredible in their own way, but if I had to pick three of them for you to watch:

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Spotify provided exclusive data to Business Insider on listening speeds for podcasts for November 2023. A whopping 98.5% of listeners never changed the speed — they stuck at 1.0x.

This stat is truly shocking to me. I first started listening to podcasts at slightly faster speeds about 5-6 years ago and now I can never go back.

I’m a 1.1x speed kind of guy, but I can see why Katie likes 1.2x. All of my podcast listening happens inside of Pocket Casts, and 1.1x speed coupled with their Trim Silence feature helps me save a ton of time and listen to way more shows. According to my Pocket Casts stats page, I’ve listened to 48 days’ worth of podcasts, while saving over 4 days’ worth of time using 1.1x speed. Who knew I’d listen to 10% more by going 10% faster? Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

Apple Podcasts lets you jump from 1x to 1.25x but nothing in between. This is too fast for me and audibly changes the way something sounds, which I don’t like. I have no idea why Apple Podcasts hasn’t added that yet but that’s a rant for another day.

9/10 - Katie is spot on overall but I prefer 1.1x

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Apple is a company on the verge of being disrupted, and the next great idea in tech and consumer electronics will not materialize from within the walls of its Cupertino spaceship.

Interesting thing to revisit 4 years later - Apple clearly hasn’t been supplanted, its Mac division is stronger and more compelling than ever, the iPhone is still sitting at comfortable levels of record revenue, and Apple TV+ is one of the highest quality catalogues of new content in the streaming wars.

Oh yeah, and the Apple Vision Pro looks set to be a breakthrough in Spatial Computing, and everyone from Valve to Meta has been caught napping and Apple has seemingly outdone them by a wide technical margin.

1/10 - Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.

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if the iPod succeeds, I expect it to be just the first in a new line of noncomputer products from Apple.

Over 22 years later, Walt might as well have been staring into a crystal ball.

100/10 - he’s the GOAT for a reason.

This has been a long time coming.

If you’ve had the misfortune of listening to me rant and rave about some new piece of technology or a new paradigm shift hurtling towards us, you’ll know exactly what to expect. I’ve had a love of writing for as long as I can remember, and there’s no feeling more satisfying than communicating a profound or complex idea using an intriguing turn of phrase.

That being said, I never pursued writing as a career, per se. I never seriously entertained the idea of becoming a novelist, a journalist, or anything of the sort. My biggest fear was turning my love of writing into something that I had to do rather than something I loved to do. I'm perfectly happy in my current career, in fact. So what is this website?

No Sevens, a name that I will explain shortly, is the culmination of many years of stop-start efforts to publish my musings around technology online. It’s not something I have to do, but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Once upon a time, I started a blog on Medium doing roughly the same thing, and even carved out a decent bit of web traffic for myself. I was a student at the time, and one of my first pieces was a review of the iPad Pro from a student’s point of view. For whatever reason, traffic on that piece exploded and I got 500k pageviews inside of a few weeks. After that, midterms came along, my free time dwindled, and as I was only writing longer essays at the time, it became really difficult to start back up again.

In the interim years, I’ve started countless free trials for Squarespace, Wordpress, and the like with the intention of starting a separate website where my writing could live. But again, if I wanted to really dedicate myself to publishing a bunch of essays every month, I told myself I didn’t have time and the free trials inevitably expired.

What if I wasn’t forcing myself to publish a bunch of essays every month? I asked myself that question a little while ago. With all the moxie of a New Year’s Resolution in tow, I decided that not everything needs to be as long as War and Peace to warrant publishing online. If you’ve ever read Daring Fireball, you know what I’m getting at. Perhaps, given the state of “microblogging” online (X, Threads, Mastodon, etc), this is a good opportunity for me to create a home for my own “tweets,” if we’re still calling them that.

So, No Sevens is two things:

• A place for those longer, more expansive essays on some of today’s meatier topics, &

• A new home for smaller, bite-sized thoughts or commentary on something I’ve seen online (à la Daring Fireball).

But what about the name of the site, No Sevens? What’s that all about?

I’m so glad you asked. There’s an episode from 2019 of my favourite podcast, the Vergecast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, at about 1:01:30), where they describe an inside joke where you imagine a world where nothing gets a 7 out of 10. You have to give it a higher or lower score (whole numbers only). This forces people to make a judgement call on whether something is good or not and removes some of the stereotypical Canadian politeness from the equation.

I use this a lot when I ask people to rate a movie they’ve just seen out of 10. If they give me a 7, I tell them all about the World of No Sevens, and then they typically revise their score to a 6, because that’s usually what a 7 converts to when probed under cross-examination. I’m a lot of fun at parties.

So that’s what I decided to call my new website! All of my posts on this site will have a score at the bottom out of 10, and my pledge to you, the reader, is that none of these scores will ever be a 7.

For this opening monologue, I guess the score should really be reflective of the site as it currently exists, although I’m sure people will also have some thoughts about my writing style. The site is definitely still in beta. I'm using Ghost.io since I thought it could be cool to deliver some of my longer essays in email form directly to your inbox, so sign up if that’s your cup of tea! Any emails you receive will be strictly for the longer essays, and there won’t be more than 1-2 per month, because everyone deserves a little more breathing room in their inbox to start off a new year.

3/10 - I’ve got a lot of work to do, but it’s a promising start!

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