Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Thursday, January 26,

2023. I'm Brian McCullough. Today I get all metaphysical

about where the tech industry is going right now with a record

slowdown in smartphone shipments, Masa Sansa saun seemingly misplacing his investing shoes,

Meta and Busvie joining forces to stave off irrelevancy and universities offering degrees in AI for the first time.

Oh, and are you sure you want to spin up that Mastodon server?

Here's what you missed today in the world of Tech.

Maybe it's because the five-year anniversary of this show is coming up soon,

and I've been reflecting on how different covering the tech industry is all of the sudden, how much different it is even from 18 months ago. We've discussed this ad nauseum, I know, but the whole conceit of covering tech as an industry conquering all before it

eating the world as it were seems to be on pause indefinitely at least broader

recession or not it's unmistakable that tech as an industry or at least as a vibe is in

recession data point number whatever. What led to the decade-long tech bull

market that we just recently left indisputably I would say it was the move

to mobile and cloud computing. Well, worldwide smartphone shipments declined 18.3% year over year to just 300 million units in

Q4 of last year, the largest ever drop in a single quarter. Again, largest drop ever seen.

Apple dropped 14.9%, Samsung, 15.6% and Jowme 26% and Jowme 26.3%.

Quoting I.

We have never seen shipments in the holiday quarter come in lower than the previous quarter.

However, we can demand and high inventory cause vendors to cut back drastically on shipments,

said Nabila Popal, research director with IDC's

worldwide tracker team.

Heavy sales and promotions during the quarter helped deplete existing inventory rather than

...