A Newsletter That’s Not About News and Is Not a Letter ⭐

I sent out the Thurrott Premium newsletter each of the previous two weeks. Except that I didn’t, as it turns out: We discovered an issue on the back end that prevented it from reaching most of those who opted in.

And that’s … OK, at least beyond the handful of customer service emails we received since I’m promoting this newsletter again. And that’s because I’m still not entirely sure about the format. The easiest approach, which I took with those last two newsletters that most people didn’t get, is a simple roundup of the previous week’s posts, mostly Premium, hopefully led by a From the Editor’s Desk editorial. But aside from stressing over the issues, I’ve also been thinking about what this newsletter could be.

And I think it’s getting there. That is, I don’t think it will be the same thing every week, or even the same format. Sometimes it will be short. Sometimes long. It will evolve.

The problem with relying on an Editor’s Desk editorial is that they’re not always there. At some point, I’ve told all the stories I have, and I’ve relayed whatever it is I think I’ve learned. Life happens, of course, so there’s always more. But delivering something like that on a weekly basis isn’t always possible. Plus, in the BWW days, when a Thurrott Premium newsletter went out like clockwork thanks to people like George and Tonya, my only regret was that those editorials were only in the newsletter. So some are either lost or would need to be manually found and entered into the site back-end, a tedious task no one wants to do.

Tied to this—and yes, I will eventually get around to some point here, I promise—I hate, hate, hate anything tied to a schedule. I was always bad with deadlines, but thanks to 30+ years of working from home and then, more recently, a pandemic that cut down on my work travel significantly and, I think, permanently, this normal facet of most people’s day to day lives is of even less interest to me. I don’t set an alarm unless I’m flying early that day, for example, and I just kind of do things the way I do things. Balancing this, I work 7 days a week. So I can always get things done. Just not on some 9-to-5 schedule.

That this isn’t entirely healthy isn’t lost on me. Burnout is perhaps a good topic for a future editorial. (Makes a note in Notion. Which, come to think of it, is another good topic.) But for now, the Premium newsletter can occur even if there isn’t an Editor’s Desk-style editorial each week. It can just be something different each week.

Ironically, I actually do have a From the Editor’s Desk-type topic on my mind for this week. But in the interest of mixing things up a bit, here is one example of something different first. This falls into the same rough category as What I Use and those end-of-year round-ups for top stories, hardware, e-books and audiobooks, apps, services, and games, podcasts, and music. Sort of. So it will hopefully be of interest to some.

? What I’ve been watching

I usually put on YouTube videos while I’m taking a break and playing videogames, and those videos tend to be tech-related and/or educational, something I can listen to in the background and hopefully absorb. Here’s a roundup of some of the content I’ve watched (or listened to) in the past week.

? Google Pixel

As a long-time fan of Pixel—as I like to say, I was a fan when it was still called Nexus—I have listened to every episode of the Made by Google podcast, and usually right when they’re first published. For the most recent season, however, it’s now available in video form on the Google YouTube channel. It’s usually not crucial to “see” the show, but I am still fascinated by how the host looks nothing like I imagined. Anyway, it’s worth listening to (or watching) if you’re a Pixel fan.

I’m writing my own series of posts leading up to my reviews of the Pixel 10 Pro XL, Pixel 10, and Pixel 10 Pro—and, yes, I will probably publish them in that order—and so I’ve been mostly staying away from what others are writing. Which is easy, since most reviewers have moved immediately on to the new Apple hardware (see below). But I did watch The Google Pixel 10 Pro Review For Photographers over the weekend, mostly because I still have a lot to learn when it comes to photography and I am vaguely familiar with the channel.

? Apple

Apple held a little event last week. You may have heard of it. Ahem. Anyway, I watched it live last Tuesday like half the planet, but it was called Apple Event – September 9 if you didn’t see it. I rewatched this today to see whether my views had changed since I wrote Ask Paul last Friday. And no, not really. If there were an iPhone 17 Plus this year, I would probably get that model. But there isn’t, so I’ll wait and see what the iPhone Air reviews look like. And then I’ll get that or the iPhone 17 Pro Max in mid-November when we get back from Mexico. Also, the AirPods Pro 3, though I will test the new live translation feature with my AirPods Pro 2 during that trip when possible.

I didn’t watch too many Apple-related videos this past week, but Apple CEO Tim Cook and Corning CEO Wendell Weeks sit down with Jim Cramer stands out, and not for a good reason. Watching Cook and every other Big Tech CEO take a knee to our crybaby in chief is the saddest thing I think I’ve ever seen. And this is just more of that. Drivel.

Speaking of which.

? Enshittification

Cory Doctorow’s new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, arrives in October. I knew this, and I can’t recall what made me check to see whether I had preordered it on Kindle. But I hadn’t, and so I did. And that made me wonder if there were any interviews or other videos related to the book. And sure enough, there are. The first one I discovered is Cory Doctorow at CF 25: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It. It’s a presentation, not an interview, and it’s the best video on this topic I’ve watched. I recommend it highly to everyone because enshittification is the defining issue of this era in our world.

I watched other videos, of course, but with diminishing results, usually because of the interviewers. But here’s a list if you like to deep-dive into your rabbit holes like I do: Enshittification: The Rise and Fall of Big Tech — with Cory Doctorow, Ep. 39: Cory Doctorow – On Chokepoint Capitalism, and Cory Doctorow on the Evils of Copyright Law.

? What I’ve been reading

Tied to all the above, it’s been a curiously good year for personal technology industry books, and it’s been a while since I could say that. If you can only read one of these books (in some imaginary scenario), I strongly recommend Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, which I reviewed back in July. And given his clarity on the problems with Big Tech, I suspect that the Cory Doctorow book noted above, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, will be excellent as well.

We’ll see. But there’s so much more.

The book I’m looking forward to the most, perhaps, is iWar: Fortnite, Elon Musk, Spotify, WeChat, and Laying Siege to Apple’s Empire, which I wrote about last week. And then there’s Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, which got some headlines earlier this year because Facebook/Meta tried to block its publication. It’s an outlier from an industry book perspective in that a lot of it is about how terrible the people are at Meta/Facebook, and they are terrible. But there’s a good history of how the company changed for the worse there, and the last chapter is especially explosive. So it’s worth reading.

When I bought the Doctorow book, I was happy to see there were some other potentially interesting and recently published industry books. I’ve bought the following, all on Kindle (as opposed to Audible), but I’ve either not started them or aren’t far enough in to determine whether they’re any good. They are:

• Yield: How Google Bought, Built, and Bullied Its Way to Advertising Dominance by Ari Paparo

• This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the Web)

• The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counterculture and How the Crazy Ones Took over the World by Luke Dormehl. This one isn’t new (in fact, it’s over 10 years old) and so far, it’s just OK

With the exception of that last one, everything listed above is really about the same topic, which is enshittification. (Antitrust being a key way we can put a stop to these behaviors.) And that helps explain why there are so many industry books all of a sudden. This is what’s the news, and it’s a real and serious issue that impacts literally everyone.

?️ And we’re off

So there you go.

I will test getting this out as a newsletter this week and see how that goes. And then hopefully I can get into a regular rhythm going forward.

Oh, right. There is one more thing.

The title of this article is a riff on something I say when people ask me about my name, which is pretty frequent and usually occurs right after they insist on trying to pronounce it even though I tell everyone it’s not important, and that they won’t get it right anyway. Which is this: Thurrott is French Canadian, but I am neither French nor Canadian.

I know, hilarious. But the reason I got to that is that people always ask. I explain the heritage. And then they ask me if I am from Canada or am French or whatever. I’m not, Thurrott is an adopted name. My original (real?) last name is McKiernan. Which is Irish. So I am half Irish and half Italian. Which my (Italian) mother once said explains why I’m so angry all the time. Also hilarious.