{"slug": "dragoncatcher-news-travels-too-fast-these-days", "title": "Dragoncatcher: News travels too fast these days", "summary": "David Pogue's new book \"Apple: The First 50 Years\" highlights the electrifying impact of early tech demos, contrasting the awe of seeing the Apple II at a computer faire with the deflated experience of encountering modern AI like LLMs through a simple web page. The author argues that the ritual and anticipation of physically traveling to see new technology created a richer, more profound sense of wonder than today's instant digital access provides.", "body_md": "[News travels too fast these days](/lab/travels-too-fast/)\n\nI’m reading [Apple: The First 50 Years](https://bookshop.org/a/541/9781982134594?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me) by David Pogue, a chronicle replete with electrifying encounters. This is a book stuffed full of people seeing some computer for the first time and thinking, *of course! This is how it’s all going to work!*\n\nSteve Jobs chief among them, watching the demos at PARC.\n\nThe astonishment of a modern LLM is on the same level, yet most people’s first encounter has been simply … visiting a web page … with the effect, I think, of deflating the experience somewhat. I suppose this is just an observation about how it feels to encounter things on the web —\n\nSurely a big part of the *wow!* of Claude Code was that it required a richer ceremony: downloading a program, inviting it into your digital home, launching an odd new interface. Yet even that is pretty thin gruel compared to the buildup and payoff of, e.g., a trek to the West Coast Computer Faire to behold the brand-new Apple II.\n\nA bit of distance does wonders for an experience; a bit of waiting has never been a bad thing!\n\n[To the blog home page](/lab/)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/dragoncatcher-news-travels-too-fast-these-days", "canonical_source": "https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/travels-too-fast/", "published_at": "2026-05-11 18:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-06 17:41:23.262714+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["large-language-models", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Apple", "David Pogue", "Steve Jobs", "PARC", "Claude Code", "West Coast Computer Faire", "Apple II"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/dragoncatcher-news-travels-too-fast-these-days", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/dragoncatcher-news-travels-too-fast-these-days.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/dragoncatcher-news-travels-too-fast-these-days.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/dragoncatcher-news-travels-too-fast-these-days.jsonld"}}