In 2014, the smartphone revolution was about seven years old and had already fallen into a kind of boring sameness. Big sellers from that time, like the iPhone 6 and the Galaxy S5, all featured a black screen, a home button, and a price tag over $600.
But a new phone from a new company, OnePlus, put some of the same old features together with a different emphasis. Carl Pei hadn’t been at Chinese gadget maker Oppo for long when he met Peter Lau and they hatched a plan to build something to excite enthusiasts at a much lower price. The original OnePlus One phone was maybe a little bulkier than the competition but cost just $300. And it featured a customized version of Android designed to give users more options for tweaking, not more ads or bloatware.
Since then, OnePlus has had some hits and misses, but it mostly stayed as a challenger brand that focused on giving smartphone lovers more of what they wanted in software while keeping the price low. Two years ago, they sent me a 7T in a pleasing metallic blue color to review. Apple and Samsung were selling flagships for $1,000 but the 7T was just $600 with many of the same features. The most expensive OnePlus at the time was the $670 7 Pro.
Last year came news that Carl Pei, whose marketing prowess paired with Lau’s engineering expertise, had left the company. In a blog post, he explained: “The world didn’t need another smartphone brand in 2013. But we saw ways of doing things better and dreamt of shaking things up. Better products. Built hand in hand with our users.” He then added he was taking some time off to decompress. He’s since started a new company called Nothing that is designing a range of smart devices but hasn’t brought anything to market yet.
OnePlus’s latest phones, the 9 and 9 Pro, were probably already in the works before Pei left, but they mark a sharper turn away from the company’s original vision: prices are going up, way up. I just used the 9 Pro for over a week and while it’s a pretty good phone with great software, it also costs almost $1,000. And the hardware and design aren’t as good as Samsung’s Galaxy S21 Ultra, which also happens to be for sale for about $1,000 right now. At least for this phone reviewer, OnePlus needs to drop this Galaxy wannabe and get back to the winning formula it used before.
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Usually, Danielle, Robert, and I write the words in Data Sheet and our ace editor, Karen Yuan, fixes them up for your reading pleasure. This week, though, Karen has produced an outstanding essay about her lived experience as an Asian-American in the wake of the Atlanta murders. It’s worth your time.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com
On March 11, the digital artist Beeple sold his “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” collage in a Christie’s online auction for $69.3 million. On this week’s Brainstorm podcast, hosts Michal Lev-Ram and Brian O’Keefe probe the profitable, perplexing world of NFTs with the help of Fortune’s Robert Hackett. He explains how NFTs create scarcity in the infinite digital environment of the internet. Listen to the podcast here.
NEWSWORTHY
Remember the Misinfo-mo. Big tech was back before Congress on Thursday but not much new ground was covered. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (who featured his blockchain clock in his Zoom background) fell under sustained attack from lawmakers for failing to block misinformation and extremist content on their sites. Danielle watched the whole hearing and has a few highlights. Dorsey was apparently caught tweeting during the gathering, for one. Whoopsie. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tech giants were also among the biggest spenders on lobbying and campaign donations last year.
Shut it down. Elsewhere on the social media beat, Chrissy Teigen announced this week that she is leaving Twitter, where she had 14 million followers including President Biden, because of excessive abuse in her feed. "One thing I haven't learned is how to block out the negativity," she wrote in a final series of tweets.
Pigs in SPACs. The latest startup planning to merge with a special purpose acquisition company? Surprise, it's WeWork, the Wall Street Journal reports. The deal to combine with BowX Acquisition will value WeWork at just $9 billion including debt. That's about one-fifth the valuation Adam Neumann's big idea fetched in a 2019 private investment from SoftBank. But Neumann is long gone and the company has been crushed by the pandemic. Online media startup Axios may also go the SPAC route. The potential transaction, which is still in the discussion stage, would include sports site The Athletic.
Turn the channel. Also on Wall Street, low-priced TV maker Vizio went public but investors weren't too enthused about the company's plans to mix ads and streaming revenue with its hardware sales. Vizio priced its shares at $21 but they ended the day down 9% at $19.10. Robinhood wants to "democratize" the IPO market by making it easier for the little guy and gal to buy in at the initial price, Reuters reports. It wasn't the most solid of reports, however: "It was not clear what kind of arrangements Robinhood would seek to put in place, and no certainty its ambition will come to fruition, said the sources."
The neverending SMS. Last week, Robert offered some warnings about the insecurity of text messaging. In a move making some progress on that front, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile closed a loophole that allowed text message hijacking via a company called Aerialink.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Computer language translation has become commonplace. Surf to a non-English web page in Chrome, and Google will offer to translate. But the various computer systems for translation are limited to a small fraction of the world's 4,000 written languages. The next frontier is developing systems that can translate more obscure dialects when only a small amount of material is available for algorithmic training. Sophie Hardach at the BBC delves into a competition to create the "universal translator." She talked to USC computer scientist Scott Miller.
It is thought that during their pre-training, the neural models learn certain structures and features of human language in general, which they can then apply to a translation task. What these are is a bit of a mystery. "No one really knows what structures these models really learn," says Miller. "They have millions of parameters."
But once pre-trained on many languages, the neural models can learn to translate between individual languages using very little bilingual training material, known as parallel data. A few hundred thousand words of parallel data are enough – about the length of a few novels.
FOR YOUR WEEKEND READING PLEASURE
A few great long reads I came across this week:
America’s Covid Swab Supply Depends on Two Cousins Who Hate Each Other (Bloomberg Businessweek)
The pandemic brought the business opportunity of a lifetime to Puritan Medical Products of Guilford, Maine. But even a $250 million infusion from the U.S. government has done little to quell an epic family feud.
Sherry Turkle: ‘Why was I asked to make Steve Jobs dinner?’
(Financial Times)
The psychologist on difficult parents, the dangerous seductiveness of the digital — and taking on sexism in academia.
On the Overnight Shift with the Amazon Union Organizers (The New Yorker)
At around 4 A.M., two veteran union reps whipped votes outside the Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama, and swapped stories of past organizing efforts at Piggly Wigglys and a condom factory in Eufaula.
How a college dropout in New Hampshire found a Shakespeare secret all the PhDs missed (Boston Globe Magazine)
Dennis McCarthy, a self-taught scholar working from his dinner table, is challenging decades of scholarship on the origins of the Bard’s greatest work.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
What comes next for the Post Office’s proposed changes, including slower delivery and higher prices By Nicole Goodkind
A glimpse into Keith Rabois and Atomic’s new Miami startup By Lucinda Shen
Don’t put Big Tech or big government in charge of the truth By Jessica Melugin
What startups should learn from Robinhood’s pre-IPO stumbles By Nnamdi Okike and Aaron Holiday
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
The Suez Canal, that watery byway connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, has been at the center of the global transportation network for decades but never got quite the kind of attention it's getting this week. A phenomenally large ship called the Ever Given somehow managed to get stuck and block up the whole shebang.
Thankfully for your Friday enjoyment, the Ever Given has also now become the ship that launched a thousand memes. Personally, while I loved the LotR crossover, I would have to vote for a more COVID-themed meme as my favorite. Have a great weekend.
