Patrick McGee (author of Apple in China; my guest on The Talk Show last May), writing on X in response to Semafor’s reporting that Nvidia is “considering” Johny Srouji:

Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji would be an incredible choice to lead @nvidia — and I believe he’d accept it.

He’s hit the ceiling at Apple and won’t ever be CEO; obviously competent; ambitious as hell; has long wanted chip designs to dictate Apple product launches/timelines.

I wrote about this a few days ago, that my money is on Srouji having no interest in the Nvidia job. It’s true that Srouji will almost certainly never be CEO at Apple. But it’s wrong to assume that Srouji would consider CEO of Nvidia to be an upgrade from CHO at Apple. There’s no way Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, or Greg Joswiak would leave Apple to be CEO at another company. Most of Apple’s leadership genuinely bleeds six colors. There’s a certain approach to product that drives them, motivates them, and literally only Apple does that type of work. Tim Cook surely turned down numerous CEO offers to leave Apple while he served as COO under Steve Jobs, and he’s always been clear that he hoped Jobs would stay a few steps ahead of his cancer and could remain at Apple until, well, probably around now. (Jobs would be 71.)

I’ve never met Srouji and don’t have a read on him like I do other leaders at Apple. But I do have a read on Ternus and Cook. I’ll stick with my bet from earlier in the week:

Another scenario is that Srouji meant what he said, loves his job at Apple, and truly is John Ternus’s trusted and trustworthy hardware lieutenant. In this case, Nvidia’s board leaking that they’re considering Srouji to replace Huang is like someone in hell saying they’re considering ordering some ice water.

Aside from Srouji’s loyalty to Apple (and to the Apple Silicon chip architecture that’s been his life’s work), there’s also the question of whether he’d take the gig at Nvidia in particular, even if he is open to leaving Apple. Jensen Huang has left the company with a $4 trillion market cap, yes, but it was $5 trillion just a week ago. It now seems 20 percent of Nvidia’s sales in the AI era have been in violation of U.S. national security export controls to China. The company has no internal leadership hierarchy. And Huang placed bets that have leveraged the company’s future on OpenAI and the overall data center mania not being a bubble. Srouji has been a senior leader at the one tech company that conspicuously avoided those bets entirely.

Link: x.com/patrickmcgee_/status/2120799867140550999

Gary Marcus:

When a business needs exponentially increasing amounts of capital to make modest increases in quality in an intensely competitive market and still owes far more money than it has ever made, there is a serious problem.

I continue to believe that there is no moat in AI models. None. But the entire premise of Anthropic’s IPO is that they have an enormous gulf of a moat.

I would not be shocked to see Anthropic go out of business. Nor would I be shocked if the IPO fails. WeWork tried to IPO, 3 times, and didn’t make it.

I would be surprised if Anthropic does not go out of business. Most cults implode, and Anthropic doesn’t even hide that they’re a cult. And I just don’t see how the math works. Scientology is a long-running cult, but Scientology hasn’t committed $900 billion in spending over the next few years.

(Marcus’s post is on his Substack blog, which, annoyingly, requires you to be logged into a Substack account and to “subscribe”, even though it’s ostensibly a free post. What a rotten oppressive turd of a blogging platform Substack is. Just in case your Substack account isn’t working, here’s a PDF archive.)

Link: garymarcus.substack.com/p/just-say-no-to-anthropics-ipo?r…

Apple Newsroom’s “Pro and Tell” announcement week continues:

Apple today announced the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, delivering even more performance, powerful on-device AI capabilities, and faster connectivity for college students, business users, creators, and more. M6 features an advanced 12-core CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core, so everything from productivity tasks to more demanding pro workflows feels incredibly fast and responsive. The 12-core GPU delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics and up to 25 percent faster AI workloads when compared to M5, making the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 a compelling value for users who need serious power. For those upgrading from M1, the performance gains are even more significant, with up to 11× faster graphics and up to 13× faster AI performance. With additional Neural Accelerators in the GPU and a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, M6 turns MacBook Pro into an even more powerful platform for AI — from taking advantage of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features across apps and macOS to running LLMs locally, all while preserving user privacy. In addition, the 14-inch MacBook Pro features Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, while superfast storage makes working with large files, exporting projects, and running demanding AI workflows fly.

I questioned Apple’s decision to close up “superfast” there, but I stand corrected — it is, in fact, a perfectly cromulent adjective. I learn something every day.

Anyway, this is just the base MacBook Pro, the one that’s more like a MacBook Air Plus than a true professional laptop with an M-series Pro or Max chip. This tier of MacBook Pro has only ever been offered in the smaller 14-inch size. Prices seem unchanged from the post-June-price-hike M5 models:

Base price:     $2000

  RAM:  16 GB      +0
        24 GB    +200
        32 GB    +400

  SSD:   1 TB      +0
         2 TB    +500
         4 TB   +1500

Space black and silver colors, and nano-texture is available for $150 extra.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2026/10/apple-introduces-the-new-14-inch…

From Charles Mann, a quick history of porcelain, which is basically what his pricey induction stovetop is made from. (Fun fact: I went to grad school for ceramic engineering before dropping out after a semester to teach myself web design.)

Alexandra Alter, in the lede for her profile of Marissa Mayer’s new AI startup Dazzle for The New York Times (gift link):

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

That anecdote is brutal. It makes it seem like Mayer has lost her mind. She’s getting roasted for it on social media. I suspected (and hoped) there was more to the story. There was. Here’s Mayer herself on X:

To be clear, I didn’t use Dazzle because I was overwhelmed by making a slide. I used it because summing up your child in a few bullets feels laughably limiting. And, since our team had just gotten an early prototype running, I wanted to see what deeper threads it might find.

She might just be hyping her startup. But she definitely didn’t tell The Times that she needed help from AI to remember that her own daughter is “empathetic, creative, and an animal lover”. She seemingly got done dirty by Alter and the Times on that use-case anecdote.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/10/25/style/marissa-mayer-ai-assistants…

Barack Obama, in a 430-word essay:

It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. [...]

The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.

Thoughtful, sharp, and eloquent as ever.

But Obama posted this essay on X, which, I have been told in the past week, shows that he in fact is a Nazi sympathizer, a fascist, a pedophile, and unconcerned about racism. As surprised as I was to learn those things about myself, I’m equally surprised to learn them about President Obama, whom I heretofore considered a thoughtful statesman and moral compass.

Either that, or, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon have relegated themselves into irrelevance by allowing their discourse to be dominated by a fringe of unhinged kooks who want to be angry and want everyone else to be angry.

Link: x.com/BarackObama/status/2111819687524774170