Business

On any given day, Nancy Bliven will spend hours watching 747s roar down the runway at LAX. Which itself might not be particularly remarkable — except for the fact that she lives more than 2,000 miles away. “I’ll turn on the 24-hour YouTube channel and put that on,” says the 68-year-old retired computer consultant from Wixom, Michigan. “It as much entertains my cats as it does me.” Bliven is part of a growing global community of virtual plane-spotters — aviation fans who tune in remotely to livestreams of major airports. Think of it as the Bob Rossification of air travel: planes taking off and landing in high def, narrated in soothing tones by amateur broadcasters who’ve turned this niche pastime into a big-time business. Her favorite channel? Airline Videos, a YouTube juggernaut with more than 800,000 subscribers. Three times a...

Over three decades working in Silicon Valley, Jony Ive has shaped the shell of the iMac, designed the look of the iPod and come up with the form factor for the iPhone. Pretty much every major piece of Apple technology we touch, from the heyday of Alta Vista to today, went through Ive’s hands first. No doubt such a legacy enticed Sam Altman to recruit Ive, with the OpenAI founder this week buying the former Apple designer’s startup io for $6.5 billion (that’s at least 130 million vintage iPod shuffles) — then announcing, in a cringey Davis Guggenheim video, the two would be working together to create an undisclosed “family of devices” to run the apps based on OpenAI’s models. io, io, it’s off to Ive we go. Altman has been trying to convince investors and the public that he will change the course...