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Hello! I hope this finds you doing well. Ugh, Steve Jobs would never have started an email like that. More on how tech bosses do email soon. Also this week: how Snapchat wants to read your mind and why the Palm Treo beats the iPhone, plus the best podcast apps. First…EMAILS!
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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: ELENA SCOTTI/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, iSTOCK
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Whenever I interview a job candidate I ask a very important question: Are you good at email?
It’s partially a trick question because no one is really good at email. Yet with fleeting streams of Slacks, iMessages, Google Chats (or whatever it’s called this month), I’m more convinced than ever that email is the superior form of digital communication. I mean, I would say that—I just launched a newsletter so I can hang out in your inbox
So, yes, I’m constantly striving to be the best emailer I can be. To do that, I read my own emails and I read InternalTechEmails, a Twitter account and email newsletter (naturally!), that shares emails sent by tech executives. These are communications that previously surfaced in court filings, government hearings, articles and more. There are writings from all the biggest tech names: Jobs, Gates, Dorsey and more.
Sure, I love reading them because they’re a glimpse into juicy internal and external dealings. (Just read this one thread where Steve Jobs told Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt to back off recruiting his people.) But I also love reading them to see how the titans of tech communicate.
Here are some tips I’ve picked up so we can all email like a tech boss:
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Grammar is cool
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There’s this idea of “boss email,” where the more powerful you are, the fewer rules of grammar and usage you need to follow. In most of these emails, the top in tech pay attention to formatting, sentence structure and their words—quite possibly because they knew we’d read them.
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Emojis are 👍🏻
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Look, Steve Jobs sent a :) back in 2007 so I think we’re totally good on these 😀😢😍. But not these 💩🤬.
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No closing needed
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Nope, no “Thanks” or “Looking forward to chatting” or “Best.” All the big-wigs just sign with their first name: Reed, Tim, Steve, Eric, Bill. Exception: Elizabeth Holmes. She seemed to be a fan of the closer, signing a note to General Mattis with a “With my very best regards.”
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And with that I’ll leave you with a…
- Joanna
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Your Phone Is Your License
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Some progress on the wallet-shrinkage front. If you’re an Arizona resident, you’re now able to add your driver’s license to your Apple Wallet and use it to get through the TSA checkpoint at the Phoenix airport. Sure, that’s just one location in one state, but it’s progress, especially considering Apple was supposed to launch this in late 2021. Residents in Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Ohio and these other states, plus Puerto Rico, are up next. For more on how this feature works, here’s my column from 2021.
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Snap Wants to Read Your 🧠
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What if I told you that someday, your smart glasses could read minds? No, that’s not a “Zoolander” reference. (Fine, it is.) Snap announced this week that it has acquired NextMind, a neurotech company behind a headband that lets the wearer control computers with their thoughts. What does Snap want with this tech? While it’s the early days for the company’s augmented-reality Spectacles, Snap’s betting that with a lot of R&D, this will be a hands-free way to navigate the digital world.
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WFH = Work From Hawaii
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While some companies test the waters of work-from-anywhere, Meta execs are diving into the deep end. Members of Meta’s C-suite are scattering farther from their Silicon Valley office as the company embraces permanent remote work. My colleagues report that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri have been spending time in Hawaii, while others are heading across the country to New York
or across the pond to the U.K.
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I have not been shy about my love for chronological social-media feeds over the years. We deserve a way of viewing our feeds that isn’t dictated by opaque algorithms. Finally, Instagram listened.
I wrote about the new feature here. But TLDR: To view posts from accounts you follow in chronological order, open the app and tap the inverted caret next to the Instagram logo in the upper left corner. From there, you have two options: Following or Favorites. Tap Following to view a feed of all the accounts you follow with the latest posts first, or Favorites to view up to 50 of your favorite accounts this way.
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PHOTO: JOANNA STERN / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Every time you want to view your Stories or after you close the app, you’ll have to go back to the algorithm-powered Home feed. It’s sort of like a videogame where the checkpoint is the data-driven Home page.
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PHOTO: KLAUS HARTNEGG
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I love this week’s submission, although for Mr. Hartnegg, his Palm Treo isn’t so much a throwback thing as a current thing. He still uses it alongside an iPhone 13 Mini because, well, you’ll see…
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Klaus Hartnegg from Teningen, Germany
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My favorite feature is definitely the calendar. When there are lots of calendar events, looking at old ones can be very slow. But inputting calendar entries is much faster and easier than in iOS. Plus, the keyboard has a dedicated key to open the calendar. PalmOS is way better with features like the calendar because these devices started as pure organizers—long before smartphones became a thing.
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This is my third 650 from eBay. A small plastic piece broke off, and I had to replace the battery, otherwise everything works fine. The previous ones all developed issues with the antenna: When it loosens, the internal contact to the electronics is bad, and cellular reception is terrible.
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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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I couldn't find a review of alternate podcast apps to use. Apple’s is terribly frustrating from a useability standpoint. Honestly the SiriusXM app might actually be worse. Just wondering if you’ve found a sensible podcast app?—Clint Kaiser from Orleans, Mass.
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I agree: Apple’s Podcasts app is not the best. It’s hard to find, well, everything: episode descriptions, what’s been downloaded, the sleep timer—I could go on and on. For that reason, I switched over to Spotify. There’s an impressive selection of shows, and I don’t feel overwhelmed by the interface. Plus, things are where you’d expect to find them. What a crazy concept!
I also took this opportunity to try out a couple of other apps, including Overcast and Pocket Casts. Both are dead simple to use and have cool features, including a silence-trimming tool, which reduces the length of an episode by cutting the dead air in conversations. Both are available for iOS.
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CARTOON: KENNY WASSUS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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I’m a newsletter N00b and want to know what you think! Reply to this email and share your feedback and suggestions.
This week’s newsletter was curated and written by Joanna Stern and Cordilia James in New York.
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