Working with Porsche and Aston Martin gives Apple two premium marques to showcase CarPlay as a more enhanced platform. Apple may limit the customisation it offers just to premium marques in the short term so that there's an air of exclusivity about things, but by working with heritage brands initially, Apple could be aiming to whet the appetite of the rest of the automotive industry, which will surely be wanting to offer that to customers too.
If Apple doesn’t see sports gambling as a vice, though, maybe that’s because America no longer sees it as a vice. Only in 2018 did the Supreme Court let states allow online sports betting. Now it has become so normalized that commentators regularly discuss betting lines, throwing around lingo about “parlays” and “prop bets.” Entire TV shows and podcasts are devoted to gambling. ESPN now has its own betting service. Sports betting has eaten sports alive, and not without consequence: Calls to gambling-addiction hotlines are way up since 2018. Even before releasing the Sports app, Apple has quietly abetted this.
Swayy is an iPhone app startup that allows you to share not your current location, but your next intended location. That could be either in a couple of hours in the future, or even weeks or months away.
So why on earth would anyone want to do that?
Well, as founder Daneh Westropp told me, the advantage is that instead of having to “constantly coordinate with your friends via text or phone calls, the app lets your followers know where you’ll be next and allows them to figure out if they can sort of ‘serendipitously co-locate’ with you.”
What separates The Way from other meditation apps is that it is really a course or a journey - you follow The Way - a literal illustrated path in the app. Along the path, are different retreats, each one delving a little deeper into meditation with different sessions giving a step-by-side approach.
Before there was Substack, and long before the word “creator” was used with any kind of seriousness, there was a small newsletter tool that captured a moment: TinyLetter. Appropriately humble in name, TinyLetter was light on features and heavy on focus. The canvas was a blank text box; the platform itself the most bare-bones way to send a bunch of emails. Publishing on TinyLetter meant stories would never be loud, go viral, or make any money. But this quietness was a strength, and for a brief era — I’d estimate 2012 to early 2016 — TinyLetter was where some of the most compelling writing was happening on the internet.
Sports is entertainment. And the athletics are entertainers. And now sports is gambling. And the athletics are… dice and cards and tiles?
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