Vish 📷

Motorbiker; Photojournalist; Jewish Boat To Gaza; Olivier Awards panellist 2018-19. @koothooloo → Instagram

[BRYN_BORANGA @BRYN_BORANGA]

Boy George announcing thar he's leaving Twitter forever only to come back 5 days later with a white reggae pro-Israel song written by AI is like being thrown out of a restaurant for being drunk & then storming back in shouting "AND ANOTHER THING..." and then shitting your pants

[raina douris @RahRahRaina]

every single word makes this sentence worse 👍

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

This might the only thing that can prise Tmux from my grip. Unlikely, but it might.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I've started a new company: @superlogical! We're going to begin by building a terminal multiplexer. The entire vision is much larger, but the multiplexer is the foundation. Sign up for the newsletter to get beta access and devlogs (product updates only I promise).

https://t.co/XJuqufkmCd

[Martyn Ware 🦉 @martynware]

@NME I’ve known George for 45 years

I am ashamed I ever gave him the time of day

Vile

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

@akiraa_tanaka For whatever reason, X doesn’t accept any of my payment methods attached to Apple Pay, or anything but Apple Pay. 🤦🏽‍♂️

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

Why do @RoughTrade have an “Album Of The Month” subscription, charge me on the first day of the month, and then, well, fail to deliver it? Some possible scenarios:

- they keep forgetting to choose it (“shit, Arthur, what’s the album of the month gonna be? We can’t do Sex Pistols AGAIN”)

– the CD albums are pressed individually, by hand, after each subscriber’s payment clears

– “of the month” refers only to the accounting month in which Rough Trade receives my money

– the records are dispatched according to the Julian calendar

At this point, the only thing arriving reliably each month is the charge.

Perhaps they’ve simply reached the limits of what Arthur, Cecil and Reginald can reasonably be expected to achieve with the new-fangled tech of a CD.

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

@PippaCrerar Let’s pretend that landlords won’t up the rents by that rate cut. Same at pubs - cut beer taxes, watch the breweries hike their prices.

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

It would be a labour of love! Sony reached the peak in maybe 2003-6 - now you've made music sound as good as it's ever going to get, what more can you do? I know there's a million companies making digital players and portable DACs and whatever, but the fact is, there are no more huge leaps left.

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

Ah - so if I have it right, the older ones with instant start don't, but the newer ones that are slow do. Maybe I'll get myself an older, faster model and buy a newer one for junior. I don't blame you for enjoying early retirement. Software ate the world, but didn't really improve it.

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

@akiraa_tanaka When are you doing your Walkman world tour? 😆

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

@akiraa_tanaka This is the only cassette Walkman I would genuinely like to listen to one day, maybe once I’ve repaired the DC2 that I gave my friend about 25 years ago 😆

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

@emmamrevell @CPSThinkTank (I love them both, skated and played frisbee through them for decades, and watched as some new housing was created on the edges - “1 Hyde Park”)

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

@emmamrevell @CPSThinkTank I didn’t know that, but that picture includes Kensington Gardens which is about the same size - so that’s either a lot of industrial land or a helluva lot of industrial land either way

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

@bobby_picasso A deliberate mistranslation of his words. Not a fan of him nor misrepresentation

[deffonottom @Altymcaltalt3]

It’s so funny how religious people are allowed to publicly declare that degenerates will burn in hell for all of time but you say the same about them after death and suddenly it’s deplorable

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

@akiraa_tanaka 😱

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

Sony thought in terms of products. Walkman, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, ATRAC, VAIO, Connect, SonicStage—each was a product or format to be protected and monetized.

Apple thought in terms of a system. The iPod wasn’t the product; it was one component of a workflow: rip, buy, organise, sync, listen. The hardware sold because the whole experience was coherent.

DRM was a constraint for everyone. Apple didn’t escape it—they had FairPlay. The difference was that FairPlay was mostly invisible unless you bought from iTunes, while Sony often imposed friction on content you already legally owned.

And you can experience that annoyance to this day with Sony’s hardware!

Apple embraced existing standards when it suited them. USB, MP3, AAC, standard hard drives, later Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. They weren’t ideological about openness—they were pragmatic. Sony, by contrast, repeatedly tried to make Sony’s format the winner (ATRAC, Memory Stick, UMD, OpenMG), increasing friction for users.

Sony’s biggest competitor wasn’t Apple—it was Sony itself. The music division, electronics division, and software teams often seemed to be pulling in different directions.

I think that’s why explanations centred on “Apple got lucky” or “Sony was forced into DRM” miss the bigger picture. Those factors mattered, but they don’t explain why customers overwhelmingly preferred one ecosystem over the other. The decisive difference was execution and integration.

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

I think that gives Apple too much credit for regulatory cunning and too little for simply making the least unpleasant system. FairPlay was proprietary, but the iPod also played ordinary MP3s and did not require Apple-specific storage media or an Apple-only audio format. The 99-cent store was attractive because it was simple, not because it trapped every user inside iTunes purchases.

Sony, by contrast, often imposed proprietary formats, transfer software and copy restrictions even on music users already owned. Apple certainly used lock-in once it had market power, and there were legitimate antitrust questions around iTunes and the iPod, but it did not “kill” the player industry merely by hiding DRM details. Most rivals lost because they offered worse software, fragmented ecosystems and devices that were harder to use.

[Vish 📷 @suckerpunch]

@akiraa_tanaka Apple did not merely get lucky; it made copying, organising, buying and carrying music feel like one coherent system.