By John Moltz

March 17, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: The Lasso Cinematic Universe

AI continues to be a lot more A than I this week as Apple expands its manufacturing outside of China, and we enjoy the return of everyone’s favorite mustachioed man, Ted Lasso.

An AI walks into a bar…

AI is all the rage these days, despite it kinda not working all that great.

For my money, none of these technologies will be ready to ship until they pass the Friedman/Fridman test. You may be familiar with Lex Friedman, the co-host of The Rebound, host of Your Daily Lex, former writer for Macworld, and, most importantly, author of The Snuggie Sutra. He’s quite famous, very handsome, and has not one but two custom-made suits. Lex Fridman is some other guy.

But every AI in the world insists Lex is Lex, probably because enough people on the internet have misspelled “Fridman” as “Friedman,” and this is “artificial” intelligence, after all. Of course the answers are going to be made up. It’s right there in the name.

Microsoft’s Bing AI is no exception. When I asked it “Who is Lex Friedman?” it replied with Fridman’s details. When I told it they were two separate people, it admitted its mistake but told me Lex Friedman was a former editor at large for Wired (he is not) and the host of the “Lex Fridman Podcast.”

Wha? Huh? I just told you that wasn’t… arrgh. It’s like you’re not even listening, Bing.

All this wrongness, of course, has not stopped Microsoft from putting its AI into more products.

“Microsoft announces Copilot: the AI-powered future of Office documents”

It also hasn’t stopped the company from laying off its ethics and society team for AI. Very cool. Your AI so far has been belligerent, creepy, and flat-out wrong on any number of fairly obvious details. Anyone looking at the ethical and social impacts of continuing to roll this out would probably only tell you “OH, GOD, STOP!” And that would prevent you from being able to say “First!”

Total buzzkill.

Meanwhile, Apple is reportedly now also experimenting with AI-related features, but at a level that is more appropriate for a technology that continues to not be able to determine who is dead and who is alive. The company has rolled new natural language generating features into the latest tvOS beta, but only for one particular purpose.

As it currently stands, Apple is only using natural language generation for telling jokes with Siri on Apple TV.

Based on my experience with AI, that sounds about perfect. Because almost every time I do a query to an AI, the results make me laugh.

Navigating around troubled waters

As part of the company’s ongoing effort to reduce its sometimes problematic dependence on China, Apple is again expanding its presence in India. For the first time, AirPods will be manufactured in India at a new $200 million Foxconn factory. Just last year, Apple’s usually well-oiled pipeline was disrupted by riots in Zhengzhou after authorities placed workers under an extreme lockdown due to COVID concerns. It’s like having a tanker stuck in a canal, if the tanker was overworked and angry iPhone assemblers and the canal was a Chinese town that was being lit on fire.

Hey, if you think that analogy is tortured, you should see the working conditions.

Of course, this is not an easy transition. Apple currently produces more than 90 percent of iPhones in China and this is only expected to fall to 75 percent by 2025. As someone who has tried unsuccessfully to wean himself off of using Amazon as his default shopping destination, I can’t really blame Apple.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Or let it be a worker who’s been locked in a company dorm for too long. Because, ugh.

Spoiler alert

Saved this story for last because, SPOILER ALERT, we’re going to talk about the new season of Ted Lasso.

Yes, the hit Apple TV+ show—the most popular on the streaming service—returned for its third season this week, and fans of the show (and just any confused football fans) can score the new Nike-branded gear worn by the Richmond Greyhounds this year. The real-world Nike logo takes the spot previously occupied by the fictional Lasso Cinematic Universe (LCU) company Verani Sports.

It seems only fair that reality should invade the LCU as the LCU previously invaded reality back in October of 2022.

“‘Ted Lasso’ Fictional Dating App Bantr Comes to Life on Bumble”

The real brain twister is FIFA Sports, which exists in both our universe and the LCU. But in our universe, you can play the fictional Greyhounds players in the console game.

“Ted Lasso, AFC Richmond are making their debut in EA Sports FIFA 23”

In the first episode this season, Ted states that he and his son have been playing FIFA to learn more about football. Which makes one wonder, are the Richmond players in LCU FIFA and do they have the same fairly high ratings as they do in our universe’s game?

This is indeed a multiversal question that could drive you to madness.¹

Still, Apple might want to think about creating its own expanded universe beyond Ted Lasso—an Apple Cinematic Universe, if you will. The crossover marketing potential is enormous.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]