Speaking of Sam Altman, this week also saw the debut of the trailer for Challengers director Luca Guadagnino's new film Artificial, in which Andrew Garfield plays Altman during those few weeks in 2023 when he got fired. And speaking of movies about tech CEOs, the internet has been having lots of fun with the surprise trailer drop for Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything, a documentary about & starring disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes filmed in the days before she went to prison.
Anyway, to quote my own social media, Happy Foldable iPhone Announcement Day Week to those who celebrate. Once upon a time, I'd have spent at least 1,000 words here or on my personal site deeply analyzing the latest stuff from Apple. Instead, here's my short, sweet take:
The foldable looks amazing, but it costs more than a fully loaded MacBook Air
The new iPhone 18 Pro is a nicer camera than my Fuji X100VI
I'll be pre-ordering an iPhone 18 Pro
Sanity is so hot right now
Regrettably, I'm not talking about the condition of having a healthy, reasonable mind, but rather the headless CMS platform. This week I attended their 2nd annual developer conference at Brooklyn's Pioneer Works, hearing about the latest new platform features, how tech and marketing execs at some of the fastest-growing companies are using AI to accelerate making stuff, and chatting with fellow content nerds about our favorite database.
Paul Ford gave the opening keynote, offering a historical view on how technology has shaped communication and creativity, and ending with a rally cry to get and stay in touch with craft even as AI cuts the cost of producing stuff to near zero.
Aboard founder/CEO, author, and Git for Humans back cover blurb-er Paul Ford, speaking at Sanity's Everything NYC 2026 event about craft in the AI era
The conference comes at a very interesting moment for web development and CMSes in general, and for Sanity in particular. In 2026, the market for freelance/small-agency scale web projects has been really, really tough.
Marketers who used to hire a Webflow/Framer developer or studio building sites themselves with the help of AI, and all the business that used to go to traditional WordPress dev shops instead going to — yes, yes! — Astro and Sanity, with some of this uptick in interest showing up in just the last few weeks.
Sanity's new product launches were, like many of their other launches, mostly new primitives for building content systems. For example, there's now a first-party Workflows feature (previously you had to build it yourself or use plugins), as well as a closed beta for content variants, allowing you to serve up different versions of the same content to different audiences without having to keep track of lots of different documents in your CMS.
The most interesting announcements were features to extract structured data and intelligence from your content without you having to put in a bunch of work. Knowledge Bases are auto-generated, auto-updated indexes to facts and details in your content, which you and AI agents can use to keep things correct and surface key details that might otherwise be buried in one random blog post. Resonance, demoed yesterday and coming to beta later on, is an AI feature that reads and audits your content, toward being able to tell you whether or not your content is effective and on voice.
I'm still trying to find the time to play with the new stuff, but will definitely share more impressions here, on our blog, and on LinkedIn.
And, in a few weeks, I'll be in SF for OpenAI DevDay
If you're gonna be at either of these, find me and say hi.
Links worth reading
💅 Design Field Notes: Limit the number of details — Lightspark is a fintech offering an "API for money." (I know, I know—another one?) But their design team, led by legend Geoff Teehan, has published a guidebook to their favorite design principles, complete with interactivity and sound, and this article about Jobs/Rams-style minimalism in practice does an excellent job of explaining the value and thinking that go into focusing on the right details.
🌚 Dark mode toggles, continued — Lea Verou continues her one-woman war on dark mode toggles. She had previously said dark mode switches, i.e. in a website's header or footer, should not have a "system" option alongside light and dark, and should just have the two modes. In part two, she explores whether it's worth having mode controls at all.
🏡 I dream of quieter computing — In a brief, lyrical post, Henry Desroches pines for "a forested internet, an imagined one of searching and finding, of patient and aimless wandering."
🤖 Four questions about AGI — Roberto Pieraccini reflects upon and examines the squishy meta-super-intelligence concept that's supposedly motivating the trillion-dollar AI build-out.
(The author wrote all this before this week's total mess where an Anthropic scientist resigned in protest over the big AI labs' pursuit of "superintelligence" that "could kill us all," which turned out to be fishy — the poster had only been at Anthropic for a few weeks, and this latest "Skynet by 2030" story seemed like an astroturfed campaign either for or against stronger AI regulation, depending on who you talk to. This stuff is nuts and I am tired.)
🗞️ Why people quit blogging — A surprisingly thorough investigation of the content-marketing zombie plague that consumed the blogosphere of old, as well as some practical tips for folks who still want to express themselves online without feeling pressure to make a business of it.