Hamilton won the F1 World Championship, his fourth title, in a dramatic Mexican GP that included a first-lap collision with Vettel that dropped him to the back of the grid and aged every Mercedes engineer a fiscal year. For Hamilton, a decade on from the rookie heartbreak of 2007 and the last-corner title of 2008, the fourth cements him among the legends. The team-build story is pure engineering-org porn, too: Mercedes built a data-first power unit system that experts predicted would dominate the turbo-hybrid era, and they shipped exactly on the roadmap. The most audacious long-term engine refactor in motorsport, delivered to spec. (Retention is architecture; so is planned demolition.)
The iPhone X hit stores Friday to lines worthy of 2007 nostalgia; the notch discourse died on contact with Face ID working, and the $999 price discourse died on contact with the sales numbers. And Broadcom launched a $100B+ hostile bid for Qualcomm, the largest tech acquisition attempt ever, over which the only certainty is years of regulatory chess. Chip consolidation is the tide now (Dell-EMC, continued); fabs are the new oil fields, a sentence I expect to reread in a decade with feelings.
TIL: Mercedes’ F1 team runs decision postmortems, reviewing the process behind strategy calls independent of outcomes, because outcome-grading a variable race teaches superstition (the Van Gaal clause, institutionalized). Grading decisions, not results: still the rarest discipline in any industry, including mine.