Stratechery's week: the HomeView argument, SpaceX's cellular ambition, and the NBA's return
Stratechery's free Friday bundle sorts the week of October 12 into three picks: the argument over Apple's HomeView, SpaceX's push into primary cellular, and the NBA's return on October 20.
One item landed in your Gmail reading queue since yesterday's edition: Stratechery's free Friday bundle for the week of October 12, which went up early this morning. Lenny's Newsletter published nothing new, so today's page holds a single entry.
Its three picks cover the week's Apple thread, SpaceX's spectrum buying, and basketball. This digest already carried two of the underlying pieces — Wednesday's Update on Apple's HomeView, and Tuesday's on SpaceX's spectrum buying — so what the bundle adds is the sorting. Its two editors say which threads of the week carried the most weight, and each one explains what he saw in the piece he chose.
The week's bundle: Stratechery's own ranking of October 12 to October 16
"2026.42: Home At Last" — Stratechery
Published Friday, October 16, 2026, at 1:42 p.m. US Eastern, which is early this morning in Shanghai. Free to read in full. This Week in Stratechery is the Friday email that gives an overview of the week's bundle, and 2026.42 is the edition for the week of October 12. Its three signed picks and the index beneath them are readable without a subscription. 1
- Thompson's pick is the argument around Apple's home push, and he is having most of it with his own co-hosts. His note sets this week's Apple pieces against the conversation that followed them. On last week's Dithering, he and John Gruber complained about Apple leaving home appliances behind in the 2010s, and Gruber's view of the company's return is that it is pointless. Thompson puts the blame for that reaction on Apple's marketing video, and on Sharp Tech he walked Andrew Sharp through what the company is trying to accomplish — close enough that Sharp was almost persuaded to go all-in on HomeView. 1 The hardware behind the argument is the $299 HomeView hub with its 7-inch display. 2
- Sharp's pick is the spectrum buying, and his own read of it is that SpaceX is shopping for more than a backup network. Tuesday's Update broke down the latest deal and the recent ones that mobile carriers and airlines signed so they would depend less on SpaceX. 3 Sharp's note adds the interpretation: what once looked like a play to become the default provider of emergency satellite coverage among mobile providers now looks like a company coming for primary cellular coverage. He sends readers to the methods that could make that path viable, and to the obstacles that make it, in his phrase, a quintessential Musk strategy. 1
- The third pick is basketball, and it carries the bundle's firmest date. The NBA regular season opens on Tuesday, October 20, with three games on NBC and Peacock. 4 Sharp's note points at two pieces for the weekend: an episode of Greatest of All Talk that makes the case for eight potential title winners and runs through the preseason, and his own Friday piece on Sharp Text, which declares confidence in the Washington Wizards for the first time in a decade and adds 18 more predictions for the league. 5 He warns that the Knicks repeat case in that podcast episode was unconvincing. 1
The rest of the week's bundle, as Stratechery lists it: two Dithering episodes, on HomeView and on "Meanness and Claude"; two Asianometry episodes, on ASML's new multibeam inspection tool and on IGBTs; a Sharp China episode on a Brussels-Beijing deal, weak Chinese holiday spending data and Xi Jinping's reported rest breaks; a Sharp Tech episode on Apple, the SpaceX cellular play, The Ringer and AI parenting; and the week's Stratechery video, which is on the October 5 essay Apple and a Hacker's Future that this digest carried on October 6. 1
Where to start
Open the bundle if you want the week on one free page. Thompson's pick matters if you are weighing what Apple's home line means for the devices people buy. Sharp's note is the one that moves a market view, because it reads SpaceX's spectrum purchases as a bid for primary cellular coverage. The Sharp Text piece is weekend reading, with the season opener on October 20 as its hook. The queue refills when Stratechery posts its next Update and Lenny's publishes its next piece.
References
- 12026.42: Home At Last — Stratechery
stratechery.com
- 2Meet Apple HomeView — Apple Newsroom
apple.com
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