🫒 Like an extra virgin

You might assume “sherlocking” means using deductive reasoning skills, and that’d probably be true most of the time — but when it comes to Apple, in particular, that’s not the case.

Sherlocking is when Apple introduces a new feature that renders a third-party tool irrelevant.

How it started

Mac OS 8 and 9’s Sherlock feature could search for content on a user’s computer, but with OS X, it could also pull info from the internet using plug-ins, per How-To Geek.

In 2001, developer Dan Wood made Watson, a complementary $30 app that expanded what Sherlock could pull — movie showtimes, exchange rates, weather reports, and more.

But when Apple unveiled Mac OS X 10.2, Sherlock could do nearly everything Watson could. Wood claims Steve Jobs himself called, comparing devs like Wood to someone pumping a handcar along railroad tracks — tracks Apple owned.

From that point on…

… Apple upending a third-party tool has been known as “sherlocking.” Other examples:

• Apple’s Pay Later, a potential replacement for services like Klarna
• Medication and sleep-tracking tools, sherlocking… a whole bunch of apps, actually
• Sidecar, which sets up iPads as second monitors, upsetting Duet Display and Luna Display

Apple isn’t alone in this, and the term has been used when other large companies do it — like when Google dropped a volume mixer akin to EarTrumpet.

In some cases…

… new features may simply be the natural progression of a company’s offerings.

Yet many smaller companies, including Luna Display maker Astropad and multiple health-monitoring companies, say Apple took meetings with them first or, worse, poached employees or tried to invalidate their patents.

Apple is frequently under antitrust scrutiny from regulators worldwide. In the US:

• The DOJ is investigating if Apple favors its own products (e.g., AirTags over Tile).
• Sherlocking came up in a 2021 Senate hearing. Apple’s chief compliance officer Kyle Andeer said it wasn’t copying or killing apps, but offering “a new choice and… innovation.”

But what will regulators say?

BTW: Astropad published some tips for sherlocked companies.

If you’re an aglio e olio fan or have a soft spot for, uh, bottle design, this story may make you sizzle in your seat.

Data from the International Monetary Fund shows the global price per metric ton of olive oil closing in on $6k, its highest point since 1997.

To blame? In part, high temps and drought squeezing supply throughout the western Mediterranean, per Quartz.

• Spain, which usually pumps out 1m+ tons annually, has been hit particularly hard, with last year’s yield down 50%.
• Production in Italy, which had its worst drought in decades in 2022, is down ~37% this year.

Thankfully, it’s not all a pit of despair: Production in Greece is looking up and nearly doubled in Turkey in 2022, with exports on track to triple in 2023.

A pour decision?

The CEO of olive-oil-in-squeeze-bottle startup Graza recently went viral for a LinkedIn post calling out a “copycat” product: an oil meant for pizza that… also uses a squeeze bottle.

The post caused quite the stir in the comments section. “With all due respect, you did not create the squeeze bottle,” the founder of Haven’s Kitchen noted.

Hours later, Graza’s CEO returned with an apology, bringing to an end what will hopefully be enough olive oil startup drama to last us for the next 100 years.

Oil be damned! All this comes as Italy’s government conducts crisis talks over Italian pasta prices, which were up 16.5% YoY in April, more than 2x the country’s broader inflation rate.

Digital media in the 2010s was an absolute mess, yet it was (weirdly) defined by optimism — that print’s demise would free up future-facing investments, that social media would be a favorable partner.

That the next great sustainable business model would take shape and save the newsrooms living on the razor’s edge.

It sure didn’t…

… and so we are here, at a rolling funeral:

• So far this year, layoffs have hit the likes of Vox Media, NPR, The Washington Post, Insider, News Corp., and far more.
• The Grim Reaper has come for Gawker (again), BuzzFeed News, “Vice News Tonight,” and MTV News, among many others.

Any publications you know and love not listed above? Assume they’ve suffered, too.

• Perhaps just kneecapped in more subtle ways — editorial leaders pushed out, roles never backfilled, budgets that slice benefits or freelancers (or all of the above).
• Or perhaps they’re soon to join Vice Media in bankruptcy; the company turned to Chapter 11 yesterday.

It’s quite the downfall — just six years ago, Vice lived atop the media world, swaggering to a peak valuation of $5.7B.

Where did it all go wrong?

Journalist Simon Owens pinpoints a stealthy reason why everything came apart: many once-proud digital media giants devalued their own ad inventory.

• Embracing a programmatic ad model that “decoupled the reader from the publication they’re reading,” Owens argues, made it stop mattering if ads were served alongside quality journalism; just that marketers reached their target demographics.
• Thoughtful, brand-building content (often costly to produce) fell out of favor; quantity and clickbait won the day.

To deliver those ads, media orgs bet on social media companies being cool with sending the masses away from their own platforms.

As it turns out — nope, they weren’t cool with that.