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Hello from a hotel room in the heart of Silicon Valley, where I’ve spent the week in meetings. I’ve also been talking quite a bit to Tony Fadell, who was instrumental in the development of the iPod and iPhone, and just released a new book. Talk about fortuitous timing: Apple bid adieu to the iPod this week. More on that, plus Google’s new awesome-looking watch, Meta’s next VR headset, unsending emails and Instagram stalking… RIGHT NOW!
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Me and Tony Fadell earlier this week with an original iPod.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: CHAYA HOWELL/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Monday: I start reading the chapter in iPod inventor Tony Fadell’s new book about how Apple decided to take the iPod and make it into the iPhone.
Tuesday: Apple announces the end of the iPod. I write a column about how many people still think the iPod is better than the iPhone, at least for listening to music.
Wednesday: I interview Mr. Fadell at the Computer History Museum about his book—and, of course, the end of the iPod. (Watch it here.)
It was a week packed with thinking about a lot of i-things, including the biggest one of all: invention. As tech users, we think about our decisions to buy these products. Rarely do we think about the decisions, ideas, teams and processes it took to make them.
That’s what “Build” by Mr. Fadell is about. It’s about what he has learned building products, including at Apple alongside Steve Jobs and then at Nest, which he started and then sold to Google. It’s part business book, part tech soap opera, part gadget-nerd fever dream.
Mr. Fadell details many of the decisions that went into the development of the iPod and then the iPhone—many of which I never knew. Here are some I found most interesting:
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The iPod didn’t need to be charged out of the box.
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Before the iPod, all consumer electronics with a hard drive needed to be charged when you took them out of the box. Steve Jobs said no more! In the factory, they tested each iPod for longer and thus were able to charge it for longer.
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The iPod was originally built to sell Macs.
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“Its purpose wasn’t just to play music—it was made to sell Macintosh computers,” Fadell writes. Jobs wanted to make something that would only work with Macs so people would buy Macs. How very Apple! (And how did that work out for the company? Have a look at the Throwback Thing below to find out.)
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An iPhone with a click wheel = not a great idea.
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The initial concept of the iPhone was to add a phone to the iPod and keep the click wheel. Within three weeks of development, the team realized it wasn’t going to work—they were basically just reinventing the rotary phone. The next concept was an iPod Mini but all screen. That turned out to be the winner.
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I could have made a list of 20 things here, like how the iPod went from prototype to finished product in 10 months, how Apple’s marketing department pushed for a BlackBerry-like physical keyboard on an iPhone, etc. You’ll have to read the book for those.
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Google’s New ⌚️ and 📱
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At its Google I/O developers conference this week, the company announced lots of new additions to its growing Pixel family. The Pixel Watch has a round display and a deep integration with Fitbit, which Google now owns.
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The Pixel Buds Pro feature active noise cancellation, as well as a transparency mode to let outside sounds in. Then there’s the Pixel 7 phone coming this fall and a Pixel tablet targeted for 2023. Nicole Nguyen has all the details here.
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Instagram NFTs
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First, if you’re confused about what an NFT (or non-fungible token) is, read and watch my explainer. OK, now the rest of this should make sense—well, uh, as much sense as NFTs can make. Instagram will now allow select creators to connect a digital wallet to their account and share their NFTs. These aren’t your average Insta posts: Shared digital collectibles shimmer ✨ and display public information that’s viewable on the blockchain. (Told you you’d need to read that story to understand!)
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Meta’s Mixed Reality
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Meta has been teasing its next headset—codenamed Project Cambria—for a while now, but in a demo this week Mark Zuckerberg showed off some advanced augmented-reality features. The color passthrough will let you see your real world in color. (On the current Meta Quest 2 it’s like watching your living room on a black-and-white television.) The headset can even display digital objects within that real-world view. You can watch the demo here.
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Confession: I’m not a very confident emailer. At least twice a day I send an email and then quickly unsend it—often to just re-read it one more time.
When you set up Undo Send, the system doesn’t actually send the email. Instead it starts a delayed countdown until the actual send, and you can recall the email back during that time. To enable the feature in Gmail, open its settings in a computer browser and find where it says Undo Send. Set the cancellation period to 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds. (I have mine at 20.) In the mobile app, you can undo sent emails, but you can’t turn the setting on or off or adjust the delay period.
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CREDIT: CORDILIA JAMES/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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You can also do this in Outlook. Open Settings > View all Outlook settings > Mail > Compose and reply, then scroll to where it says Undo send. It’s less generous with time: You can only set the delay up to 10 seconds.
Check out this tip and so many more great work tips in Nicole’s column.
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PHOTO: APPLE
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It finally let me get an iPod! Before iTunes for Windows, the iPod only worked with Macs. I didn’t have a Mac. I had a Dell Inspiron laptop running Windows XP. I so desperately wanted an iPod and was so excited when I could finally get one. I guess I have Tony Fadell and Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal’s first personal tech columnist, to thank for that. Mr. Fadell discusses in his book that Steve Jobs was against the iPod working with Windows PCs. They decided to get Walt’s opinion. (Mr. Mossberg was unaware that he was casting a deciding vote on this world-changing decision.)
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I had a book of at least 50 CDs, with each in a plastic sleeve along with its CD booklet. I stayed up until all hours of the night, ripping CD after CD in iTunes then syncing it with my iPod, which had to be plugged into a FireWire ExpressCard.
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I still have that 2002 Dell laptop. I haven’t tried to boot it up in about 5 years.
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📷 Got an idea for a throwback? Reply to this email with a photo of your old tech and tell us why you loved—or hated—it. 📷
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Got questions about your digital life? Reply to this email with them!
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My husband bought a suitcase for our daughter. The next day, eight to 10 ads for suitcases showed up on my Instagram. My husband doesn’t have an Instagram account, so how does Instagram know my husband was buying luggage? We both have our own email addresses, but we do have a joint credit card.—Kitty Fyfe from Irvine, Calif.
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If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me something like this, I’d have a lot of dollars! These questions are always hard to answer because I don’t have a glimpse into, well, your entire life: your internet searches, your browsing history, accounts you follow on Instagram, where you shop online and in real life, what loyalty or credit cards you and your husband use and so much more.
Point is, all that information and more can be used to target ads to you on Instagram. An Instagram spokeswoman also couldn’t say for certain what happened here but pointed to this page with further information on ad targeting.
My best guess? You recently searched for something related to suitcases, and that website or app shared the info with Meta.
You can see which companies pass along some of your activity to Meta. Open Facebook, go to Settings & Privacy and look for Off-Facebook activity. There you should see info that businesses share about you with Facebook. (For instance, I can see that Zillow has sent over 100 “interactions” to Facebook.) You can clear the entire history of what Facebook has received or Disconnect Future Activity so the information Facebook gets from businesses is limited to just what you do on Facebook and Instagram.
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Next week, after a two-year break from in-person events, The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival is back!
I’ll be sitting down with executives from Magic Leap and Amazon. And there’s loads more, too. It’s all happening May 17–19 in New York City and online. Register here for a free virtual pass.
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Reply to this email and share your feedback and suggestions.
User-submitted content has been edited for clarity and length. This week’s newsletter was curated and written by Joanna Stern in the Bay Area and Cordilia James in New York.
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