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19 October 2026 at 02:01

Friends,

This past week 4 of “Wealth and Poverty” focused on inequalities of place. If you haven’t had a chance to join, here’s a VERY short summary:

Reminder: Tomorrow we begin Week 5, when we’ll turn our focus to the giant “power shift” that began in the 1980s — weakening the power of workers and increasing the power of big corporations.

Week 5 will be released tomorrow at 2 pm PT, 5 pm ET.

In case you missed them, here are the classes that have been released so far: Class 1, Class 2, Class 3, and Class 4.

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Tom the Dancing Bug’s Inner Hive, and Harvey Richards, the Greatest Lawyer in the History of Fiction

19 October 2026 at 00:53

Ruben Bolling’s long-running Tom the Dancing Bug is one of my favorite comic strips. I’ve been a huge fan since the early 1990s, when I started reading it in alternative newspapers. (Newspapers were sort of like websites, excepted they were printed daily or weekly. I swear.) Back in 2012 Bolling — noting that the comic was more widely read than ever yet generating less money than ever — started a subscription membership called The Inner Hive. I love it. Not just because I’m supporting work that I adore and value, but because the extras that members get are so fun. If you’re even half as big a fan of Tom the Dancing Bug as I am, you should join too. There are several options — Patreon, MailChimp, Substack — but in my opinion Patreon is the simplest and the best, and it gets you everything.

I was reminded to re-endorse The Inner Hive after I wrote a post last night referencing Harvey Richards, lawyer for children — one of the comic’s longest running recurring characters. Tom the Dancing Bug’s entire schtick is premised on a wide array of recurring characters and premises, but Richards is probably my favorite. Here’s an early one regarding the doctrine of “He Who Smelt It, Dealt It” that ran in National Lampoon in 1990. Here’s one from 2012 at Boing Boing (where Bolling is a contributor), and here’s one from 2018 where Richards joins the Trump 1.0 White House, and specifically invokes the “I’m Rubber, You’re Glue, Everything You Say Bounces Off Me and Sticks to You” doctrine that I mentioned as a Richards specialty in my post yesterday.

But the thing is, my earliest memory of Harvey Richards was regarding the “I’m Rubber, You’re Glue” doctrine. It’s the foundation of all of children’s law, obviously. In my memory, it’s the first thing I remember about Harvey Richards in the strip. But I searched the web, and couldn’t find any old strips with it. I asked the LLM robots to search, and they came up with nothing. So I wrote to Bolling, with whom I’ve exchanged occasional correspondence for many years. Bolling not only confirmed that my memory isn’t entirely shot, but he graciously granted me permission to reproduce it here. It’s from 1993, when I know I was already a weekly reader of the strip.

1993 “Tom the Dancing Bug” comic strip, featuring Harvey Richards, lawyer for children, branching out into courtroom practice.

WorkOS AuthKit

19 October 2026 at 00:45

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. Login looks simple until you’re building password resets, email verification, MFA, social providers, session management, and the enterprise SSO your first big customer asked for last week.

WorkOS AuthKit lets you:

  • Offer SSO, MFA, passkeys, passwords, email codes, and social sign-in.
  • Add and remove users automatically with SCIM provisioning.
  • Track who did what with audit logs.

Try AuthKit today.

Verizon Is Going to Charge $10/Month for iPhone Handoff

19 October 2026 at 00:20

Verizon, in a post headlined “Switch to Verizon and Get the New iPhone Duo Now. No Trade-In Needed.”:

Verizon will support iPhone Handoff, giving customers the flexibility to use a single Verizon phone number seamlessly across two compatible iPhone models. Whether using the pocketable iPhone Duo on the go or iPhone 18 Pro for work, customers can switch active status between devices at any time while keeping full access to Verizon’s 5G network. iPhone Handoff will be available from Verizon for $10/month on compatible iPhones models running iOS 27.

First, the word “now” is doing a lot of work in that headline, given the current January 25 estimate for new Duo orders.

Second, we all know Verizon is the most expensive competent carrier in the U.S. (Maybe AT&T is just as expensive, but I said “competent”.) It feels like a rip that T-Mobile is charging $5/month. Verizon charging double is on-brand but irritating.

Gurman on HomeView: ‘Finished Units Have Been Sitting Boxed Up in Warehouses for the Better Part of a Year’

18 October 2026 at 23:58

Mark Gurman, today, in his weekly Power On column for Bloomberg (gift link):

Without a serviceable version of the new assistant, Apple couldn’t deliver the experience it had envisioned. That left the hardware ready to go, but the software nowhere near finished.

So Apple postponed the HomeView repeatedly — first until spring 2025, then summer, then fall, and then again throughout 2026 before finally unveiling it this past week. And the hardware betrays its age. With thick bezels, an A18 processor and 8 gigabytes of memory, this is clearly a product conceived years ago. Finished units have been sitting boxed up in warehouses for the better part of a year, waiting for the software to catch up.

The A18 chip and 8 GB of RAM aren’t a sure sign of delay; this year’s MacBook Neo has the 18 Pro chip and only 8 GB RAM, and wasn’t delayed. And if a kick-ass MacBook can get by with A18-class chip and 8 GB RAM, surely a HomeView can too. HomeView only does a fraction of what a Mac can do, and the MacBook Neo is perhaps Apple’s best new product, full stop, in years.

But I have no reason to doubt Gurman that this hardware was finished and production started long ago. His reporting on this product has proven out going back two years. Parts of Apple clearly — and disastrously — believed that a credible version of Siri AI would ship in early 2025. You might recall my writing about that. HomeView clearly depends on having a credible version of Siri AI behind it. But Siri AI didn’t ship until last month.

One revealing sign of how long this thing has been in development: I spotted several posts on social media from former Apple employees proudly touting their work on the HomeView. These weren’t people who had just left the company, either. Some hadn’t worked at Apple in quite a while, yet were still able to point to the newly announced device as something they helped create. That tells you plenty about how long ago much of the work was completed.

That’s juicy, but it might have been good to include some links here?

Claim Chowder: The Information on HomeView Having a ‘Robotic Swiveling Base’

18 October 2026 at 23:26

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting, wrongly, for The Information in January this year (paywalled; here’s MacRumors’s summary)

Apple’s pin joins a growing portfolio of AI-powered products the tech giant has under development, including AirPods equipped with enhanced sensors, a security camera, smart glasses and augmented reality glasses, according to multiple people familiar with the projects. Apple is also working on a home product featuring a small display, speakers and a robotic swiveling base, designed with a heavy emphasis on AI features. That device could be released as soon as this spring, according to two of the people.

Wrong. So I’d say that the stupid-sounding “AI pin” that these same “people familiar with the matter” told Ma and Liu about is probably equally wrong. (That supposed “AI pin” was the main thrust of the article.)

I love to point out when Mark Gurman is wrong, which is not infrequently, but in the case of HomeView he’s seemingly been right about everything going back to 2025. He reported back in April 2025, with codenames, that the initial HomeView (J490) had no robotics but that a subsequent version (J595) would — or at least might. Two dinguses heard a rumor about J595 and told The Information it might ship six months ago, when in fact it’s something that won’t ship until 2027 or 2028 at the earliest. But The Information ran with it.

The phrase “familiar with the matter” often just means “who heard something about it from someone who goes to the same gym as a guy whose wife works at Apple”. Substitute that longer phrase whenever you see “people familiar with the matter”.

Apple Issues Statement on Duo Demand Far Outstripping Supply

18 October 2026 at 22:04

The Financial Times:

Apple had originally promised delivery of the Duo by October 23, but within hours of orders opening, delivery times through Apple’s website had slipped into late January. US mobile carriers also saw delivery times for new orders pushed back.

“The pre-order demand for iPhone Duo, our first foldable iPhone, has been nothing short of extraordinary,” Apple said in a statement. “We are working hard to get this revolutionary new product into customers’ hands as quickly as possible,” it added.

Of course Apple is going to play it this way. I would too. But no one other than Apple’s operations teams knows how low the initial supply is. Just judging from my friends and my social media feeds, I think demand is quite strong for a device that starts at $2000. But I think initial supply is incredibly low.

To that point, Hartley Charlton has a nice scoop for MacRumors:

Apple Store employees told MacRumors that they have been advised that there will likely be no iPhone Duo stock available for walk-in purchases on launch day. Staff have been instructed to discourage customers without pre-orders from coming in expecting to buy the device, warning that they will be disappointed. [...]

Warnings about a constrained launch began well before Apple announced the iPhone Duo. In early September, Nikkei Asia reported that production had reached only a few hundred devices per day in late August. Further production problems emerged in late September.

I suspect this means Apple is going to discourage, if not disperse, anyone attempting to camp out overnight on Thursday outside Apple stores.

That said, a few hours after pre-orders opened Friday morning, ship dates went to January 25. They’re still at January 25, as I write this Sunday afternoon. So it seems Apple expects to greatly increase production in the next two months. I bet a lot of those “January 25” pre-orders wind up delivering weeks before that. Apple has a strong history of under-promising and over-delivering when new products are backordered.

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