Ten years after we founded it, The Verge continues to be the best place to discover the import and impact of technology’s place in our culture — but after today, the team will be doing that without me. After 20 years in media, I’ve decided it’s time to do something new. If you’ve been a Vergecast listener, you know that disclosure is our brand, so here’s mine: I’m headed to Google to work on the Platforms & Ecosystems team. I am excited to help shape the future of software platforms like Android and Chrome — and continue to work at the nexus of technology and culture, just in a different way.

(An even fuller disclosure: even as you read these words, I am out of The Verge’s newsroom; I have not been involved in editorial decisions for some time.)

But before I go and before I say a woefully incomplete set of thank yous, I want to reflect on those 20 years for just a minute. We founded The Verge with some grand ideas about how to do technology journalism differently. We started with the thesis that technology — especially consumer technology — creates culture. It seemed like a very big idea at the time, but it has turned out to be bigger than even we could have imagined.

Now, a decade on, The Verge does a better job than anyone at looking at the ways technology shapes culture and is, in turn, shaped by culture. An insight that once felt revelatory is now almost universally accepted. Our coverage has expanded to policy, science, climate, transportation, creators, games, movies, and more — all of which are changing ever more quickly and evolving fractally under the influence of tech. That evolution has been electrifying and, increasingly often, terrifying.

To say technology has changed us in fundamental ways — not just the way we communicate but the way we think and what we are — feels both deeply radical and deeply, boringly obvious. I feel that dichotomy quite keenly because I was the person 25 years ago practically grabbing random people in the hallway and saying, Look At This, This Will Change You. 

I distinctly remember pulling a professor aside and showing them my Handspring Visor PDA. It wasn’t just a planner, I said; it was also an entertainment device with music, a camera, a research device. I created a tiny app for tracking my studies and adding marginalia to digitally scanned quotes. That professor found it interesting but didn’t think it was important. And the thing is, they weren’t necessarily wrong. I couldn’t prove it would be important.

One thing that’s difficult to remember today is that being gadget-obsessed was once weird. It was a thing I had to defend or (more often) apologize for. I used to have to give a little speech defending the idea of fandom for gadgets or pop culture that now seems quaint at best. I would say, “If you’re not a nerd about something, you don’t care about anything.”

I was — and am — a nerd for gadgets and for consumer technology. I think it matters. Though a great majority of people rightly don’t care about the incremental improvements in smartphone technology year over year, those improvements aggregate into a major impact over time. I think our discourse about gadgets is still nascent even this far into the smartphone revolution.

Technology itself is culture, and a phone or a laptop or an algorithmic feed is in itself a cultural object just as worthy of analysis, critique, and serious attention as any piece of artwork or fashion trend. This is why I prefer the term “instrument” over “tool” as a metaphor for most technology. Both are useful metaphors, but “instrument” has connotations about creation and precision that “tool” lacks. And most importantly, it suggests that we have a relationship to the objects we use to create personal expression – to create culture. 

This idea is so deeply embedded in the philosophy of reviews at The Verge that it’s difficult to see — and to a casual reader perhaps indistinguishable from a bare speeds-and-feeds kind of review. A simpler way to think of it is that we always take the things themselves seriously, living in the strange space between “just another phone” and “vital instrument our readers will never be more than a few feet away from and use hundreds of times a day to live their lives.” If that kind of object isn’t worth taking seriously, what is?

Even as I write this, I find it strange. These are insights that were once important because nobody knew what was coming. Now I think these insights are important because we’re living so completely within the world tech has wrought that it’s hard to see them. I’m a fish talking about the water.

A lot of my favorite moments at The Verge happened at CES, the bacchanalia of consumer tech and consumerism that used to matter much more than it does now. It’s long been standard for all the reporters who trekked to Las Vegas to point out that the best products don’t get announced there (Palm Pre excepted!), that it’s a depressing slog, and that all their claims about being the place where the future is first shown are bombast at best.

All true, and we never shied away from those realities in our coverage. But neither did we just dismiss it all as meaningless. We took — and still take — the impact of technology products seriously. One of the things I loved making in this vein seems jokey, but I meant it quite seriously: in the waning days of CES 2015, we shot a video recontextualization of a classic Walter Benjamin essay about how technology was changing art but set in the age of gadgets.

And obviously, CES was always a great moment to work in person with our growing team — and to see each other do great work under intense pressure in strange conditions. People would sometimes ask me how we managed to be first to a story or how we produced a great video, and I always had a hard time answering because the answer was so simple: we just combined planning and organization with a team that understood how to collaborate, worked at a very high level, and cared deeply about getting it right for our audience. Simple. Although it’s been a minute since I’ve directly managed anyone here, one thing I’m proud of is that culture of actually giving a shit while constantly trying to improve the ways the shit gets made.

There is a long-running joke from back when tech keynotes happened in person that I was always the very first journalist in line. I often was, and I took all the ribbing gladly because it didn’t matter as much as the real reason I always showed up so early. Was it because I always earnestly believed those events to be important? Sometimes, but mostly, it was that I wanted to make sure I was doing everything I could possibly do to not let our team nor our audience down. 

I was in a privileged position to be in that line, in the room where the announcements were made and the gadgets first shown, in a spot where I might have a chance to talk to a passing executive. The products and software shown at those events would end up being part of the daily lived experience for thousands if not millions of people, so yes, I did my best to never be jaded about them and took the work of holding companies to their promises as a duty. I’d like to think that caring came through in my work. I know it comes through in the work The Verge does every day.

I’m not naively optimistic about tech in the way many of us once were when the networks and gadgets we use today were just getting started. Neither am I direly pessimistic — I think technology still can do great things for humanity, and besides, it’s not going away, so we should damn well do our best to make it so. 

We are also getting better at talking about how technology affects marginalized communities — and even how it influences war. I personally haven’t done as much as I should have in these spaces, and we can all do better. Though I won’t take credit for the work, one of the things I’m proudest of is how The Verge has stood up for people in the face of digital harassment, bias, and many other problems big tech has brought on.

I do think we’re all getting better at deepening our discourse about tech beyond a reductive spectrum from good to bad. And on my way out the door, I am hoping to make a small contribution to that effort.

So here goes: technology is a method for making meaning.

Ha, of course the English major who studied semiotics (broadly, theories of how meaning is created through language) is bringing it around to his home turf. But hang with me because I don’t intend to count too many angels on this pinhead and build a whole damn system of thought. I just want to try to introduce a useful metaphor, not a definitive truth.

One of the things I took away from Derrida was that thinking about how writing relates to meaning yields more insight than thinking about speech. Rather than belabor the semiotics, I’ll just say that thinking about the relationship between writing and meaning instead of just speech and meaning forces us to contend with just how complicated and rich this business of using language to create meaning out of nearly nothing actually is. 

It’s also true that writing changes how we think and how we relate to one another. It’s an entirely different mode of thought beyond just the logistics of communication. To steal the phrase, it makes us think different. (Shout out to the semiotics nerds who groaned at the mere thought that I was about to make a “think différance” joke.)

Writing reveals insights about what it means to be human and changes what it means to be human — both at the same time. Writing reveals that we need much more than a simple set of abstractions to explain how meaning arises out of language. 

If you haven’t figured out the game here yet, I’ll just tell you: you can just replace the word “writing” with “technology.” Writing is a technology, after all (and so, I’d argue, is language itself, but that’s the English Major in me). 

Thinking of technology as a kind of writing brings the idea of agency back to the foreground. The same methods of thought you (hopefully) learned to read critically and consider whether or not you agree with a piece of writing can be applied to tech. It becomes less monolithic and more clearly the result of the choices and abilities of human authors — choices that you can learn from, reject, or even build upon.

Think about the way your phone’s interface slices your experience into discrete little chunks of linear time while your desktop computer lets you arrange your experience spatially. Think about how the social media feeds and search results you see are the result of algorithms that were designed by people. Most of all, think about how so much of technology involves building a worldview, just like a piece of writing does, and that context matters just as much as the content.

I believe that revealing those contexts has always and will always be essential to The Verge’s work. And while I won’t be a part of this team anymore, I am incredibly excited to watch the people who will continue to make The Verge great find new ways to use technology to reveal how technology changes us. (Which is a tease of a website redesign coming later this year that’s much more than a fresh coat of paint.)

Have I been sublimating my emotions about my time at The Verge into some half-baked philosophy rather than expressing them directly? Obviously. And so, while I really do believe that technology is a powerful instrument for making meaning, I should just come out and say that reporting on it and reviewing it has been deeply meaningful to me. 

I built a career here, but I also helped build this thing called The Verge, and I will be eternally proud of it and grateful for the chance to have done it. I have been at the forefront of watching how tech is changing us, and it’s been exhilarating and sometimes filled me with dread. It’s deepened my empathy and compassion for those around me and for humanity at large. I have been given so much and tried to give back as best I could. Mostly, I’m just thankful.

It’s impossible for me to sum up the past decade neatly in a post and even more difficult to name and thank everybody who deserves my boundless thanks. But I can’t go without praising Helen Havlak for steady leadership, Jim Bankoff for his faith and for building an incredible media company to work at, Dan Seifert for creating an amazing reviews program, Walt Mossberg for his guidance and kindness, Casey Newton for his wisdom, Nori Donovan for her ambitious video work, Vjeran Pavic for being my partner in video, Mariya Abdulkaf for her tireless work on Springboard, TC Sottek for his grounded common sense, Lauren Goode for her friendship, and, well, I could go down the entire past and present Verge masthead with effusive praise. Instead, I will sadly cut it short and thank everybody at The Verge for their dedication to their craft and to our journalistic mission. 

And of course, most of all, thank you to my good and true friend Nilay Patel, a fearless and inspiring editor-in-chief whose least-appreciated asset is his incredibly deep well of empathy and respect for his colleagues and our audience.

One of the great joys of my 20 years in media has been in engaging with our readers, viewers, and fans. The Verge has always had a faith in our audience to be smart and to take even esoteric bits of technology seriously. That faith has been richly rewarded because our audience is smarter and cares even more than I could have guessed. 

I’ve personally been lucky in that, instead of being on the receiving end of a merely parasocial relationship, I feel I’ve been able to have an actual relationship with so many of our readers, listeners, and viewers. You’ve let me take risks, crack jokes, and have taught me so much (and abided my puns, for which I am sorry / grateful). 

All the nouns I’ve got to work with here — readers, listeners, viewers, fans, audience — are too passive. You’ve made it feel like I’m talking with kindred spirits, and I thank you for it. Please feel free to say hey anytime because it’s wonderful to hang with a kindred spirit. You may be hearing from me a bit less, but I will be thinking of you always.

Another year of the Consumer Electronics Show has wrapped up, and it was a strange one: the weeks leading up to it were filled with cancellations due to Omicron, and as a result the show floor was virtually empty. The keynote presentations lacked the usual spectacle; the pomp was overshadowed by the circumstance.

Nevertheless, I found myself surprised to realize that CES 2022 was a slightly better than average year for the show. There weren’t any industry-shaking products announced and shipping — but that almost never happens at CES, and the expectation that it should was always misguided.

Instead, we saw some genuinely good improvements on technology that will actually ship, which isn’t always the case at CES. Here are just a few of my favorites:

• Dell’s XPS 13 Plus is a bold (maybe too bold) reimagining of a classic laptop design. It’s too bad the company mixed some interesting ideas with one obviously bad one: dropping the headphone jack.
• AMD and Intel both had chip announcements that should lead to some solid computers (although an M1-level revolution isn’t on the table for PCs yet).
• The smart home ecosystem is gearing up for a big year with more ambitious products designed to actually work together with the new Matter standard.
• There’s a curved monitor you can rotate 90 degrees so it swoops over your head.
• A home robot that could actually be useful because it doesn’t try to do anything too futuristic, just provide the service of helping people with mobility issues carry stuff around.
• New Quantum Dot OLED technology that should allow OLED screens to be much brighter — plus there’s the CES intrigue of Sony announcing a TV with a Samsung-made panel before Samsung itself announced a TV.
• A portable projector that manages to solve for the actual hassles involved with portable projectors. It was almost like the product manager used these types of products and understood their problems.
• A Chromebook that slots into the high-end spot that’s been frustratingly empty for about two years now.

Then there’s the stuff that will likely never ship but are worth examining as the concepts that they are. Not because they’re inspiring examples of hashtag-innovation, but because they reveal the id of consumer tech: companies that desperately want you to believe they’re innovative, environmentally friendly, and have multi-year roadmaps that are actually realistic.

I’m talking about electric cars, of course. CES is just as much a car show as it is a gadget show — and the cars are all gadgets now, anyway.

There was one concept car that was just unabashedly fun because it was cool and because nobody pretended that it would turn into a real product. That would be BMW’s use of E Ink on the body panels of an iX to give it the ability to change from black to white at the flip of a switch.

But we sit in a strange time where every car manufacturer needs to earnestly project that they’re switching to electric but most of them have yet to ship EVs at meaningful scale. Which means that CES 2022 was filled with more than its usual share of concept cars and paper-thin promises that in [insert year here], the company will be fully electric.

• The biggest car news of the show was undoubtedly the Chevy Silverado EV, but it has a target ship date of late 2023, which is plenty of time for plans to change.
• Mercedes-Benz had a DB5-looking concept whose purpose was to convince us that 600+ mile ranges could be easily achievable in the future.
• Cadillac and Chrysler both had concepts that aren’t really going anywhere (literally and figuratively, I suppose).
• BMW’s non-E-Ink iX M60 looks like a rad performance crossover and its summer 2022 release date seems promising. But the electric crossover space is awash in announced-but-barely-shipped EVs and so the burden of proof is on BMW to make this thing at volume. (The same burden lies on Chevy’s promised $30k Equinox.)
• Hyundai, General Motors, and Volvo each made bombastic autonomous driving claims when it would have been better to let the results speak for themselves when (or if) they actually happen.
• Most egregiously of all to me, Sony said it’s launching an entirely new company to “explore” getting into the car manufacturing game alongside revealing another concept vehicle. I would love to be proven wrong, but it read like a blatantly disingenuous grasp at attention.

So I am clearly put off by the concept cars this year — but I also have a modicum of sympathy because in this precise moment supply chain issues make ramping up any new thing difficult. CES is the place for tech hype, so it’s no surprise that car companies are participating in that. But when the hyped tech is a category of devices that could be an essential part of eliminating our use of fossil fuels, my sympathy doesn’t go as far as it otherwise would. We need EVs to be real and widespread, so looking at concepts that are probably vaporware stings more than if it were a fancy monitor or a weird pretend robot.

But look away from the concept cars (except the E Ink one — that one is still cool). There were plenty of pedestrian laptops, wearables, and various other gadgets that will surely come out this year and definitely seem like improvements on what came before. Nothing worthy of their own keynotes, but all in all a decent enough haul for a weird year at CES. 

Here’s a representative example: one of the staff’s favorite announcements here at The Verge was LG’s 42-inch OLED TV. We loved it not because it was a massive, wall-sized TV but because it was small and useful. It fills a hole that needed to be filled — a TV with superb picture quality that works in a smaller room (or, alternately, a potentially cool option for a gaming monitor).

Here’s one more: L’Oreal’s created a hair gadget that combines a dye cartridge with a brush with vibrating bristles. It handles the amount of dye and makes applying it much easier. It’s not Wi-Fi enabled. There is no app. It doesn’t support Bluetooth. It seems great in part because it lacks those things — and the time that would have been wasted building that tech in was instead put into designing it for its actual purpose.

That’s what I mean when I say it was a pretty good year for CES. There were more gadgets that seemed more useful this year, making the vaporware easier to ignore. Practicality: what a concept.

In 1998, Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins quit Palm, a company they’d founded, to begin a new one: Handspring. They had a simple goal in mind: to eventually create the smartphone. Years before any of the technology was actually ready, their tiny startup began laying the necessary groundwork for what would become the Treo.

In Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone, we document the history of Handspring, from its dramatic beginnings to its tragic end. Along the way, we hear from five of the key players who tried to invent the modern smartphone years before the technology world was ready for it. It’s a story that interweaves the dotcom crash, technological innovations, wireless carrier resistance, and much more.

You can watch Springboard on The Verge’s smart TV apps on Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, and Apple TV. And now it’s also available on our YouTube channel. 

Alongside today’s YouTube release, we’re also publishing a special episode of The Vergecast, the discussion we recorded after the premiere of Springboard at our 10-year anniversary party in New York last October. In it, Nilay Patel and I talk through some of the stories that were left on the cutting room floor.

I’d like to share a couple of them here, too. Both fall outside the scope of the documentary’s timeline, which was focused strictly on Handspring and not the eras of Palm that preceded and followed it. 

The first comes from Jeff Hawkins during the early days of Palm. His company had captured the lion’s share of the Personal Digital Assistant Market with the PalmPilot and some of its successors, which meant that Microsoft was going to take another run at them. Given Microsoft’s dominance, it was an existential threat. Here’s how Jeff, one of the great product executives in tech history, described his approach to handling that threat:

Our first big run in competition was with the Palm V. That was with Microsoft. 

We had been having a lot of success with the PalmPilot, and Microsoft said, literally, Steve Ballmer got in front of their annual conference, and they had a picture of Palm in a target, and it was like, “We’re gonna kill these guys,” you know? “We’re gonna crush them.”

I had engineers writing their resumes. I mean there were people saying, “Oh, man, it was a good run, sorry,” you know? The conventional wisdom was you can’t compete against Microsoft, and I said, “No, we can compete.” 

And I came up with a strategy for it. I said we’re gonna build hardware and the software. They’re only building the software, and they’re relying on other people to build the hardware. So what we oughta do on our next product is create the most beautiful piece of hardware we can create, which they’re not gonna do.

This was the controversial idea; they were adding all these features to their software, tons of features to their software. And I said, “We’re not gonna add any new features to our software,” because if we add new features to our software, people are going to compare our new software features to Microsoft’s new software features, and we’re gonna be behind.

If we come out with a beautiful product, they won’t talk about our new software features. All they’ll do is talk about the new, beautiful product. And then they’ll say, “This product is more beautiful than anything that they got going on,” right?

So this was a controversial strategy of mine; we’re not going to add new features when the Palm V came out. There’s going to be no new software features. We could have had a whole list of things we could put in, but I said that’s not going to help us. And it worked beautifully.

The Palm V came out, and we just crushed Microsoft. They just, you know, they just couldn’t compete at all. And they were blown away that we blew ‘em away.

The second story is a little different — and it’s also addressed in our Vergecast episode today, with some of the relevant audio. After Handspring merged back with Palm, Ed Colligan was running things, and eventually, all eyes were on Apple, which was widely expected to release a smartphone. A few weeks before the iPhone was first announced, Colligan sat for an interview with New York Times reporter John Markoff at the Churchill Club. 

Back in 2006, nothing had actually leaked about the iPhone, and so Markoff and Colligan speculated a bit on what Apple might be doing. Then the conversation turned to discussing competition in general. 

All of this context is in service to correcting the record on one of Colligan’s responses. Somewhat famously, a line of his has been quoted over and over — most often by John Gruber at Daring Fireball in a post titled “Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s Head Seems to be Stuck Somewhere.” He quotes the following real-time transcription — which, as it turns out, is inaccurate:

Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smartphone sector.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

We’ve gotten the original recording of the interview — our thanks to the Computer History Museum, which has received the Churchill Club’s archives after it sadly had to shut down. Here’s the actual exchange, which begins after the Apple speculation.

John Markoff: But what will it look like in 2007? Apple does get in. Eric’s [Schmidt, then CEO of Google] wandering around talking about free phones. He’s got Andy Rubin, who was the founder of Danger doing something inside. He bought Andy’s startup. The phone market could look, I mean, it looks crowded now. It could look intensely crowded next year.
Ed Colligan: It’s intensely big. We just have to get our fair share of the pie. And let me tell you this, it’s not as easy as it looks. You’ve seen Motorola, one of the biggest phone companies in the world enter with a device that was going to take over the world, and it’s had enormous issues.
Markoff: The Q? You’re talking about the Q. [The Motorola Q, a hyped up Windows Mobile smartphone that struggled with technical problems and slow sales]
Colligan: Yeah. And so I just would caution people that think they’re going to walk in here and just and do these. We’ve struggled for a few years here, figuring out how to make a decent phone. The PC guys are not going to just, you know, knock this out. I guarantee it. So, look, welcome, let’s go for it. We can’t stop all that. It’s going to happen, but it’s going to be, I don’t think it’ll be so easy for everybody, as everybody thinks to enter it. It’s a tough space.
Markoff: You’ve been around this industry long enough, and you probably remember, maybe you don’t actually, the famous Wall Street Journal ad that Apple took out in 1981. “Welcome IBM. Seriously.”
Colligan: Exactly. Well, look, you know, I’m not trying to be cocky about it. It is a tough, it’s a tough business. We’ve really struggled through that in the sense of making world class radios that perform on global networks consistently with all the applications that we deliver and…
Markoff: Is radio expertise, something you have to have internally, is that…
Colligan: Yes.
Markoff: Yeah. That’s a black art, still.
Colligan: Yes.

The conversation moves on from there. Colligan clearly saw the competition coming was was likely worried and needed to put a brave face on it, but it’s notable that the more immediate prompt was Google and Motorola. And beyond the specifics of the wording, the overall tone and affect of Colligan’s response (which you can hear about in The Vergecast episode, starting around the 11 minute mark) is also relevant. It wasn’t a prediction that Apple would fail — it was more of an admission that smartphones were hard. And it wasn’t simply about Apple, but also Google and the new entrants running Windows Mobile (which Palm also used on its Treos at the time).

Weeks later, the iPhone was announced and it was, of course, more popular than any Treo. However, it was Android that ended up walking in, becoming the fatal competition for Palm and its subsequent webOS phones. Verizon ultimately chose Google’s operating system and the Motorola Droid instead of the Palm Pre to compete with the then-AT&T-exclusive iPhone.

The Motorola Droid was spearheaded by Rick Osterloh — who got his start making SoundsGood MP3 Springboard modules for Handspring Visors before his company was acquired by Motorola. Palm held on for a little while longer and was acquired by HP, but the Droid was the beginning of the end. Osterloh now runs hardware at Google, and his Pixel phones face competition every bit as daunting as anything Palm once dealt with.