After a two month hiatus due to fun shenanigans onchain, I finally dusted off the woodchipper again and max longed ETH plus some hype, all on the timeline for max funnage with the thesis: ball tingling. I now locked away that Imac not to overclick button. Will throw away keys and use an axe to retrieve end of cycle. New one should be here in 48 hours so all good. Wish I was kidding.

NEW APPLE DEVICE INCOMING Apple $AAPL is about to make a bigger push into the home device market with the launch of a new smart-home hub on October 13th. The device recognizes who's approaching and pulls up that person's contacts, messages, and calendar automatically, using voice or facial recognition, with an iPhone as backup. The standard version has a large display on a half-dome base, styled like the 2002 iMac G4. A second version, J491, mounts flat on a wall. It's the showcase device for Apple's long-delayed Siri AI assistant, and it can control smart-home devices, handle video calls, and pull up recipes hands-free in the kitchen. Two more are already in development: a privacy-focused home sensor that detects which room you're in without recording video, and a bigger 9-inch hub on a robotic arm that swivels 360 degrees. (Source Bloomberg)

Why were the early keyboards from the 1970s-1990s “boring beige? Early computer keyboards weren’t beige because folks lacked imagination. They were beige because a strict German workplace safety rule effectively outlawed pure black and pure white. In the late 1970s and 1980s, computers were still serious business machines—descendants of typewriters and adding machines that were expected to disappear into the office background. Germany, a major market and an early leader in workplace ergonomics, took that expectation and turned it into regulation. The Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) and related safety rules (notably around DIN 66234 and the 1980 ZH 1/618 guidelines for visual display terminals) set tight limits on how office equipment could look and reflect light. The core worry was eye strain. Office workers spent their days shifting focus between bright white paper and the machines in front of them under harsh fluorescent lights. A pure black keyboard created extreme contrast: every glance from paper to keys forced the pupils to dilate and contract like a camera aperture working overtime. Pure white equipment created the opposite problem—blinding glare that bounced straight into the eyes. The approved solution was a muted, low-contrast middle ground: beige or light gray with a matte finish. Reflectance had to stay in a narrow band neither too dark nor too bright so the eyes could rest. Because companies like IBM and Apple wanted to sell the same hardware worldwide, it was far cheaper to design one compliant beige keyboard than to tool up separate color versions for different markets. Europe’s rules effectively set the global palette. Beige also happened to be a manufacturing gift: the plastic was inexpensive to produce in off-white shades, and the color forgave dust, fingerprints, skin oils, and the inevitable scrapes of daily office life that would have looked catastrophic on black. That compromise held for nearly two decades. Then the late 1990s arrived. Computers stopped being purely office tools and became home appliances. The paperless office began to feel less theoretical. Manufacturers finally broke free of the old standards, unleashing the candy-colored translucent plastics of the original iMac G3 and, eventually, the silver and black machines that dominate today. Yet many RGB lit keyboards cause the very eye strain as the DIN rules tried to stop. So the next time you see an old putty-colored keyboard, remember: it wasn’t a failure of style. It was the visible result of German engineers trying to spare the eyes of a generation of office workers and the rest of the computing world simply followed along. This is by far the best keyboard ever over engineered and manufactured. The buckling spring IBM Model F (yes it beats the Model M).

In September 1997, Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy, the stock was at $3.30, and Michael Dell had publicly said the company should be shut down and the money returned to shareholders. Steve Jobs had been back for 8 weeks. No title. No salary. Technically just an advisor. He walked on stage that month, slept three hours the night before and gave a 16-minute speech that almost nobody has watched. It is the speech that saved Apple. He did not show a product. He did not show a chip. He did not show a roadmap. He spoke about one idea. Marketing is about values. Not features. Not specs. Not megahertz. He said the world had become so noisy that no company on Earth was going to get a chance to tell people more than one thing about itself. So you had to be very clear about what that one thing was. Then he said the line almost nobody quotes from that morning. Even a great brand needs investment and caring if it is going to retain its relevance and vitality. The Apple brand had clearly suffered from neglect. He admitted on stage, to his own employees, that the company they worked for had stopped caring about the thing that made it matter. Then he ran the ad. Here is to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. When the tape stopped, the room was silent for a few seconds. Then they stood up. The thing he did next is what most people miss when they tell this story. He had personally called Yoko Ono to get permission to use John Lennon. He had called the estates of Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, Edison, Amelia Earhart, Martin Luther King. Almost none of them had ever appeared in an advertisement before. Almost all of them said yes to Apple specifically, when they had said no to everyone else who had ever asked. He said on stage that morning that he did not think any other company on Earth could have run that campaign. He was probably right. The campaign broke on Sunday night during the network premiere of Toy Story on ABC. The ad ran twice. Print followed in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today. Billboards went up in five cities. Buses with Rosa Parks' face on them started driving through Manhattan. Apple did not announce a new computer that quarter. They announced who they were. 18 months later they shipped the iMac. 3 years later the iPod. 6 years later the iTunes Store. 10 years later the iPhone. The most valuable company in the history of capitalism was rebuilt on a 16-minute talk where the founder did not show a single product. Everyone quotes the Stanford commencement speech from 2005. The one about staying hungry and staying foolish. That one made him a philosopher. The 1997 speech is the one where he saved the company. He told his employees the company had lost its soul. He told them what the soul was. He told them they were going to spend a fortune reminding the world. Then he walked off stage and went to work. The difference between a company that dies and a company that becomes the most important company in the world is sometimes one person, on three hours of sleep, willing to stand in front of his own team and say we forgot who we are. The crazy ones changed things because somebody believed they could. That somebody was him.