Locator: 50176APPLE.
Before we get to Apple: Microsoft partners with Anthropic for "Copilot Cowork" in "push for AI agents.
Now, back to Apple.
Ready to rumble: now that Apple has released its ultra-low-priced laptops, the company is now ready to raise the bar on high-end laptops and iPhones.
Headlines from Macrumors.
- MacBook Ultra with touchscreen. Link here.
- Apple still has more new Macs planned for 2026. Link here.
- Apple could launch three new "Ultra" devices this year. Link here.
M4 iPad Air review, link here:
Unless the iPad has been significantly upgraded -- and I don't think it has -- it still doesn't meet my requirements for blogging. But for surfing the net -- there's nothing better than the iPad -- 11-inch.
The M5
This is an incredible price:
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M5 MacBook Pro
The movers and shakers in the Dept of War and the entire Federal government are going to be using the M5 MacBook Pro and Anthropic. Just wait.
Qualcomm introduced its third-generation Oryon cores to its Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, bumping up the specifications to an impressive 18-core CPU, resulting in significantly increased single-core and multi-core performance.
Unfortunately, these upgrades might give Windows laptops some bragging rights when compared as individual products, but as soon as you put the M5 Pro and M5 Max into the mix, the story changes immediately.
In the latest single-core and multi-core benchmark comparison, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme continues to lag behind its direct competition.
Disappointingly, the M5 Pro and M5 Max are up to 26 percent faster than the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, with the latter also losing to the older M4 MaxOn Geekbench 6, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme was tested in the upcoming ASUS Zenbook 16, obtaining single-threaded and multi-threaded scores of 4,033 and 23,198, respectively.
These results are far superior to the Snapdragon X Elite, but it’s always important to gauge the competition, or more specifically, the new Apple Silicon range.
For investors, this isn't going to move the AAPL needle, but "this is just the start."
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The Book Page
Today: The News: A User's Manual, Alain de Botton, c. 2014.
A gift from our younger daughter many years ago.
We are addicted to the news, and governed by the news cycle:
- 0400: check the overnight headlines on Fox News, x
- 0500: check RBN Energy
- 0600: check Oilprice; occasionally check pre-market
- 0800: ten to thirty minutes of Jim Cramer
- 1700: ten minutes, check the weather on network television
From Botton, p. 11:
Societies become modern, the philosopher Hegel suggested, when news replaces religion as our central source of guidance and our touchstone of authority. In the developed economies, the news now occupies a position of power at least equal to that formerly enjoyed by the faiths.
Dispatches track the canonical hours with uncanny precision: matins have been transubstantiated into the breakfast bulletin, vespers into the evening report.
It is clear, the author needs to write a sequel: Agentic AI: The New Writers.
Gustave Flaubert:
The noblest promise of the news is that it will be able to alleviate ignorance, overcome prejudice and raise the intelligence of individuals and nations.
But from some quarters it has intermittently been accused of a contrary capacity, that of making us completely stupid. One of the most uncompromising versions of this charge was levelled in the mid-nineteenth century by Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert belonged to a generation that had experienced the rise of mass-circulation newspapers at first hand.
Flaubert was appalled by what, in his estimation, these newspapers were doing to the intelligence and curiosity of his countrymen.
Quick: what novel was Flaubert best known for?
And then there's John Hanning Speke (1827 - 1864). Remember him? I didn't think so.
Before our time, the only way to get to Uganda was to travel for two months by sea around the perilous Cape of Good Hope bound for Dar es Salaam, then inland for another few months through bush and desert, with every likelihood that one would never return.
In 1859, on the eve of the US Civil War, John Hanning Speke, the first European ever to enter Uganda and the man who gave Lake Inyansha its new name, Lake Victoria, made it back to Britain and gave a lecture on his travels to an almost hysterical 800-strong crowd in the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.
And that's just a start.
