Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Qualified Health, which helps health systems evaluate and adopt AI tools, raised a $125M Series B led by NEA at a valuation of between $500M and $1B (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare)

Heather Landi / Fierce Healthcare:
Qualified Health, which helps health systems evaluate and adopt AI tools, raised a $125M Series B led by NEA at a valuation of between $500M and $1B  —  Qualified Health Artificial Intelligence New Enterprise Associates SignalFire  —  Qualified Health, a startup that works with health systems …

A look at why Dotcom Bubble comparisons to the AI boom are off, vertical SaaS is up +3% last 12 months vs. horizontal SaaS down 35%, and other reflections on AI (Logan Bartlett/@loganbartlett)

Logan Bartlett / @loganbartlett:
A look at why Dotcom Bubble comparisons to the AI boom are off, vertical SaaS is up +3% last 12 months vs. horizontal SaaS down 35%, and other reflections on AI  —  This week I co-wrote Redpoint's 2026 Market Update for our Limited Partners with my colleagues @AdilBhatia and @lydianday.

The 2019 Intel Mac Pro’s Unfortunate Timing

Stephen Hackett, at 512 Pixels:

I’ve thought a lot about the bad timing Jones mentions. Had Apple stuck to the original timeline, and killed off the 2013 Mac Pro in favor of an iMac “specifically targeted at large segments of the pro market,” back in 2017, Apple could have avoided putting out the best Intel Mac ever, less than a year before the transition to Apple silicon.

Did Apple know in 2017 that 2020 was the year the M1 would make it out of the lab? Probably not, but it doesn’t make the timing any less painful.

Apple might not have had 2020 set in stone for the Apple Silicon transition, but in 2017, they definitely knew that Apple Silicon was the future. I think they knew that years before 2017, and in broad strokes, that’s why 2015–2020 was such a bad period for Mac hardware. They didn’t ship a retina MacBook Air until 2018. The 12-inch MacBook was beautiful but expensive and seriously underpowered. And nothing suffered more than the Mac Pro in that stretch. I think Apple knew that the future was on their own silicon, but in the meantime, they just couldn’t get it up for the last five years of the Intel era.

Apple Should Set and Enforce Some Basic Standards for Custom Video Players on tvOS

While I’m bitching about Netflix’s craptacular new video player on Apple TV, let me quote from a piece I wrote two years ago (also complaining about Netflix’s tvOS app):

Turns out there are two better ways:

  1. If you use the Control Center Apple TV remote control on your iPhone, there’s a dedicated “CC” button.

  2. In tvOS, go to Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut, and set it to “Closed Captions”. Now you can just triple-click the Menu/Back button on the remote to toggle captions. (On older Apple TV remotes, the button is labelled “Menu”; on the new remote, it’s labelled with a “<”.)

But here’s the hitch: Netflix’s tvOS app doesn’t support either of these ways to toggle captions. Netflix only supports the on-screen caption toggle in their custom video player. I get why Netflix and other streaming apps want to use their own custom video players, but it ought to be mandated by App Store review that they support accessibility features like this one.

What Apple should have done right from the start with the tvOS-based Apple TV a decade ago is require all apps to use the system video player. No custom video players. It’s too late for that, alas. But the tvOS App Store review process ought to insist on compliance with these accessibility and platform compliance features.

You want to use your own custom video player? Fine. But apps with custom video players must support the “CC” button in the iOS Control Center remote control, must support the triple-click accessibility shortcut, must support the platform conventions for fast-forwarding and rewinding using the Apple TV remote control, etc. If your video player doesn’t comply, your app update doesn’t get approved.

Apple should use the App Store approval process for the benefit of users. Isn’t that supposed to be the point?

A profile of Mark Lanier, a TX lawyer and part-time pastor who beat Meta and Google in the LA social media case and said Zuckerberg was "rattled" on the stand (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal:
A profile of Mark Lanier, a TX lawyer and part-time pastor who beat Meta and Google in the LA social media case and said Zuckerberg was “rattled” on the stand  —  Plaintiff's attorney Mark Lanier uses props and parables to challenge social-media giants, drugmakers and manufacturers …