Walt Mossberg With Kara Swisher on Sway

Kara Swisher’s excellent podcast Sway needs no introduction from me, but her latest episode, with longtime collaborator Walt Mossberg as her guest, is simply sublime. Just so good.  ★ 

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The Verge: ‘Facebook Plans to Change Company Name to Focus on the Metaverse’

Possible huge scoop from Alex Heath for The Verge: Facebook is planning to change its company name next week toreflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a sourcewith direct knowledge of the matter.The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talkabout at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th,but could...

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‘Exile From Dongletown’

Loved this take on yesterday’s announcement from Jason Snell: If Mac laptops come in eras, one just ended. It started in 2016 with the release of MacBook Pro models featuring butterfly keyboards, the Touch Bar, and a minimal selection of USB-C ports. It ended on Monday with the announcement of new MacBook Pro models that roll back...

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Jeff Bezos Left Andy Jassy a Mess to Clean Up

“Lawmakers Give Amazon ‘Final Chance’ to Clear Up Testimony”, from the AP: The letter says the antitrust subcommittee is considering referring the case to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. It accuses the world’s biggest online retailer of at least misleading Congress and possibly outright lying. It cites recent...

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Apple Music’s New $5/Month ‘Voice’ Plan

This plan struck me as weird when it was announced during the keynote, but it makes sense for the way many people use Apple Music: by just asking Siri to play whatever, where “whatever” is a particular song, a particular artist, or a particular mood. If this is your plan, when you go to the Music app on your devices, the interface will just be Siri...

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Facebook ‘Ready to Engage on Substance’

John Pinette, VP of communications for Facebook, in a series of tweets: Right now 30+ journalists are finishing up a coordinated series of articles based on thousands of pages of leaked documents. We hear that to get the docs, outlets had to agree to the conditions and a schedule laid down by the PR team that worked on earlier leaked docs....

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[Sponsor] Mux Video

Mux Video is an API to powerful video streaming (like Stripe for Video), built by the founders of Zencoder and creators of Video.js, and a team of ex-YouTube and Twitch engineers. Take any video file or live stream and make it play beautifully at scale on any device, powered by magical-feeling features like automatic thumbnails, animated gifs, and data-driven...

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Updated MacOS 12 Monterey Page Reveals Safari 15 With Tabs That Look Like Tabs

Didn’t make today’s event, for some reason, but the updated page for MacOS 12 Monterey (shipping next Monday) shows that Safari 15 has reverted to actual tabs instead of “tabs”. Compact mode is still an option, which is great — the way this design should have been approached all along. Safari 15 on iPadOS 15.1 comes along for the ride too. We’re...

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★ Last-Minutes Guesses for Today’s ‘Unleashed’ Event

All of these are purely guesses, based on rumors and my sense of which way the wind is blowing in Cupertino. I could well be wrong about most of these. I started a thread on Twitter with most of the following guesses — feel free to chime in with your guesses and wishes there. We need to do something for the next 90 minutes, might as well speculate....

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Meh.com

My thanks to Meh for sponsoring last week at DF. Meh.com does the daily deal thing, sells cool shit for cheap, and they keep it simple. One thing a day — just go there and see what’s up now. They’ll have something different tomorrow. They also have a sharp logo that looks great on the DF background color, and they write really funny sponsored entries...

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