Interesting debate the other evening. If the cost of building nears 0, should PMs still shudder at custom feature requests? My view, yes, the answer to custom feature requests in the AI age is to build the product for customisation, not the process for it.
I’ll be speaking at @WebSummit for the first time, about a topic close to heart, if the cost of dev nears zero (debatable) what happens when delivery moves faster than the roadmap? How to avoid a feature factory on steroids.
If you’re heading there too, I’d love to meet people. Drop me a message! 👋
websummit.com/sessions/lis26…
Maybe I’ve drunk the kool-aid, but same. It’s a great device. Many of the viral reviews feel like none-issues.
Picked up my old Pro Max and it felt obnoxiously tall. Wife’s Pro felt the same, needlessly lanky.
I know they technically display more content, but the Duo, even closed, somehow feels more informationally dense.
Just miss FaceID.
Yes, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with my iPhone Duo today. I’ve been using it for almost 8 hours straight. It’s a premium product, has an amazing screen, and has completely upended the way I interact with a device. That’s probably the biggest learning curve, and greatest benefit of using it.
The massive screen is incredible, and the phone in that mode is easy to hold. Yet, when you use it closed, the screen, even though much shorter than my 17 Pro Max, does not feel that way. Still easy to type and read. I feel like I’ve sacrificed nothing. The cameras have been great for what I use them for.
Many of the apps out there have not been optimized for this device, yet. But as I refresh throughout the day, this very app, X, updated with a refresh and it is stunning. I’m sure there will be a lot of hate on this device, as there is with every Apple product, every year. But so far, I’m absolutely enthralled. I’ll update you again at the 24 hour and 1 week mark.
first 12 hours with the duo:
- love the form factor, both folded and unfolded. I grew tired of the pro max falling out of my pockets. some apps make surprisingly good use of the horizontal space when folded.
- apps updating to the new layout isn’t a big deal, updates will come, we’ve been here before several times.
- some apps already look great. apple apps obviously, but also claude, linear and surprisingly… outlook.
home screen expanding across pages when unfolded is great.
- lack of face id is a major regression. without apple watch unlock i’d genuinely be taking it back to the store. even then, passwords etc. still need touch id, and the positioning feels completely unnatural on the side compared to the old iphones where your thumb naturally rested on it.
you don’t realise quite how often you use face id until it’s gone, or just how seamless that experience had become.
Couldn’t get the babycam past the hotel WiFi portal page. Used the Ethernet at the back of the TV and Mac Internet sharing to create a hotspot. 21x faster download speed than the hotel WiFi and way less flaky.
Starting to understand why travel routers are all the rage.
Related thought on incentives. I’ve been a little taken back recently at just how often Claude Code arrives at “you know what would make this project even better, give me an anthropic api key”.
Since the standard is to hide thinking traces now, the frontier lab pricing model from the perspective of a user, is basically "just trust me bro here's what it cost".
Like, the user is charged for a bunch of thinking tokens that they never got to see on a usage basis.
This creates misaligned incentives between model providers and consumers. If you're Anthropic, and you find a way to reduce thinking tokens by 10% without compromising response quality, are you really gonna press that button to reduce your top line revenue by 10% right now, as you gear up for a potential IPO?
I had a weird aha moment with Claude last week that recouped me €1.7k. I set Claude loose on bank statements from all my accounts, mainly just wanting to get a lay of the land on where my money was actually going.
Claude picked up that I’d been charged twice for mortgage fees, once through the notary and once by the bank directly.
It had access to my ‘second brain’ directory structure, including the notary statement, but the transaction itself wasn’t broken down beyond a generic bucket of fees. It managed to marry part of that up with a random €1.7k charge from the bank, on a different account, a month later.
Slightly embarrassing to admit I wasn’t on top of this. When the second charge came in, while unpleasant, I recognised what it was, but being a month after the notary transaction, I just didn’t compute that I’d already paid it.
Such a trivial example, but one that I doubt would never have been caught by me or the bank. Claude casually found this buried across my accounts and documents when I didn't even ask It to look. Makes me think of what's happening in the world of fraud detection with more powerful models and hardware and targeted application.
A lot of people are jumping on the ISO 24495 / ASD-STE100 Simplified English bandwagon, and I can see the value for getting Claude to respond with less fluff and more directly.
But for anyone using it for copywriting, sense-checking emails, etc., or anyone already worried about their content looking like AI slop and using light-touch prompts like “make this sound more coherent, but grammatically correct, while sticking to my original writing style”, I’d be wary. Adopting these standards just strips all the personality and humour from your writing.
People weren’t meant to write to each other like the instruction manual for a Philips toothbrush.
Something I keep coming back to is how much better positioned orgs would be to build their company brain and institutional intelligence if shared network drives were still a thing.
With O355/GSuite everything just became a link to a specific file in someone’s personal space. Few took the time to set up proper team/department structures in the cloud like they would network drives.
It means most orgs have little open information and no permission model for AI to inherit.
