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, years after his first title with allegations of rookie struggles, the victory cemented 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, #069; so is planned demolition.)
The iPhone X (#115) hit stores Friday to lines worthy of 2007 nostalgia — the notch discourse died on contact with Face ID working; 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 (#068’s 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 (#051’s Van Gaal clause, institutionalized). Grading decisions, not results: still the rarest discipline in any industry, including mine.