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Apple’s MacBook Pro at 20.
Apple’s MacBook Pro turned 20 this year. Steve Jobs introduced the move to Intel processors that made the original Apple MacBook Pro possible at WWDC 2005. The reason revolved around computing power per watt. PowerPC’s offered 15 units of performance per watt, Intel’s future roadmap at the time offered 70 units of performance per watt.

This impacted energy efficiency and heat management as much of raw processing power – both of which were important for portable devices and smaller desktop units. Those metrics were a symptom of IBM’s inability to push the PowerPC architecture and fabrication processes as far as Intel could. Here’s Steve Jobs’ from his keynote address:

Because we want to make the best computers for our customers looking forward. Now, I stood up here two years ago in front of you and I promised you [a 3 GHz Power Macintosh G5], and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you yet. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you yet. But these aren’t even the most important reasons. The most important reasons are that as we look ahead, though we may have great products right now, and we’ve got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come, as we look ahead we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map. And that’s why we’re going to do this. When we look at Intel, they’ve got great performance, yes, but they’ve got something else that’s very important to us. Just as important as performance, is power consumption. And the way we look at it is performance per watt. For one watt of power how much performance do you get? And when we look at the future road maps projected out in mid-2006 and beyond, what we see is the PowerPC gives us sort of 15 units of performance per watt, but the Intel road map in the future gives us 70, and so this tells us what we have to do.

My journey with Apple’s MacBook Pro.

I was leaving Yahoo! to go to an agency then called Waggener Edstrom, bringing my experience working on digital campaigns and using blogs as a product communications channel. My redundancy cheque was in my bank account and my Mac Mini was of limited use due to it being a desktop computer.

Based on what I had seen the previous year and conversations I had with Yahoo! engineers there was only one laptop for me to get: the Apple MacBook Pro.

The Apple MacBook Pro represented a step change in what you could do. You were longer tethered by your power cord to your machine. At Yahoo! we had a bad cultural habit of using our laptops in meetings, not only for presenting, but to retrieve relevant files, take notes and have sideline conversations on Yahoo! Messenger that may have been apropos to the meeting going on, or organising what to have for lunch.

While you could access Yahoo! Messenger on your phone, it was much slower and less user friendly than iMessage, Signal or WhatsApp would be now.

If you had two meetings back-to-back there was a dash back to your desk to plug into your charger. Going to a conference meant a scramble for those seats next to a power socket.

The MagSafe connector meant that your laptop would no longer get dragged onto the floor by the power cable if someone brushed past your table. Instead it would be secured magnetically and easily disconnected.

If your Apple MacBook Pro was plummeting to the floor, an accelerometer onboard would at least park the hard drive heads to minimise any damage on landing. It wasn’t fool proof but it was step out on options previously available.

On the Apple MacBook Pro, the laptop lid closed and stayed in place, once Apple moved way from using the last generation PowerBook design case. Many Windows laptops had to have their screens locked with a latch or a button, a number still do. Previous PowerBooks were only slight more elegant with a flush mechanical push-button placed on the front edge of the lower case. Pressing it pushed a small internal bar that unhooked a latch extending down from the display bezel.

In a darkened room the keyboard would light up. This was a game changer when you were watching a projected presentation, or in my case, going through emails while watching CSI DVD boxsets of an evening.

Apple’s MacBook Pro was a game changer for me. I didn’t need to work at my desk. I could work in a local coffee shop, or a different part of the office without bringing my power pack.

Apple’s MacBook Pro radically changed working from home. You no longer had to worry about a separate webcam perching precariously on the top of your screen. Instead, the MacBook Pro had it built into the top of the laptop screen. Giving you an integrated video studio that we now take for granted but was revolutionary when it was launched.

An aside on laptop cameras

So IBM made the first laptop with an integrated laptop with a webcam back in 1996 called the ThinkPad 850 which was a PowerPC workstation in a laptop format.

There was also the Sony VAIO PCG-C1 PictureBook which was a Windows sub notebook that had a camera which could be rotated to look towards the user or in front of the laptop lid. Both were very expensive for the time and saw limited usage. The MD in my first agency had a PCG-C1 and it was a beautiful piece of industrial design for the time.

It’s the kind of laptop that would have looked right at home in Ghost In The Shell. Neither of them models could be considered to mainstream products. But the Apple MacBook Pro brought the built-in camera into the mainstream of laptop design.

Remote working.

Skype was only a few years old at this point, allowing for video calls with clients, distributed teams and remote working. With a MacBook Pro, you had it all together in a seamless package. Twenty years ago we were pretty close to what became the new normal during COVID and in the post-COVID work world.

Battery life

Early on in my agency career, a lot of my clients had Tumi leather bags. The Tumi Alpha bag became a corporate rite-of-passage. You were a corporate traveller. Tumi had benefits for air travellers, being soft enough to squeeze into an overseas bin, but tough enough to protect the contents and not burst at the seams while you waited at the checked baggage carousel.

Beyond the social signalling Tumi bags became useful as a repository for spare batteries and a charging block with cable. There was probably a note pad and some pens in there as well, along with travel documents.

That’s what a work day outside the office needed. One of the pleasures of people watching in an airline lounge at the time was watching the passive aggressive conflict over a limited amount of electric sockets available.

The Apple MacBook Pro started off with a solid 4 1/2 hours of battery life making it ideal if you went to a conference like I ended up doing at the time. Or you could take it along to a pitch, present and head back to the office without your power brick. Things changed when Apple introduced the unibody model. You could no longer swap out a spare battery. Apple eventually compromised with a low price battery replacement for aged out batteries. This also meant that Apple pivoted to a full working day on batteries – a game changer in laptop computing.

The move to ARM-based Apple silicon

In the same way that Steve Jobs announced the move to Intel in 2005, that reasoning was mirrored in the 2020 move to ARM-based Apple silicon focus on performance per watt, which made the MacBook Pro even more ‘road warrior’ friendly.

ARM also offered other opportunities
- Custom silicon including on-silicon neural networks and security enclaves.
- Common architectures with iPads, iPhones and the AppleTV.
- Control over its own silicon roadmap, rather than being tied to Intel’s chip-making process delays.
What’s also changed over the 15 years of the MacBook Pro is their ubquity. In coffee shops like the ones near my home, the few people that seem to use non-Apple laptops are usually mainland Chinese students. And their laptops borrow a lot design cues from the MacBook Pro.

More information

Macworld Podcast: The history and future of the MacBook | Macworld

More related posts here.
September 9, 2026
August 2026 – the more than eleven edition
August 2026 introduction – (37)

Welcome to the 37th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘more than eleven’.

37 in Chinese is largely considered positive as a number, based on its component numbers of 3 and 7. On the Chinese internet 37 is used to say thank you because of its similarity in sound to the English phrase.

37 seemed appropriate given the searing heat we’ve experienced across Europe during July and August.

It was roughly this time three years ago when I started writing Strategic Outcomes. I was burnt out working far too many hours at an ad agency due to being massively oversold (150 – 200% utilisation rate during a typical week with new business pitches on top) to clients.

So took myself to Paris for a short break to recharge, truth be told it took until the end of the year for me to recharge fully.

I watched programmes, finally finished a great book I had been trudging through for months, while enjoying coffee and cake in the lobby of the George V Hotel.

The first issue was written in 20 minutes and I didn’t think I would still be writing some three years later. Since then over 600 people have subscribed, I had no expectations – so it was definitely more than I had expected and I am deeply appreciative that it gets a glance, let alone a read; from so many people in such attention-poor times 🙏.

Over time Strategic Outcomes has developed a format and a voice, but now takes longer to write despite me being more practiced in writing each episode. Secondly, the length of the episode doesn’t equate to the amount of time that it takes to write.

Onwards.

The soundtrack this month isn’t the usual track selection or mix, but a podcast from the European Space Agency highlighting sounds that are literally out of this world. If that isn’t your cup of tea then I also offer this live concert recorded in the US by Cabaret Voltaire for radio station KEXP. Think of it as a modern-day version of the BBC’s Peel Sessions.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things that I’ve written

Back in 2015, Stephen Waddington invited people to submit a media diary based on a common set of questions. I revisited during the middle of the CoVID lockdown when we were in peak-Zoom usages. And I decided to revisit again this month to compare and contrast with my past installments.

Apple is launching a TV adaptation of Neuromancer, William Gibson’s seminal novel and you can see the trailers online. I had been been thinking a lot about Gibson recently from the saturation of the Neo Tokyo aesthetic in mainstream culture to the surreal nature of Silicon Valley which sounds more like Wintermute at every turn. So I curated some video interviews that Gibson had done down through the years; as well as miscellaneous things from around the web.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. I wrote about Aston Martin putting up for sale the majority of its non-automotive naming rights. It’s an important issue for marketers, but the attraction of the Aston Martin brand for people interested in cars had my post seen much more widely than I expected.
2. I posted a video where Les Binet discussed brand loyalty from a marketing science perspective and the trap marketers face by focusing on the loyalty of generation-Z customers.
3. A breakdown of the BBC Research & Development’s research report on the state of the social Internet.
4. Michael Farmer triangulated advertising agency problems: big workloads, plummeting fees, clients trapped in low growth or de-growth.
5. Temporal mismatches can affect corporate innovation as much as it can affect hedge fund strategies like Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness LP.
Books that I have read

Like many people I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby at school. At the time I was uneasy at the class interpretation of the book as a portrait of a tragedy set in 1920s excess. Re-reading it years later, I thought of it more as a clash of antiheroes dripping of prejudice and latent racism. The book is full of grifters and cads. What makes the narrator a more likeable at a surface level is that he’s a more inexperienced grifter who hasn’t managed to exorcise his own conscience at the time of the incident. Now, more than ever, it feels very of our times.

It was unintentional that I read Regime Change: Inside The Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump in tandem with The Great Gatsby. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan craft a book that is a blow-by-blow account of the second Trump administration over its first 18 months in office. It’s gossipy without the analysis one got from Bob Woodward’s books on previous administrations. What struck me was the illusion of coherence.

A lot was made in the media about the publication of Mandate for Leadership The Conservative Promise Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project published by The Heritage Foundation as a plan for government. But Haberman and Swan’s book paint a picture of a government improvising it up as they went along with appointees who were often drowning in their roles. One thing stuck with me more than anything else was how partners like GCC nations and Jeff Bezos who courted the administration were bilked. This didn’t seem to be out of malice but incompetence and ineptitude.

Finally in a time of a thin skinned administration taking action against its critics, it’s a wonder Haberman and Swan haven’t been embroiled in legal disputes.

Things I have been inspired by.

I was thinking a lot about the rise of betting culture, from the rise of Robinhood and crypto wallets or prediction markets to ‘trading courses’ promoted extensively across social media. IPSOS encapsulates the why elegantly with its trend of Nouveau Nihilism. It becomes a rational response to constrained circumstances.

Luxury brand CHANEL has been doing some interesting fireside chats in their CHANEL Connects project. I was particularly interested in their interview with Thomas Bangalter. He framed Daft Punk in terms of an experiment in anonymity. They were initially inspired by Detroit’s Underground Resistance but that evolved into cinematic science fiction.

Bangalter’s critiqued streaming media as eroding the ritualistic and symbolic power of listening space. Bangalter avoided generative AI because it reduces art to verbal prompting and pre-calculated outputs. He considered creation as an intuitive, non-verbal journey; bypassing the process misses the entire point of art. More from Bangalter here.

Chart of the month.

Growing up we were a family who read. My Mum was the first person to sit the Irish leaving certificate and civil service examinations in her family. My Dad, left school at 13 to serve an apprenticeship, but had a love of books. One of the books we had was an account of The Kennedy Family by Joseph Dinneen.

In the book there is one section where Joseph Kennedy Sr talks about the inciting incident that encouraged him to sell all his shares. Kennedy goes to get his shoes shined near his office. The boy shining his shoes immediately took him for an investor and began offering specific stock picks and market tips.

Kennedy then realised if a shoeshine boy knows as much about the market as he did, then it was time for him to sell up. Kennedy goes back to his office, closes out his portfolio and starts to short the market in advance of Black Thursday. How true the story was is a whole other story, but the ‘late’ buyer market theory underpinning it is sound enough. When those with the least disposable income are highly leveraged in the market, it means that the pool of ‘new buyers’ no longer exists to push prices higher.

Thinking about Joseph Kennedy’s story I dived into how Americans hold wealth. On the face of it Kennedy’s rule doesn’t seem to be coming through at the moment. However there might be several other factors:
- The massive appreciation in house prices.
- The hollowing out of the middle class wealth.
- Wealthy people make dumb money mistakes too (Bernie Madoff, Situational Awareness LP, Bear Stearns and Neil Woodford’s funds).
Things I have watched.

Many people of heard of Akira, which was originally a manga and then an anime film written and directed by Katsushiro Otomo. Later on Otomo wrote and designed Roujin Z that was directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Roujin Z on the surface of it is social satire that addresses concerns about caring for the elderly population in the early 21st century, there are concerns about technology and the possibility of a resurgent military being authoritarianism.

The film taps into the phenomenon of social hospitalisation for the elderly where their families would sign them away to hospitals once they were admitted and refused to take them back. This happened because care homes carried a stigma that hospitals didn’t. This stigma came from the post-war collapse of the le system, where the eldest son and his wife lived with his elderly parents taking care of them to the end.

Stylistically, Roujin Z is interesting for its use of mixed media techniques including live film and photo-reference photogrammetry layout. This was part of a stylistic movement in anime called 90s realism. It includes Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Patlabor 2: The Movie and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade.

Watching it 35 years after the film was produced was interesting in terms of the foreshadowing within the film.
- At the time Sony was secretly designing the Apple PowerBook 100 for Apple. Its design appears in the film with a Sony logo. The film launched in cinemas at least a month before Apple launched the laptop.
- Sony appears all over the film and throughout the hospital equipment. It foreshadows Sony’s pivot into elderly care and its abandonment of its iconic consumer electronics business.
- The film shows a ubiquitous, always-on network with messaging and what we’d now call artificial intelligence. This was way before the web was commonplace.
The film matches all these heavy themes with great physical comedy.

Useful tools.

Copynpaste is a single purpose website that acts as an intermediary moving copy between applications. It’s more of a lifesaver than you realise and works just as well on mobile devices as it does on desktop.

Googler is a cleaner way of experiencing search. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and people came into work hungover, Google was separated from search rivals like Infoseek, Excite and AltaVista by its clean interface. Now you have lots of things on a search engine results page fighting for your attention. If you install Homebrew on your computer, you can then install Googler which gives you the Google search experience without distractions in your terminal window.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”. The kind where complexity, business goals, and human culture collide, requiring synthesis into actionable insights.

I have a decade-plus of expertise across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I have been embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots with the rapid rise of Gen AI. Following the completion of this engagement, I have continued to partner with agencies and founders on high-impact projects. My recent freelance work includes architecting the brand narrative for a fast-moving startup, driving strategic creative for new business pitches, and developing a dynamic sports partnership activation.

I focus on what works: balancing long-term brand growth with short-term sales. I don’t just write presentation decks; I build campaigns that actually ship. I’m hired to develop, or strategy QA their ideas before they go live, helping leadership teams avoid expensive mistakes. I prioritise commercial reality, smart budgets, and measurable results over cosmetic solutions.

How I help leadership teams:
- Strategy QA: I put clarity into complex roadmaps before you commit capital.
- Cultural Translation: I bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and human adoption, across EMEA/JAPAC.
- Commercial Grounding: I build strategy for campaigns that ship, prioritising measurable ROI over “hype” metrics.
The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Modular Strategic Leadership: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am an operator who reads—using a deep archive of industry expertise to ensure your next pivot isn’t just “new,” but actually sustainable. If you have a challenge that requires an all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my August 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the well deserved bank holiday.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
August 27, 2026
2026 media diary
The 2026 media diary post is an update and a reflection on past posts that I have written in the same vein. The first one was inspired by a request that Stephen Waddington put out in 2015.

I wrote the next iteration during CoVID. I was working from home in a role where it was getting hard for me to continue to add value. I had done much of the building capability I had been brought in to do and the business was in stasis following a purchase by a larger firm. I finished up at the business and moved to do strategy for the global launch of Wegovy.

My 2026 media diary evolved.

Messaging mayhem

I still rely on various messaging platforms. At the moment its:
- Google Meet
- KakaoTalk
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- WeChat
- WhatsApp
Thankfully I only use Zoom for the occasional webinar call now. I switched companies during lockdown and moving from working on Zoom, to working on Teams was a huge improvement in cognitive load.

Zoom has migrated for lots of organisations from a video chat platform to a video broadcast platform.

Skype was finally killed off by Microsoft, though the writing was on the wall long ago, due to poor product management. Any recommendations for a better VoIP client to deal with calling US businesses gratefully received. Skype had its niche and it is missed for it.

The most notable update to my 2026 media diary is what’s missing. I no longer use Netflix. Instead, I save the subscription fee and buy DVDs and Blu-rays of films that I actually want to watch.

Apple TV’s smaller collection of high quality series has more appeal as does some of Amazon Prime Video’s tentpole productions.

The media remains the same

I have been a subscriber of the US edition of Wired magazine. Back then it worked because I had a lot of technology clients, for a long time I had no technology clients and then I did two engagements: Google Cloud and Arm Semiconductor.

The Financial Times is the best in a rather poor landscape of newspapers. Yet it sill proves surprisingly handy.

I still love Monocle and Japanese style magazine HailMary.

RTÉ is still a connection to home. In my 2026 media diary I rely even more heavily on podcasts rather than the BBC. My podcast tastes tend to run professional, current affairs analysis or financial news including:
- Asia Geopolitics by The Diplomat
- Asia Stream by Nikkei Asia
- Independent Thinking by Chatham House
- KBS World Radio News
- English News – NHK World Radio Japan
A brace of podcasts by Bloomberg, CNBC, CSIS, the FT, Monocle and Reuters. I still keep an eye on the best part of 1,100 online information sources using Newsblur.

Social disengagement

While I will occasionally log on to Twitter (I resolutely refuse to call it X) to browse the lists that I have curated on the platform for certain subjects such as China analysis, my use of micro-blogs in general has decreased massively. My posts on Instagram are occasional too.

I still use LinkedIn for work and have a couple of dark social communities across Slack and WhatsApp that I check in on daily. I am now a member of a WhatsApp group for the people living in my block of houses.

Brands that cut through

It has been fascinating to watch ASOS’ pivot to attempt brand building. While the cost cutting has taken the headlines, and the gross merchandise value continued to decline, consumers are at least taking a look at the platform again. Secondly, they have managed to reduce their reliance on discounts.

I wish that they would double down on their brand building efforts through, creative like this needs time to burn in.

I have a strangely deja vu relationship with brands at the moment, direct to consumer brands like Suri or Tallow + Ash advertising remind me a lot of the JML screens in Wilko and Woolworths, slavishly copying the show-and-sell concept. Other brands like Gymshark feel very similar to QVC and IdeaStore. Brands have managed to partner with creators to extend shopping TV onto YouTube. They have built mental availability in the must-avoid category inside my head.

Quality still counts. My wardrobe changed a bit since my last media diary. If you told my 2020 or 2015 media diary self that I would have had Nike ACG and Patagonia in my wardrobe I would have been surprised. My 2026 wardrobe now has Patagonia high loft fleeces and Nike ACG Goretex shells, the reason was quite simple. Nike and Patagonia were just building them better. I had a zip, not the zipper, but the zip come off my North Face jacket in my hand. Any North Face item I now own is well over ten years old. I still like Carhartt but wear more Gramicci climbing pants for comfort.

Finally, I have been disappointed by Sony’s retreat from consumer electronics, it felt like a personal betrayal. Sony’s self-described purpose is ‘fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology’ yet it dropped consumer electronics and hi-fi components for Sony old peoples homes and life insurance.

Previous editions of my media diary

2020 media diary – the CoVID pivot back to desktop.

2015 media diary – at the time I was on the cusp of living a post-PC life. My Mac was only really used for content creation.
August 17, 2026
William Gibson + more things
William Gibson

I have been thinking a lot about William Gibson recently. Judging by my social feeds, the Neo Tokyo aesthetic has saturated mainstream culture (from 90s anime clips, tech wear, creator built cyber decks and Hong Kong at night) and our Silicon Valley elites sound more like Wintermute at every turn.

The K-shaped economy described by Gary Stevenson in his thesis, feels very much like the have-nots of the sprawl trilogy.

Finally, Apple is on the cusp of releasing a TV adaptation of Gibson’s first novel Neuromancer next year. So I had to post these vintage videos of Gibson as they feel so ‘now’ despite being decades old.

William Gibson talking about cyberpunk as a genre in 1990. He calls a distinctively post-modern fiction genre. In a prophetic turn they talk about the unique way in which cyberpunk has been manifested into the real world; just not in the countercultural way that Gibson envisaged. Although the relationship now between Gibson’s work and the real world are probably too close for comfort. And there is a great interview with Timothy Leary.

Related to that was the cypherpunk movement who realised that cryptography was essential to online worlds.

Cypherpunks were concerned about the government a quarter century before the Edward Snowden leaks and the algorithmic web with a web of data for sale to advertisers and bad actors.

And in this clip, William Gibson contextualises the early web in this interview

Business

The Technology Industry Is Stumbling Down The Path To Becoming A Proper Supply Chain | Forrester – I think is a polite way of saying that the industry has moved from growth to value investment. Whether the industry has a maturity in thinking that reflects this new position is something else.

China

Spain’s largest Chinese investment to rely on workers from China | Investment Monitor – very similar to the belt-and-road model elsewhere. Interesting the lack of pushback that came from Spain, given the size of the country’s construction industry.

Design

30 Years of Micro Motors to Robot Dexterous Hands: MINDSYNC TECH and Jiangsu Leili Solve the Mechanical Stiffness Problem in Humanoid Gripping – interesting article in Pandaily. It’s basically smaller sizes of strain wave gears. Back when I went to the launch of Automata’s EVA robotic arm launch, strain wave gears came up as a topic of conversation. Robotic precision focused on software because only standardised strain wave gears were available from a limited amount of suppliers like Harmonic Drive. The Chinese seem to have sidestepped this innovation pinch point with powered strain wave gears small enough to operate a robotic hand with a high degree of dexterity.

Gadgets

Open Source Vacuum Avoids Cloud | Hackaday – thanks to open source software, a Raspberry Pi board, off the shelf parts and accessible additive manufacturing there is now an open source Roomba style vacuum cleaner.

ŌURA and LillyDirect to Expand Support for People Using GLP-1 Therapies with New Tools and Savings Options – The Pulse Blog – I was there when wearables were proposed as a digital kit to another obesity management product years before this deal was announced. I am surprised that it took so long. The partner selection implies a heavy female bias to the expected customer base.

ChinAI #366: Most Companion Robots Die by Day 30 – model capabilities will become increasingly cheap, while scenario-specific evaluation datasets will become increasingly expensive. Most companion products will not die because their AI models lack power, but because users stop opening the app by Day 30.

Germany

Watching China in Europe – August 2026 – by Noah Barkin – Volkswagen is now pursuing a strategy that consists of:
- Doubling down on manufacturing at its EV hub in Hefei, China as part of what Blume describes as an “in China for China” approach.
- Exporting the cars it produces in China, in Blume’s own words, to Southeast Asia, Australia, India, South America, Africa and Europe, in what looks more like an “in China for the world” strategy (minus the US market).
- Pursuing mass layoffs in Germany, while luring Chinese carmakers into the German factories that Volkswagen is struggling to sustain.
- Urging the EU to accelerate and broaden its trade defense measures against Chinese competitors that are seizing market share for plug-in hybrids at an astonishing rate.
If your head is spinning, you are not alone …

Ideas

FCC approves orbital space mirrors, first test satellites will launch this year — large spacecraft reflects sunlight to Earth’s surface for construction sites, search-and-rescue lighting, and more | Tom’s Hardware

Indonesia

Indonesia’s 9 Dragons. Who Are They? Are They Too Rich For Indonesia’s Good? | Dr Wealth

Innovation

Why the US is losing Chinese AI stars | FT – comparable opportunities at home.

Russia’s Newest Kh-101 Cruise Missile Upgrade Points to Chinese Help | Wes O’Donnell – the recent upgrade to Russia’s Kh-101 missile capabilities owes far less to stolen Western secrets than it does to Chinese industrial hardware. Whilst espionage may have ironed out a few technical creases, Russia is quietly acquiring the machine tools and microelectronics from Chinese suppliers. These are needed to turn a dormant Soviet-era innovation into a mass-produced reality.

The rationale for putting such high-spec, durable components like single-crystal engine blades into a single-use weapon comes down to a recent design trade-off. Having substantially increased the missile’s warhead size at the expense of its fuel capacity, Russian engineers required a hotter, vastly more efficient engine to recoup the lost flight range. Manufacturing equipment sourced from Chinese vendors provided the industrial “kitchen” necessary to make this crucial engineering workaround a reality.

Porous material could pull 1.8 liters of drinking water daily from dry air | TechXplore

IP

The 6 wildest claims in Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI | The Verge – OpenAI allegedly “coached” Apple employees on how to bypass security measures. Apple alleged Tan kept an internal document that outlines employee off-boarding procedures. OpenAI allegedly used this information to warn employees coming from Apple about the company’s security checks and “coached” them on how to avoid it.

OpenAI advised departing Apple workers not to disclose their new employer and also offered tips on how to avoid a “dreaded walk out,” which would result in their immediate removal from the company, preventing them from accessing Apple’s systems for a standard two weeks, the lawsuit alleges. OpenAI is accused of telling Apple employees not to “sign anything at the exit interview,” and if they’re asked to sign a document, to tell OpenAI “asap.”

In the lawsuit, Apple says that OpenAI’s alleged tactics “appear to be having their desired effect.” Apple claims it has noticed “a recent trend of employees who are leaving Apple for OpenAI and taking steps to evade security measures,” including workers “ignoring outreach by security personnel to schedule exit processes and security reviews.”

Luxury

Why luxury brands are falling for Asia’s queer romance shows | FT

Rolex accused of hiring ‘crowds’ for Shanghai centenary exhibition | Reddit r/Watches – the use of gig workers to bulk up footfall numbers is unfortunate but understandable. It’s not a great look. They may have not have been hitting footfall numbers.

Secondly there is a need in Chinese culture for events to be bustling with people. I remember going to the China South City wholesale mall in the Shenzhen region. Some of the car park was converted into basketball courts so that there would be the sound of people there, even if they were having fun rather than purchasing supplies for their business.

The problem for Rolex got much worse when this story breached beyond the Chinese internet into the feeds of western watch enthusiasts.

Security

OpenAI admits AI ‘agent’ caused major cyber breach by itself | FT – I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a certain amount of PR behind this story.

Royal Navy Drops a Drone Boat Out of a Plane | Maritime Executive – this feels like an important step towards more autonomous warfare, particularly in rapid expeditionary deployment.

German firm files for insolvency, blames cybercrims who shut down production for 6 weeks | The Register

UK, EU officially pin Poland energy cyberattack on Russia | The Register

Space Force officially has its own weapon for taking out satellites | Task & Purpose

Five Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into Larry Ellison’s A.I. Gamble – The New York Times – The United States had one major advantage in the A.I. race: China lagged behind in computer chip technology. The Biden administration cut off Chinese access to American-made chips, but China could still obtain computing power remotely through other countries.

In 2024, Oracle made a $6.5 billion deal to build an data centre complex in Malaysia from which it could supply computing power to ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, and other foreign companies. Oracle’s facility in Malaysia was soon on track to become the second-biggest in the world, providing by one estimate more than one-fifth of China’s total A.I. computing power. Ellison is now powering the A.I. ambitions of China aka America’s biggest geopolitical rival.

Cybersecurity expert Steve Sims discusses how hackers are now using AI.

Software

3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber | News from Google – but no Gemini 3.6 Pro yet.

Exclusive-Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China’s top AI models, sources say | Yahoo! Finance

Microsoft to axe 4,800 jobs as it resets Xbox | FT

Palantir CEO Alex Karp says ‘something has gone completely wrong’ with how AI is sold | CNBC – Palantir CEO Alex Karp caused a stir by discussing what he says is growing unhappiness among U.S. businesses about the costs to access models from the biggest AI companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic. And he asserted that those customers are getting “no value” from the technology.

Taiwan

China-friendly KMT stunts Taiwan’s attempt to grow into a fully formed hedgehog | The Strategist

Technology

Hyundai buys SoftBank’s Boston Dynamics stake for $325 million | Quartz – Hyundai is using the robots in its own operations from factories to construction sites. They are even being used in Posco’s steel foundries too.

RISC-V Is Inevitable, State of the Union Keynote Argues – EE Times

Axios AI+ |⛽ Trading compute – 1 big thing: Wall Street wants to trade AI compute like oil. This reminded me a lot of Enron’s doomed attempt to trade bandwidth in a similar way, which was the core offering of Enron Broadband Services.

Wireless

OnePlus, the ‘Flagship-Killer’ Smartphone Brand, Is All but Dead | WIRED – this surprised me given that Samsung has been on the ropes and OnePlus had such a good relationship with Qualcomm.
August 13, 2026
July 2026 – the three dozen edition
July 2026 introduction – (36)

Welcome to the 36th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘three dozen’. And yes that’s the most uninspired yet functional bingo lingo I’ve come across on this journey so far. 36 seemed strangely appropriate as that was the temperature inside my house on the celsius scale most days this month.

There is no fancy symbolism of the homophones in the Chinese language for 36. But The 36 Stratagems are sayings and tactical manoeuvres used in areas of Chinese life from business to politics.

My personal favourite is ‘borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul‘ – take something that has been forgotten or discarded and appropriate it for one’s own purposes.

This month’s soundtrack is by Horalion who created a divine mashup of Daft Punk and Miki Matsubara. Matsubara is famous for work in city pop and anime soundtracks. Together Something About Us and 真夜中のドア〜Stay with Me sound sublime.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things that I’ve written

I explored moral licensing from agency behaviour to a global health crisis.

Consumer grievance is coming as a steady drumbeat from consumer and economic research and has an impact on marketing.

I curated things of interest from around the web including an interview from Jensen Huang in advance of his publicly support for open models and open weight LLMs as cybersecurity tools.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Global brand strategy has got harder with tainted national brands. Europeans are now torn between the US and China.
2. Rolex’s use of chōngchǎng (paid gig workers) as a rent a crowd in Shanghai caught the attention of watch collectors around the world
3. Corporate earnings skewed agency growth targets due to the artificially high values of hyperscalers.
4. Hard luxury outperforms soft luxury
5. A video where Les Binet endorse Byron Sharp’s line on loyalty.
Books that I have read

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. Gnomon is a speculative fiction book set in the near future. The UK is totally surveilled by an AI. The main character Mielikki Neith is an investigator and is looking to the death of a suspect who dies in state custody. Neith explores the neural recordings of the dissident to try and work out what happened.

The recordings consist of four surreal impossible lives, but the lives are a form of hidden code designed to affect anyone exploring them. Questions then arise about the purpose of the surveillance system and whether it has undergone what could be called ‘model drift’.

It’s not the easiest book to read, but his rewarding as Harkaway takes you through the different worlds that Neith explores and her own experience in the real world.

This month I have been working my way through Dan Wang’s Breakneck. A book that looks at China’s development versus US development, written by a Chinese author who grew up in Canada. I am almost finished and it’s very readable.

The key thrust of the book is that China is a society governed by engineers and scientists, whereas the US (and by extension much of the west for that matter) is run by lawyers. In the US and the west that breaks down slightly but the point Wang makes is China asks what’s possible, the West winds its way through restrictions. I think modernism vs. post-modernism would have been more accurate short hand descriptors; as difference goes beyond government to the ‘industrial party’ and even science fiction like Liu Cixin’s TheThree-Body Problem.

Wang’s work has started to shape how I look about the ‘why’ behind the divergent approaches to LLMs and other products between the US and the west, but more on that another time.

Things I have been inspired by.

I am a long time fan of Kevin Kelly’s writing from his work with Wired magazine to the book What Technology Wants I have found his thinking right on the money. He reframes large language models as a latent space due to their massive compression of knowledge and information.

For instance it knows all Shakespeare plays, and it could create a new play that sounded exactly like Shakespeare, and can even quote famous lines in his plays, but nowhere in the model are the actual texts of Shakespeare. Instead there is simply the abstract information about all the plays, the plots, the characters, the words, the style, the references.

Until recently we might have thought that all the information about a thing would take up more storage space than the thing itself. That may be true for a single thing, but not for the aggregate of all things. That is because most things share a lot of common attributes with other things. The neural nets of an LLM do a magic trick by abstracting the information of everything at once, so that it uses the myriad common relationships between things and ideas to compress and abstract them into this virtual “latent” or hidden space.

Kelly reflects on this latent space as a new form of medium, implying more potential than a productivity hack. Kelly describes this latent space as a map built in millions of dimensions making it sound like science fiction or theoretical physics.

Gig Economy in China

Inspired is the wrong word, but I was surprised and shocked to find out by a piece from Think China that 44% of the country’s workforce now work in the gig economy.

Chart of the month.

McKinsey have published a paper on Agents, robots, and us: How AI reshapes work and skills in Europe. In it, they have estimated what tasks LLMs will do well.

“Most human skills will endure, even as they are applied differently. Three-quarters of the skills sought by European employers today, including problem solving, writing, and research, are used in both automatable and non-automatable work. This overlap means they are more likely to be applied in collaboration with AI than replaced by it, at least in the near term.”

Things I have watched.

German TV series Where’s Wanda made some light watching as a Germany family manages to stay together while searching for their missing daughter. It’s got humour, creative problem solving and a giant Sasquatch-type creature. I will leave it there so I don’t give away any spoilers.

I rewatched To Live and Die in LA for the first time in years. The film was written and directed by William Friedkin, and second only to The French Connection in his filmography of outstanding films. William Friedkin was part of the New Hollywood movement, alongside figures like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Bogdanovich.

The screenplay was based on a book by a former Secret Service agent and documents an investigation into a talented counterfeiter. Like Michael Mann’s Thief which demonstrated how to crack a safe vault with a thermic lance, Friedkin went into detail abut the photolithographic process that counterfeiters used prior to desktop publishing. You get fantastic performances from an edgy young William Defoe and William Petersen.

I found it as enjoyable to watch as I remember but I picked up on different things, particularly the detail in Friedkin’s introduction that showed the art and grim edginess of 1980s Los Angeles with retina-burning typography, with an interesting use of fonts to give ‘place’ and the cinematography which made the city a key character.

Useful tools.

Ever done research, or tried to pull in data from a website or table and had the format go funny. You then spend an inordinate amount of time fixing it? That’s where TextSoap comes in. Its a Mac app that cleans the data that you are bringing across, It has a number of built-in cleaners or you to choice from and also allows you to create your own one using its cleaner editor.

Hookmark cleans up weblinks, this helps with bit rot since a lot of links add additional privacy related information that stops working over time.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”. The kind where complexity, business goals, and human culture collide, requiring synthesis into actionable insights.

I have a decade-plus of expertise across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I have been embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots with the rapid rise of Gen AI. Following the completion of this engagement, I have continued to partner with agencies and founders on high-impact projects. My recent freelance work includes architecting the brand narrative for a fast-moving startup, driving strategic creative for new business pitches, and developing a dynamic sports partnership activation.

I focus on what works: balancing long-term brand growth with short-term sales. I don’t just write presentation decks; I build campaigns that actually ship. I’m hired to pressure-test their ideas before they go live, helping leadership teams avoid expensive mistakes. I prioritise commercial reality, smart budgets, and measurable results over cosmetic solutions.

How I help leadership teams:
- Pressure-Testing: I put clarity into complex roadmaps before you commit capital.
- Cultural Translation: I bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and human adoption, across EMEA/JAPAC.
- Commercial Grounding: I build strategy for campaigns that ship, prioritising measurable ROI over “hype” metrics.
The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Expertise: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am an operator who reads—using a deep archive of industry expertise to ensure your next pivot isn’t just “new,” but actually sustainable. If you have a challenge that requires an all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my July 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the sun when you can. We have less than one month to wait until the next bank holiday.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.

PS: Why Buzz Aldrin as this month’s picture? I try and have a photo that matches the theme, in this case 36. This photo taken during the Apollo 11 mission was from the film magazine 36/N – Trans-Lunar. A tenuous but cool link.
July 29, 2026