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Tedium. The newsletter all your other newsletters look up to.

Since 2015, Ernie Smith's Tedium has been hunting for the end of the long tail, and we've yet to find it. But we'd sure love it if you followed us on our journey. Especially now that we're ten friggin' years old and we're still using a Street Fighter II slogan as our subscribe button. Validate the use of obscure video game slang as a successful subscription strategy. Click the button.

 

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Not Universal Enough
The Latest

Not Universal Enough

Microsoft attempts to make the USB-C port live up to its name by trying to force manufacturers to follow a standard. But you know what they say about standards.

By Ernie Smith • June 2, 2025
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New Verse, New Story

There was a certain type of song that seemed to keep cropping up in the mid-’90s. Here’s my attempt to figure out why that was.

By Ernie Smith • May 31, 2025

Arc Of The Broken Covenant

We have at least two recent belabored examples of companies bewilderingly dropping beloved products for seemingly no good reason. Let’s not make it three.

By Ernie Smith • May 27, 2025

Explaining The Vibes

AI gets a lot of hate these days, and it often frustrates me too, but let’s be clear about what it can realistically do. Here’s my attempt to explain by example.

By Ernie Smith • May 25, 2025

The Comic Book Sales Team

Discussing the rise and fall of the “sales club,” a marketing tactic that gained extreme popularity with kids in the 1960s and 1970s. (Warning: This story ends kind of bleak.)

By Ernie Smith • May 20, 2025

Build Your Own Gumball

Considering how the user benefits when a mature project goes fully open-source—even one with the baggage of something like Gumroad.

By Ernie Smith • May 16, 2025

Wrong Merger, Wrong Direction

How MapQuest, a company innovative enough to kill road atlases in one fell swoop, was turned into an also-ran by a bad merger affected by an even worse one.

By Ernie Smith • May 13, 2025

Soup To Nuts

If we’re headed for a less-globalized technology industry, the desktop version of Huawei’s HarmonyOS offers an interesting preview.

By Ernie Smith • May 9, 2025

No Sprouts

Why the fast-casual sandwich shop Jimmy John’s struggled with selling sprouts for so long, despite their obvious health risks.

By Ernie Smith • May 6, 2025

The Finance Team Lost One

For years, many of Apple’s most consumer-unfriendly decisions have felt like an extension of a revenue-optimization strategy at constant risk of backfiring. Thanks to a bracing legal decision, now it has.

By Ernie Smith • May 2, 2025
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