The last edition of Recharged

The day has arrived to say 'see you later' to Recharged, and this will be the last newsletter on this part of the experiment. It's ironic that I chose to close this down on U.S. thanksgiving, but it also made me want to say thank you, for giving this a shot, enthusiastically reading the newsletters and chatting to me. I learned a lot, and I hope you did too.

To wrap things up, I thought I'd highlight a few of my favorite editions from over the past two years. I covered all sorts of topics, from an array of industries, and it's actually wild looking back on it. There was the piece about the impact of Fortnite on the industry, the time I explained the real meaning of GDPR, breakdowns of Apple's big developer event, and what peak smartphone means for all of us.

What's wild is how much has transpired in the last two years: Facebook went from trusted and beloved to a company we're deeply suspicious of, computer processors were shown to be fundamentally insecure, 5G got talked about a lot but didn't really arrive, Spotify pivoted into podcasting, and much much more.

Through all of this, I wrote some 700 editions with hundreds of thousands of words, and enjoyed trying to find ways of distilling this news for you. Thank you for sticking around, supporting this project, and backing me building it for two whole years! It was such a success, and I love that I could build a better way to get content in your hands, without ads, tracking or dodgy links.

I can't express my appreciation enough, and hope to see you again, when I relaunch Recharged in 2020 (sign up here to get in first).

Thank you, and see you soon.
Owen


Quick FAQ about what's happening today

  1. Your subscription will be cancelled this afternoon, and you'll be credited for any time remaining (even on annual subscriptions) in the next week. You don't need to do anything!
  2. You'll be able to log in and read for the next few weeks, but eventually the archive will be available without a login. Your data will be purged in the new year, so you can be sure that I'm not retaining your details long-term.
  3. No further newsletters will be sent after today, but I'm planning to launch a new format sometime in the New Year.

Tab Dump

Just because I can't resist a few last good links:

Twitter is hitting pause on its plan to delete inactive accounts
In the most Twitter-esque fashion ever, the company is backing away from its original plan after people were pissed they might lose history, until it has a memorialization plan in place.

Apple changed maps of Crimea at Russia's request, within Russia only
Technology is political.

Good read #1: The best books of 2019, according to The New York Times

Good read #2: Managing your friendships, with software