The original PlayStation launched in Japan on Dec. 3, 1994, meaning that Sony’s video game brand is celebrating its 30th birthday. Once dismissed as an also-ran beside powerhouse console makers Nintendo and Sega, PlayStation has since become a dominant player in the video game industry. But it hasn’t always been easy; Sony has enjoyed the highest of highs and some rough patches as a console maker.

For PlayStation’s 30th anniversary, we present our ranking of the best PlayStations, considering Sony’s consoles and handhelds not just for their lasting impact on the market, but their game libraries, hardware design, and controllers. And their crimes.

1. PlayStation 2

Sony’s PlayStation 2 is not just the best-selling console of all time, it’s one of the best consoles of all time for about a million good reasons. It helped bring online gaming to the console masses, thanks to games like SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs, Final Fantasy 11, and a long list of sports games that supported online multiplayer. It was backward-compatible with thousands of original PlayStation games. It was more graphically advanced than any other console on the market. It was a moderately priced DVD player, helping the burgeoning video format replace VHS tapes. And it had a sleek, grown-up look; the PS2’s physical design made it look more like a piece of mid-range AV equipment and less like a kid-friendly gaming console.

But the PlayStation 2’s biggest strength was its software. The system was home to groundbreaking new game franchises, like God of War, Guitar Hero, Yakuza, SSX, and Kingdom Hearts, as well as landmark sequels like Grand Theft Auto 3 and Metal Gear Solid 2. Beyond the blockbusters, game developers experimented with bold new ideas in games like Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, Katamari Damacy, EyeToy Play, and Kill Switch. More than 4,000 PS2 games were released, making the system’s library one of the largest and most varied ever.

It was also just… cool. Armed with a chip slickly named the “Emotion Engine,” PlayStation 2 overshadowed its competition on virtually all fronts, winning the console generation handily against Nintendo and Microsoft — and taking Sega out of the console-making business for good.

2. PlayStation

Only slightly less impactful than the PlayStation 2 was the original PlayStation. Sony’s first foray into console hardware was a revolution for 3D gaming — and console gaming as a pursuit that was finally deemed mature, thanks to a huge list of original, grown-up franchises. Gran Turismo, Twisted Metal, Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, and Tekken launched the PlayStation to success. Snatching franchises like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest from creaky rival Nintendo was a coup, thanks in no small part to Sony embracing CD-ROMs as the PlayStation’s storage format. The PlayStation’s game library was overstuffed with original ideas like PaRappa the Rapper, Vib-Ribbon, Vagrant Story, and Bushido Blade.

While Sony innovated in focusing on 3D graphics and optical storage, it wasn’t afraid to steal a few good ideas. After launching with a so-so digital game controller, Sony shipped the dual-analog-stick-equipped DualShock, taking inspiration from Nintendo’s N64 controller and Rumble Pak.

The OG PlayStation also boasts arguably the best console revision in history, in the form of the PS One, a gorgeously soft, diminutive reimagining of the dull gray box Sony originally shipped.

3. PlayStation 4

After some missteps during the PlayStation 3 era (and a series of blunders from rival Microsoft), Sony’s PlayStation 4 felt like a balm. Unlike the overly complex and expensive PS3, the PS4 felt like a back-to-basics approach for the PlayStation brand. It was priced right at $399.99, focused on social interactivity through services like Remote Play and Share Play, and was refreshingly unfussy. Sony eschewed restrictive digital rights management schemes in a very public way, using some of its friendly faces to illustrate that the arrogance of the previous PlayStation generation was gone (but not forgotten).

The PS4 library felt similarly friendly, focusing on established and fan-favorite PlayStation franchises like Uncharted, Ratchet & Clank, Metal Gear Solid, and Final Fantasy. But Sony also made strong moves into supporting indie gaming, bringing more varied gaming experiences to the PS4 — a return, in some ways, to earlier, more experimental PlayStation eras.

Of course, the PS4 also has one important key exclusive: Bloodborne. 

The DualShock 4, the PS4’s default controller, was also excellent. It’s still one of Sony’s best gamepads, thanks to its tight construction, responsiveness, and built-in Share button — a smart innovation during an era when social media was just beginning to flourish.

4. PlayStation 5

Lessons learned from the PlayStation 4 era carried over to the PlayStation 5, which lags behind its predecessor on this list for one big reason: The PS5 is the ugliest console Sony has ever released.

But the PlayStation 5 is a more than capable machine, with an excellent controller, the DualSense, and a solid if slowly growing library. With Sony embracing PC ports of its first-party games, the PS5 is lacking in must-have console exclusives. And you know what it doesn’t have? A native version of Bloodborne that runs at 60 frames per second. Seriously, what gives?!

Beyond aesthetics, there’s not much positive or negative to say about the PlayStation 5. We could ding it for its price, which isn’t budging and is only going up in certain parts of the world. And we could levy that same criticism against its mid-cycle upgrade, the $699 PlayStation 5 Pro, which has one of the least convincing value propositions of any video game console released in recent memory.

5. PlayStation Portable

PlayStation’s first foray into handheld gaming — PocketStation notwithstanding — was an incredible little machine in 2005. It was an internet-connected 3D handheld that could play audio and video, meaning you never had to be without easy viewing access to Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man 2 on UMD. The PSP as an all-in-one multimedia device often outshone its actual gaming capabilities. PSP games often felt like lesser versions of PlayStation 2 games, without great reason for those games existing on a handheld rather than a big-boy console.

On the other hand, the PSP had Lumines. It helped popularize Monster Hunter as a massive gaming franchise. It had Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Metal Gear Acid, and other fascinatingly weird spinoffs of AAA franchises. But it was ultimately defeated by the Nintendo DS, a game system that took advantage of its own unique hardware capabilities to deliver new gaming experiences.

6. PlayStation Vita

I loved my PlayStation Vita. Just not as much as I did its predecessor. The Vita was arguably little more than a stronger PSP, only with a gorgeous OLED screen (at launch) and a funky, huge touchpad on the posterior. The only thing I remember about that rear touch panel was how unsettling it was to poke my “fingers” through the PS Vita screen in Media Molecule’s Tearaway.

But as an indie-gaming machine and a home to backward-compatible PSP games, the PS Vita remains a beloved but ultimately unsuccessful little powerhouse.

7. PlayStation 3

Outrageously expensive (“Five hundred and ninety nine U.S. dollars”), massive in size and weight, and derisively likened to a George Foreman grill, Sony’s PlayStation 3 is hubris in console form. Powered by the ambitious and complex Cell processor, the PS3 was clunky inside and out. The DualShock 3 is also one of Sony’s worst controllers, only slightly better than the alternative the PlayStation maker threatened us with early on.

But that software library! PS3 was home to Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto 5, The Last of Us, Journey, Rock Band, Demon’s Souls, Batman: Arkham Asylum, LittleBigPlanet, and many more modern classics. For that, it deserves to be fondly remembered. But for the console itself, and its slimmer, still-unattractive revisions? A bit of a dud compared to previous PlayStation generations.

8. PocketStation

Having never played a PocketStation myself — the wee handheld/memory card device was a Japan-only release — I don’t have any opinion on it, other than that it looked really cute, like the PS One. The PocketStation is also somewhat responsible for helping to popularize Toro, the mascot cat from video game Doko Demo Issyo, who is also cute.

PocketStation: Its legacy is, in a word, cute.

9. Nintendo PlayStation

Nintendo and Sony’s infamous falling out over the Nintendo PlayStation, a console that was never officially released, helped birth the PlayStation brand. For that, we can appreciate the Nintendo PlayStation, a system that gets rightfully dinged on this list for literally having no exclusive games!

The Nintendo PlayStation is simply a fun relic. It looks more like a workstation than a video game console. Certainly not worth the asking price of $300,000!

10. PlayStation 2 (for killing the Dreamcast)

The PlayStation 2 doomed the Dreamcast, thanks to pre-release hype over the technical capabilities of Sony’s successor to the original PlayStation. When Ken “Father of the PlayStation” Kutaragi unveiled the PlayStation 2 to the world in 1999, he promised it would vastly outperform Sega’s already-flailing-in-Japan Dreamcast, all but rendering the Dreamcast obsolete months before its U.S. launch in gamers’ eyes.

It certainly didn’t help that third-party publisher Electronic Arts promised never to support the Dreamcast, while going all in on PlayStation 2 software.

Yes, the Dreamcast was technically inferior to the PS2. Sega’s system used the proprietary GD-ROM format, not the larger DVD format. The PS2 was also backward-compatible with hundreds of original PlayStation games, while Dreamcast owners had to build their game library from scratch.

Thus, the PS2 squashed the Dreamcast’s chances, putting an end to Sega’s hardware efforts and ending a brief but joyous period of perfect arcade ports and delightfully weird video games like Seaman and Jet Set Radio. Sure, the PS2 had its share of wonderful games and innovations, but at what cost?! The whole damn Dreamcast, that’s what!

Some time ago, I shared the trick of asking customers to blow the dust out of the connector. Today I’m sharing a trick I learned from the enterprise product support team.

It can happen that investigating a problem reveals that a problem occurred when calling a function that has been patched or hooked. (In the case of enterprise customers, the offender is typically some “advanced anti-malware software” that they paid a lot of money for.) The code running in the hook ends up does something sketchy, the most common example of which is hooking a low-level function and then having the hook call a higher-level function, resulting in a deadlock. A ridiculous example would be hooking Heap­Alloc (a low-level memory allocation function) and calling Message­Box (a high-level user interface function). Another example would be hooking a function in a way that changes unspecified but observable state, such as changing the value returned by Get­Last­Error when the function succeeds.

The trick here is to not to tell the customer, “We think the problem is being caused by your anti-malware software.” That is something they don’t want to hear. After all, they paid a lot of money for that anti-malware software, and a recommendation of the form “throw away a lot of money you already spent” is not going to land well. (See also: sunk cost fallacy.)

Instead, tell the customer, “It looks like the anti-malware software is interfering with our ability to debug the problem. Can you temporarily turn it off, then reproduce the problem following the same instructions, with the same tracing and crash dump collection steps? Once you’ve done that, you can turn the software back on.”

In other words, “It’s not you. It’s me.” We are trying to debug the problem in our software, and we fully acknowledge that it’s a problem in our software, but we’re not smart enough to do it while that other software is running, so can you just help us out and remove some of the distractions?

I’m told that what usually² happens is that the customer, for some mysterious reason, is unable to get the problem to occur when the anti-malware software is disabled. “Wow, that’s weird.”

Sometimes the customer gets the hint and opens a support ticket with the anti-malware vendor. Sometimes we have to suggest to them, “Why don’t you check if there’s an update available for your anti-malware software?”

¹ A common example of this is calling Tls­Get­Value from inside the hook, which has a documented side effect of clearing the last error code.

² Usually, but not always. Sometimes, the anti-malware software not actually the source of the problem. But we’re not lying! Removing the anti-malware software from the equation does simplify the debugging: Since we don’t have the symbols for the anti-malware software, the stack traces are cluttered with mystery frames, and sometimes the frames are so badly messed up that the debugger can’t find the other end. Removing the anti-malware software produces cleaner and more complete stack frames, which definitely makes the analysis easier.

The post Tricks from product support: We’re not smart enough to debug the problem, can you help us? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Despite their apparent insouciance cats are loving and loyal companions. When my special best little buddy Mr. Tigg crossed over in 2023 I was devastated; it was the first time in my life I suffered a heartfelt loss. Adrian Veidt’s only real friend was Bubastis, a large red lynx named after the ancient Egyptian sun-goddess, but the sociopathic Veidt callously sacrificed her in his attempt to kill Dr. Manhattan, part of his warped plan to bring peace to a world on the brink of Armageddon. What’s one more life next to the three million you took thirty-five minutes ago? Even I would have spared the cat.

Two weeks ago roughly the same number of idiots took to the internet to express their disgust at the twenty-five-second clip Jaguar released to launch their rebrand. What pricked their rage glands? A mostly harmless if puzzling montage of beautiful people in avant-garde clothing, parading around primary colored backgrounds while a series of Instagram self-help slogans splashed across the screen. It gave the impression of a perfume commercial without the mandatory shot of the Eifel Tower, or an advert from this week’s app-based fashion start up. What started out as genuine bafflement rapidly turned into an eye-rolling new front in the culture war, leading to some seriously vile and bigoted commentary from the sort of swivel eyed loons who have a secret folder labelled Magaret Thatcher on their hard drives. In their lager-addled brains all Jaguar needs to do is return to its role as a purveyor of traditional masculine cars for traditional masculine customers, and En-gur-land will rule the waves once more. I’ve got a newsflash for those mutton-headed bulldog botherers: the customers who bought those cars never existed in numbers large enough to support the company as a going concern.

Like Veidt’s precious Bubastis, the Jaguar these Churchill-fondlers are getting all misty-eyed over is an imaginary creature. There was a time when a Jaguar was a wood-paneled and leather-lined phallus on wheels with feral suggestion bursting out of every curved body panel. Iron fist, velvet glove, yadda yadda. But when this reality held true the company itself was more like poor old Mr. Tigg: an arthritic blind old tabby who pissed on the carpet. A paper tiger held together by the sheer penny-pinching autocratic will of its revered founder, Sir William Lyons. Before we get into dissecting what this all means now that we’ve seen the bloody car, we need to understand how Jaguar ended up in the position of having to blow up its brand to save it.

Humble Beginnings

Plain old William Lyons as he was then known started the Swallow Sidecar Company with William Walmsley in 1922. Walmsley built the sidecars, while Lyons concentrated on the administrative side of the business. To expand they began repairing and repainting cars and renamed the company the Swallow Sidecar and Coachbuilding Company. Their first rebodied car was the Austin 7 Swallow, a brightly colored two-seater that sold for £175 but with its unique body resembled something much more expensive. Demand meant relocating the company from their hometown of Blackpool (a seaside town north of Liverpool) to Coventry in 1928.

After the Second World War Lyons decided using the name SS was no longer a clever idea, so in 1945 the company was renamed Jaguar Cars Limited. Pre-war models went back into production as Jaguars, until in 1948 they were replaced by the Mk V, a lumbering bus powered by the existing Standard straight six that could just about wobble to 90 mph. Lyons had long wanted a luxury sedan that could top the magic ‘ton’ (100 mph) and that same year he finally had an engine powerful enough; one that would go on to define Jaguar for the next four decades: the legendary XK.

That engine along with two cars – the E-Type of 1961 and the XJ of 1968, did more than anything else to define what a Jaguar was. Fast, stylish but raffish. Solid middle-class bowler-hatted types drove upright and uptight Rovers. Horse and hound families drove a Rolls Royce, an Aston Martin, or a Range Rover. Jaguars were driven by shifty grifters; wide boys and villains who appreciated their combination of luxury and performance at a bargain price. Watch any British cops and robbers TV show or film from the sixties and seventies and there will be a Jaguar full of gangsters squealing away from the boys in blue. A Jaguar is a Guy Richie film on wheels.

The Rot Started Decades Ago

By the late sixties, the British motor industry at large was imploding. The government pressured various struggling British OEMs into an unwieldy round of consolidation that by 1968 saw Jaguar firmly ensconced within the bosom of the newly formed British Leyland. Although at the time Jaguar was profitable, Lyons himself was nearing retirement age and had no natural successor, so placing his company under the aegis of Leyland seemed to be the logical thing to do to ensure Jaguar’s survival.

We all know how that experiment in motor manufacturing turned out – the Leyland logo was not nicknamed the flying plughole for nothing. Jaguar was always an awkward fit within the mass market Leyland empire and so in 1986 it was floated off publicly. By now the Jaguar range consisted of one brand new model – the XJ40, and two crocks. The Series III XJ12 was a 12-cylinder third facelift of the original XJ from 1968, and the XJS which dated from 1975. Sir John Egan kept the company above water until November 1989 at which point Ford, attracted by the untapped potential of the company, decided paying £1.6 billion for it was a sound business decision. Unfortunately Jaguar, after years of non-existent investment was more of a basket case than Detroit realized. Newly installed chairman (and ex-Ford executive) Bill Hayden told Gavin Green in the October 1990 issue of Car magazine:

“I was given the usual presentation on what terrific progress Jaguar had made over the years, and was then shown around the factory. I was appalled. I am essentially a manufacturing man. I’ve been to car plants all around the world. Apart from some Russian factories in Gorky, Jaguar’s factory was the worst I’d ever seen.”

“The labour practices, the demarcation lines, and the general untidiness of the place: it was unacceptable. I think the workforce genuinely thought this was an advanced, acceptable factory. Perhaps they knew nothing different. Whatever, we will get it right.”

Despite pouring money into Jaguar, Ford never did get it right. First the XJ220 launch was all gong and no dinner: the promised V12 four-wheel drive show car became a two-wheel drive V6 and customers wanted their deposit checks back. After that debacle, Detroit squeezed out of Coventry a range of cloyingly retro cars designed around the idea of what Americans thought a Jaguar should be. The X-Type was unforgivably front wheel drive (although there were four-wheel drive versions) because it shared underpinnings with a Mondeo. The DEW98 platform that sired the Ford Thunderbird and Lincoln LS gave birth to the vagina grilled S-Type. The slick, ovoid XK8 could accommodate a pair of golf bags in the trunk but kept the XJS floor pan and had a ride height that wouldn’t trouble the hip joints of Florida retirees. Finally, the XJ40 was tarted up twice before finally being replaced with the brand new but superficially identical aluminum-bodied X350 in 2003. By the mid-2000s Ford themselves were in the shit and offloaded Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata in 2008 for £1.15 billion (about half what it paid), never having made any money on the company.

Tata taking ownership of both gave birth to the modern-day company we know as Jaguar Land Rover (JLR). Although the pairing of two iconic British car companies appears to make some sense on an emotional level, it makes less sense from a building cars point of view – because they make completely different types of vehicles. Nonetheless, modern platforms are capable of incredible acts of contortion – leveraging their expertise in aluminum construction JLR developed the D7 platform which on the Jaguar side of the business birthed a new compact sports sedan, the XE, and a second generation XF in 2015, and the F-Pace SUV in 2016. Lastly, the E-Type finally got a sort of successor with the F-Type, which replaced the XK in 2013. This flurry of new products including the electric iPace gave Jaguar its best year of sales in 2018 at just over 180k units worldwide (as a comparison that year BMW sold 2.5 million). Since then sales have fallen off a cliff, plummeting to just over 60k for 2022. So what the bloody hell went wrong?

The Problems

Two of the main problems have been brand positioning and products. Ford saw untapped value in Jaguar as a potential BMW competitor. In attempting to recoup their monumental investment they moved Jaguar into shark-infested volume waters. It didn’t work because the cars had too much Ford in them and their retro design didn’t appeal to a younger audience that hadn’t grown up with derring-do tales of Le Mans in the fifties. Tata continued this strategy but despite a step change away from the retro design direction thanks to Ian Callum taking over from Geoff Lawson as design chief in 1999, the cars simply weren’t competitive enough. They weren’t as light as their aluminum construction implied and the interiors offered nothing of the traditional Jaguar ambience. The iPace was one of the first full EVs from an OEM that wasn’t Tesla but it was built under contract at Magna Steyr in Austria so it never made any money. It was left to wither on the vine without any further investment or attempt to leverage its early mover advantage. They couldn’t get the CX-75 supercar into production for much the same reasons – a lot of the engineering had been contracted out to Williams so the economics didn’t stack up. The F-Type was oddly positioned – sized like a Boxster and priced like a 911 without the practicality of either. They titted about with various powertrains even inflicting the poor thing with a droning 2.0 liter turbo four, but it still failed to find more than about four thousand sales a year. And they never took it racing, which of all the times JLR pointed the corporate shotgun at their feet, this feels the most avoidable.

Jaguar has never had the sort of consistent, decades-long involvement in motorsport their German competitors have. There were the Le Mans wins in the fifties with the C and D-Type cars but away from the 24 hours these cars had little success. D-Types remain unsold and were converted into the road-going XKSS and they still couldn’t unload them. Remember my earlier remarks about Jaguars being cars for chancers? Cometh the hour, cometh Tom Walkinshaw, a hardheaded racer who thought rules applied to other people. He took the XJS into European touring car racing and then used that as a trojan horse to get Jaguar into Group C racing in the eighties. Their 1988 Le Mans win was celebrated in the UK like we’d won the soccer World Cup and by the same class of people. What price pitching the F-Type into GT3 racing as a works effort using purple, white and yellow as the team colors and then using that scheme as a springboard for high-performance versions of their road cars? The less said about the brief F1 foray the better – this was only ever a corporate branding exercise undertaken at the behest of Ford. Jaguar themselves had little to no involvement.

Under Sir William Lyons the company didn’t modernize because he would rather save a pound today than invest it and save two in the future. Ford thought the answer was giving their own platforms a set of clothes from 1968. They found out to their great expense it wasn’t. Tata invested in all new platforms and with the stunning Callum-designed X351 XJ finally broke free of the stylistic legacy of the 1968 original. It was bold and shocking because it had to be. The F-Pace is as good as it’s possible for an SUV to look – but was it the right product for Jaguar? In hindsight probably not. No matter how great it is, when your sister company in the next room is Land Rover you’re getting to the point of splitting semantic brand hairs.

The Past Is A Gift And A Curse

What constitutes a brand isn’t a fixed point or a single well you can keep pouring from. Jaguar won Le Mans a few times in the fifties, released a couple of legendary cars in the sixties, and then kicked back and said that’s our brand values sorted for the next seventy years. We don’t need to bother doing anything else. Pass me the port old boy. You don’t enrich and progress your heritage by releasing continuation cars from the distant past that no one under sixty-five gives a shit about, and that have about as much relevance to the road car range as a pair of Jaguar-branded socks. Which you can pick up by the way in the reception of JLR Classic when you go and collect your ‘new’ XKSS. Sure they took on Group C in the eighties but to what end? None of the full English breakfast thickos who found themselves getting a French sunburn in 1988 were buying a new Jaguar because the cheapest one cost nineteen thousand pounds and came with cloth seats and wheel trims. Le Mans wasn’t a Jaguar victory – it was another Churchillian Brits against the Dastardly Jerries victory.

War rhetoric and class issues aside, this points to a broader problem Jaguar has with its home audience. There’s a big disconnect between how British car enthusiasts see the Jaguar brand and how the rest of the world sees it. A curious disease infects the British mind, one that demands nostalgia because things were much better when we had an Empire. We’re strangled by an opaque class system and yet completely in thrall to it – King and Country. We recently appointed a German as head coach of the national soccer team, and the most important thing on the minds of mid-wit commentators was: would he sing the national anthem at games? No other modern European country is so insular.

Enter Gerry McGovern

With the departure of Ian Callum in 2019, Gerry McGovern took over as the chief designer of both Jaguar and Land Rover. McGovern is often portrayed by the automotive media as a slightly prickly and aloof character – full disclosure he hired me personally back in 2017 and I knew him a bit two years prior to that – so I can’t help but get the feeling a lot of the ire directed towards the Jaguar rebrand from some quarters was a desire to see the whole thing blow up in his face: a gotcha from automotive journalists.

Growing up in post-war Coventry McGovern is influenced by Modernism – not out of nostalgia but because it looks forward represents a time in history when design was about improving lives. He is not one for heritage or gimmicks; the little Jaguar cub silhouettes in the windscreen band of the E-Pace would never make it out of one of his design reviews alive. McGovern has always been forward-thinking and unsentimental–a look at his greatest hits demonstrates the man knows how to design a good-looking, modern car. This is the point that everybody clamoring for a return to tradition seems to miss, and I’ve made this point before: What resonates on nostalgia-obsessed social media does not translate into sales of cars in the real world. If it did, Jaguar wouldn’t be in the position they are in now. So anyone expecting the new Jaguar to hark explicitly back to the past was always going to be sorely disappointed.

McGovern talks a lot about ‘reductive design.’ Taking away that which is absolutely unnecessary and leaving only a clean, modern form language. You can see this in the progression of successive Land Rover models – compare the details and feature lines on the original Evoque to the latest L460 Range Rover. But here’s the thing – the latest Range Rover is still definitely a Range Rover because it has the proportions, silhouette, and character of one. It’s the sheer surfaces, the hidden-until-lit rear lights, and flush glazing that place it firmly in the here and now.

Further Thoughts On The Type 00 Concept

This reinvention of Jaguar was named Project Renaissance within the company. The three internal design teams were Jaguar, Land Rover, and Design Research (a sort of internal advanced skunkworks based at Warwick University). Each pitched against each other, and after a review at board level the Land Rover team won out. There was some internal strife as a result of this, leading to something of an exodus of the Jaguar design team to the new GM studio in Leamington Spa. But the proposals from the Jaguar team were iterative – newer versions of what had been done before, and this is something the JLR board was keen to avoid. They wanted a complete reinvention of the marque.

In attempting to break so deliberately with the past the new Jaguar needed to be absolutely stunning to shut the naysayers up. Cliché Miami pink color aside, the new Type 00 is devoid of warmth and crucially, movement. The sheer sides and rigid geometric features make the whole thing look blocky and static. There’s too little detailing – on a large car details do a lot of work disguising the bulk – so reducing the grill to a series of embossed horizontal lines in body color does little to help break it up visually. The proportions are verging on the cartoonish – the slide glazing is too shallow – and the passenger compartment needs puffing up to help balance out the sheer amount of car below the belt line.

Athleticism. Lightness on its feet. Movement. Muscularity. Grace. Danger. These are some of the adjectives the name Jaguar brings to mind – and none of them can be used to describe the Type 00 concept. It might sound corny but as a designer one of your jobs is to identify the positive connotations you want your brand to represent and exemplify them visually. This doesn’t mean applying them in the way it has been done in the past – and note none of them are meant to appeal to any one kind of customer. The trick is to capture and interpret these feelings in a new and meaningful way that resonates in the marketplace. It doesn’t mean pandering and redoing what came before. McGovern has talked about a modern sense of occasion for a younger, city dwelling affluent market – it bears pointing out that OEMs do not pull customer archetypes out of their assholes. They have whole departments dedicated to market research. The lens to view this new Jaguar is not as a car, but as a luxury consumer good. Speaking to a crowd at the launch event in Miami, McGovern said “Some may love it now, some may love it later and some may never love it. That’s what fearless creativity does.” In other words, a man who is not afraid of ruffling feathers expects to ruffle a few feathers.

Just over twenty years ago television executive Ronald D Moore presented five minutes of new footage from his reimagined Battlestar Galactica series at a fan convention. The reception from the fans was decidedly chilly. The recasting of Starbuck as a woman had these die-hard bores booing. Eventually one asked Moore outright if he would entertain their wishes to turn the reboot away from his grimdark vision and back towards the earnest, corny look and feel of the original series. No, Moore told them. He had his own ideas for what he wanted to do. Take it or leave it he told them.

Appeasing the loudest voices in the room isn’t a good idea because they are never going to be satisfied. It’s no surprise that the wrong sort of people were upset with the Jaguar rebrand because Jaguars traditionally appealed to the wrong sort of people. The Type 00 is not what they wanted – but going on what we’ve seen so far I’m not sure it has the visual appeal for anyone to want it.

The reimagined BSG is now feted as one of the greatest television series reboots ever made, however.

All photos from Jaguar unless otherwise noted

• Why Does The New Jaguar Type 00 Look Like A Concrete Shithouse? An Ex-Jaguar Land Rover Designer Explains
• Is Jaguar Serious?
• This Is The Car That’s Supposed To Save Jaguar
• Jaguar Seeks A Way Out Of Mediocrity With Smaller, More Expensive Lineup

The post Why Jaguar Had To Blow Up Its Brand In Order To Save It appeared first on The Autopian.

by Jeremy Kohler

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

One month after Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion, Republican lawmakers in the deeply red state are already working to overturn it — or at least undermine it.

One measure would ask voters to amend the state constitution to define life as beginning at conception, declaring that embryos are people with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The result would be to classify abortion as an unlawful killing.

Another proposal, aimed at repealing the abortion rights amendment, would ask voters to ban gender transition procedures for minors, tying the two issues together, despite the fact that the amendment did not address gender surgery and gender-affirming care for transgender children is already illegal in Missouri.

Other proposed amendments include stricter abortion limits, such as restricting access to cases of rape, incest, medical emergencies and fetal anomalies. These measures would impose additional requirements, such as mandating that rape survivors file police reports to obtain an abortion.

GOP lawmakers have also introduced a measure to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution through voter initiatives, which could make it harder to pass similar measures in the future.

The legislative moves follow the Nov. 5 election, in which the amendment to put abortion rights in the state constitution won by a 51.6%-48.4% margin. Starting Thursday, the right to abortion will be constitutionally guaranteed up to the point of fetal viability, while restrictions on post-viability abortions will remain in place.

In other states where voters approved abortion rights measures last month, there were no signs yet that lawmakers would also try to counter those measures.

Even before votes in Missouri had been counted, proponents of Amendment 3, as the measure was called, had anticipated that a victory would be met with efforts to somehow undercut abortion rights.

“These people will continue to rail against abortion,” said state Rep. Deb Lavender, a Democrat from the St. Louis suburbs.

Although Missouri already has a law recognizing life as beginning at conception, stating that unborn children have “protectable interests in life, health, and well-being,” the proposed constitutional amendment would go further. It would effectively elevate this principle to the state constitution and potentially complicate not only abortion rights but the legality of in vitro fertilization and the handling of embryos.

Several states have laws recognizing fetal personhood, but Missouri would be the second — after Alabama — to enshrine it in its constitution. That could create legal and ideological confusion or even conflicts, experts say.

“You could see voters saying, ‘I support a right to abortion,’ but also saying, ‘Life begins at conception,’ without understanding that you can’t have both of those things at the same time,” said Jamille Fields Allsbrook, a professor at St. Louis University School of Law and a former policy analyst for Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The author of one of the personhood measures, Rep. Justin Sparks, a Republican from the St. Louis suburbs, said he was emboldened by the narrow margin of the abortion rights vote.

“A clear mandate has not been achieved,” he said. While the amendment had strong support in metro St. Louis and Kansas City and in the county that’s home to the University of Missouri, “the vast majority of the rest of the state voted in a different direction,” he added. “So I think it’s fair to again bring the question up.”

But state Sen. Tracy McCreery, a Democrat also from the St. Louis suburbs, noted that Sparks was going against the will of voters in the St. Louis area. “I find that even more disrespectful of the voters,” she said. “It wasn’t just voters that tend to vote Democratic that voted yes on Amendment 3. It was also Republican voters and independent voters, and I think that’s getting lost in this discussion.”

The measure to link abortion and transgender rights reflects the campaign before the election, when abortion opponents conflated these topics. Critics said this strategy seeks to distract from abortion rights, which had strong voter support, by capitalizing on voter discomfort with transgender issues.

While GOP lawmakers push these measures, the legal landscape around abortion in Missouri is already shifting. On Wednesday, a Jackson County Circuit Court heard arguments in a lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri that seeks to strike down Missouri’s near-total abortion ban and other laws that regulate abortion. The lawsuit followed the passage of Amendment 3. Planned Parenthood said if it wins in court it plans to resume abortion services in St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia on Friday.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has acknowledged that the amendment will legalize most abortions when it goes into effect, but he has said he intends to enforce remaining restrictions, such as a ban on abortions after fetal viability, a 72-hour waiting period and parental consent for minors.

Lawmakers are also pushing to raise the bar for passing constitutional amendments. Now, a simple majority is enough; that has allowed Missouri voters to bypass the legislature and pass progressive amendments that lawmakers oppose. A new bill would ask voters to pass a constitutional amendment requiring not just a statewide majority but also a majority of voters in five of the state’s eight congressional districts — a change critics argued would give disproportionate power to rural areas over urban voters. It would then be harder for voters to approve measures that don’t align with the priorities of the conservative politicians they tend to elect.

Earlier this year, a similar effort to make it harder to amend the constitution failed after Democrats in the Senate filibustered it.

Sparks criticized the Republican leadership in the General Assembly for allowing the failure, pointing to a Republican supermajority in both houses that could have passed the measure.

“We hold all the power,” Sparks said. “We hold all the procedural levers of power, and we can shut down debate in both houses any time, any day, for any bill we choose to.”

Florida shows how a higher threshold for voter initiatives might play out. In 2006, the state raised the bar for constitutional amendments to 60%. This year, a majority of voters — 57% — supported an abortion rights amendment, an even bigger margin than in Missouri, but not sufficient in Florida.

It’s not clear yet, though, whether any of the measures have enough support in Missouri’s General Assembly.

Lavender said that the campaign supporting abortion rights significantly outraised its opposition during the election. “It’s going to be difficult to overturn,” she said. “You’ll have the same money that supported it now going up against you.”

Late Wednesday, bitcoin hit $100,000—a major milestone for the cryptocurrency, which has been experiencing a massive upswing since Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election.

Trump is a shiny new crypto supporter, launching his own cryptocurrency on the campaign trail and hoping to woo crypto enthusiast voters by promising to slacken the Biden administration's heightened scrutiny of cryptocurrency.

According to CNN, bitcoin's latest record high came shortly after Trump announced his intentions to nominate Paul Atkins to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) once Gary Gensler—a noted crypto critic—resigns on Inauguration Day.

Atkins previously served as an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008 and currently is co-chair of Token Alliance, which bills itself as a group of more than 400 "industry thought leaders" and technologists and lobbies for friendlier crypto regulations. Viewed as a crypto advocate, Atkins is expected to support Trump's plan to make the US the "crypto capital of the planet."

"If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA," Trump said on the campaign trail, CNN noted. And on Wednesday, he posted on Truth Social that "Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations" who "also recognizes that digital assets and other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before."

Although Atkins would still need to be confirmed, bitcoin's price rocketed to $100,000 "just hours" after Trump revealed his pick, CNN reported.

Bitcoin collectively worth $2 trillion

For bitcoin investors, this jump has already been huge, and the rally does not seem to be ending any time soon.

The New York Times noted that "Bitcoin now stands as arguably the most successful investment product of the last 20 years" after previously becoming "mocked" as a "sideshow." Collectively, all the bitcoins in circulation are worth about $2 trillion, the Times reported, which is more than MasterCard, Walmart, and JPMorgan Chase combined.

The ongoing rally has begun to make some of the earliest purchases using crypto appear a little ill-advised—like when Laszlo Hanyecz spent 10,000 bitcoins on two pizzas in 2010, then worth $40 but now worth $1 billion, the Times noted.

But for those who have held tight to bitcoins while enduring crypto winters, bitcoin's rise shows the wisdom of stockpiling, and as bitcoin seems likely to continue rallying, Trump seemingly wants the US to become just as savvy.

The president-elect has vowed to create a national stockpile of bitcoins, which he has claimed could be used to wipe out the US national debt by discontinuing the government's typical practice of auctioning off cryptocurrency seized during criminal investigations, CNN reported. It's an ambitious goal, as the US national debt crossed the $34 trillion mark early this year, Forbes reported. Trump's plan could meet resistance, however, as crypto experts and political analysts are already raising questions about the seeming conflicts of interest between how Trump governs crypto and his potentially large stake in the industry if his cryptocurrency takes off.

Atkins has said that the US being too tough on cryptocurrency drove investors to other markets where regulations on digital assets are clearer, like Asia or Europe, The Wall Street Journal reported. If his plans to shift US regulations to be "more accommodating" to crypto come to fruition, those investments could come back to the US, Atkins suggested. And the friendlier the regulatory environment gets, the more stable and legitimized crypto becomes and the more value could be pumped into the US, the thinking goes.

How far Trump will take his plan to be America's first "pro-crypto president" remains unclear, though. He has previously expressed concerns over crypto facilitating unlawful behavior, like drug trade or money laundering.

But in the build-up to his next term, the outlook is good for crypto investors as bitcoin's price soars. Late Wednesday, the CEO of Professional Capital Management and longtime crypto advocate Anthony Pompliano—seemingly teeming with optimism—forecast on X (formerly Twitter) that bitcoin's price will only keep rising.

"If you like bitcoin at $100,000, you’re going to love it at $1 million," Pompliano posted, prompting a top commenter to joke, "how long have you been sitting on this tweet…"

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