And yes, of course some are caught up in the hype; that’s the nature of these hype bubbles.

Apples’s defense of its in-app payments rule is that having a single payment system owned by the platform used by every app on that platform provides the best experience for users. According to them, Apple isn't being greedy but rather they are ensuring their users have the best experience on their platform.

But if a single payment system for a platform is such a great user experience, why does Apple not offer that superior experience to their Apple Music customers on Android?

Of course, one could argue that Google's refusal to require apps on their platform to use their in-app purchase system means that superior user experience of a uniform payment system is out of reach regardless of what Apple does with their own apps on Android, so maybe it's not a contradiction after all.

It seems as though they are viewing SwiftUI as a successor to UIKit/AppKit on all their platforms, not just a higher level wrapper.

SwiftUI tries to do clever stuff under the hood to only update the portions of the view hierarchy affected by the state change for performance.

And yes, Google certainly wouldn't demo a completely non-existent technology, and I'm sure Gruber knows that. But they might very well demo a technology that only works 60% of the time at present. Let's be honest, this wouldn't be the first time we've seen a large tech company demo incredible-seeming too-good-to-be-true tech that turned out to actually be too good to be true and never made it into real world use for one reason or another.

It is kind of weird that the broad tech punditry has just accepted Google's demo at face value with respect to what the tech is actually capable of at present.

For example, Google demoed object removal in Google Photos (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654476/google-photos-ob...) last year at IO, and as far as I can tell it never shipped.

If a company in any other industry announced an insane-seeming new technology with a completely non-verifiable demo like this, no credible journalist who covers that beat would report it as credulously as tech journalists have covered the Duplex demo. Gruber is absolutely right that the lack of skepticism around Duplex is baffling and journalistically suspect.

It is kind of weird that the broad tech punditry has just accepted Google's demo at face value with respect to what the tech is actually capable of at present.

[EDIT]

For example, Google demoed object removal in Google Photos (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654476/google-photos-ob...) last year, and as far as I can tell it never shipped.

[EDIT 2]

If a company in any other industry announced an insane-seeming new technology with a completely non-verifiable demo like this, no credible journalist who covers that beat would report it as credulously as tech journalists have covered the Duplex demo. Gruber is absolutely right that the lack of skepticism around Duplex is baffling and journalistically suspect.

I personally don't see it. Uber has already begun being disintermediated. For example, ride-sharing is already an option in Apple Maps on iOS where Uber sits alongside Lyft and any other ride-hailing apps on your phone, price comparison and all. You can also hail a ride with Siri. As a rider, why would I care whether my ride is dispatched by Uber or Lyft? I only care about availability and price. At some point in the future, I probably won't even need to install a competitor's app on my phone; I'll ask Apple Maps or Siri to get me a ride and it will dispatch a car from whichever service is faster and/or cheaper.

Uber has a plausible route to winner-take-all dominance as long as ride-hailing remains a two-sided market, where competitors have a chicken-and-egg problem in recruiting drivers and riders. But self-driving changes the game.