Letters by Burk #164: The Number on the Box

Hi friends,

This week I kept running into numbers that say less than they look like they do.

A median conversion rate that flattens thousands of newsletters into one decimal. A GPU name on a laptop sticker that can mean two quite different machines. And a price rumor for the foldable iPhone that was off by several hundred dollars, in my favor for once.

Loose thread, I know. But it held for three pieces.

Here's my week.

Six in a Thousand (Free-to-Paid Newsletter Conversion in 2026)

Beehiiv published their conversion numbers from thousands of paid publications. The median is 0.62 percent, which puts 100 paying subscribers at a free list of roughly 16,000. My own rule of thumb from two years ago was too friendly by a factor of five.

Read it or on Substack.

I'm Back on Windows. It's Still Bad.

In May I wrote that I'd never use Windows again. Then part of my work moved onto a Windows machine. What got me this time wasn't the Start menu, it was the hardware: the same GPU name can mean 50 watts or 100 watts, depending on who built the laptop around it.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

A Foldable Only Apple Could Do

In April I called the foldable iPhone Apple admitting it's out of ideas. Then I watched the keynote. It starts at $1,999, the Dock moved to the side, and the interface does a little show every time you open it. I want to hold one, which I did not see coming.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

⚡ AI Bytes

Dario Amodei published an essay called "We Must Pace the Frontier" on September 12, arguing the industry should slow capability gains by a year or two so alignment work can catch up, and Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk all said some version of yes, while Trump called the whole thing a conspiracy against AI on Truth Social. Mozilla's new State of Open Source AI report puts the gap between US frontier models and the best Chinese open-weights models at 4.4 months, with Kimi K3 three points behind Claude Fable 5 on the Artificial Analysis index at 30 percent of the price. And Apple shipped iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate 27, the last macOS that will run Intel apps through Rosetta.

📎 From the Archive

From August last year: "Can Substack Sustain a Free Model Forever?". If six readers in a thousand pay, somebody has to fund the other 994, and that question got more interesting this week.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

💬 Quote of the week

Ernie Smith, who runs Tedium, got more than a dozen cold emails in three days from AI agents on a platform called iLands, each offering to do his research for around $25.

These bots are trying to take work from me when I need the work. It is deeply insulting.

His read on the motive is the part I keep thinking about. The agents aren't earning for their makers, he writes, they are hustling to keep their own tokens paid for. Ars Technica picked the story up three days later, after Mastodon admins had already started blocking them.

That's #164. Back next Tuesday. ✌️

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