Joanna Stern's last tech column?

I’m Signing Off From This Column After 12 Years. Here’s What’s Changed in Tech.

Phones became our everything, cars became computers, and AI became the new interface. In her final dispatch, Joanna Stern looks back at the consumer-tech shifts that reshaped daily life.

By Joanna Stern, WSJ

Feb. 6, 2026 5:30 am ET

After 12 years with The Wall Street Journal, this is my final column and video as a full-time employee. I’m off to build something new and independent. I’ll still pop up on these pages and at WSJ events from time to time. Can’t get rid of me that easily! Before I go, I wanted to reflect on the past dozen years in tech—in a letter to my first-month-on-the-job self.

Dear 2014 Joanna,

Right now, your iPhone 5 is small, slow and still blessed with a headphone jack. “Alexa” is someone you remember from camp. And the only battery-powered vehicle you’ve driven lately had a holder for golf clubs. All that is about to change.

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m future you—2026 you, to be precise. And I’ve seen some things. Enough things to fill over 500 WSJ columns, nearly 450 videos and 167 newsletters.

A bunch of technologies will collide and completely reshape our lives. When you’re inside it, the progress might feel incremental, at times even boring. When you step back, you’ll see all the markers that pointed to sweeping change—and a few that meant nothing. (Yeah, maybe don’t bother with the metaverse.)

Here are the 12 technologies that really did shape my—or our—past 12 years.

1. Supersized smartphones

Screens will balloon to such absurd proportions that you’ll recruit the tallest NBA player in history to demonstrate how to properly use them. Phones will get multiple cameras and water resistance (and price tags exceeding $1,000). In fact in 2016, you’ll review the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 entirely underwater. A few weeks later, those phones will explode. Literally. Samsung recalled them for battery-fire risk.

The bigger screens start out as indulgences for gadget nerds, but by 2020, nearly everyone is upsizing. This leads to even more people, especially teens, spending all their time “doomscrolling” social feeds. People start to wonder if the kids are all right.

Joanna Stern underwater in a scuba mask holds up a Samsung Galaxy Note phone displaying the message "Dear Diary, I'm cold here."

In 2016, the Galaxy Note 7 was one of the first giant-screen, water-resistant phones. Too bad it was recalled for exploding batteries. Adya Beasley/WSJ

2. Talking speakers

Humanity’s greatest problem—knowing when to take the cookies out of the oven—will be solved. Low-cost, tube-shaped speakers with always-listening microphones invade our homes, allowing us to set timers, check the weather and play music. Amazon is first with the Echo and an assistant named Alexa. Then Google, with a speaker you roast for looking like an air freshener. Then Apple, with the HomePod. This will quickly feel mundane, and before long you’ll be trying to talk to all your appliances.

3. Emojis everywhere

🙂🛫📈📲💬🟰😍✅ (Translation: Emoji use skyrockets. Despite your many stories on phone calls and voicemails, pictogram-heavy messaging becomes the way we communicate.)

4. Vertical videos

The solemn rite of turning your phone sideways to watch and record video will die. First Snapchat, then Instagram, then TikTok will make vertical video the default. (Even though everyone fought me in 2016 when I said this would happen.) But even the best-funded developers couldn’t rotate their way out of a bad idea, as evidenced by the $1.75 billion bomb known as Quibi.

5. Worthy wearables

The Apple Watch—Apple’s first major product launch of the Tim Cook era—will finally make wrist-top computing happen. The first model will have weak battery life, a thick design, limited health sensors, no water resistance and no sleep tracking. And yes, you’ll capture all of that with a camera-equipped hockey helmet strapped to your head. Over the next decade, Apple will fix nearly everything. In 2018, the fall-detection feature (which you tested with a stunt double) marked the moment the Watch went from fun gadget to necessary lifeline.

Not so much with face-top computing: You’ll get the virtual-reality trend wrong a few times. You won’t need to buy one, the future of the office isn’t in a nerd helmet and even Apple can’t change that. The consolation prize? Unexpectedly popular connected-camera glasses. Not from Snapchat, but from Meta. (Oh yeah, Facebook Inc. will change its name to Meta Platforms.)

Joanna Stern wearing a hockey helmet with a mounted GoPro and an Apple Watch in the shower.

In 2015, the original Apple Watch came out. It wasn’t water-resistant, but Joanna wore it in the shower anyway. Along with a hockey helmet. Jarrard Cole/WSJ

6. 5G promises

Cellular carriers will promise a 5G utopia full of doctors performing robotic surgeries while they lie on a hammock. In reality, you’ll get…slightly faster speeds. Plus, a great excuse to shoot a ridiculous video on the field at MetLife. The bigger change: Unlimited data becomes normal and rushing to find a Wi-Fi network becomes less important. Weirdly, T-Mobile will get affordable and dependable, pushing Verizon and AT&T to get more competitive.

7. Algorithmic control

Right now, your social feeds mostly show posts from people you follow, in roughly chronological order. Cherish every moment. Soon they’ll be steered by algorithms designed to keep you inside the app for longer. You won’t recognize half of the videos in your feed, but you will watch them all. Social stops being especially “social.” TikTok will be best at it, constantly figuring out what will keep you glued without you ever telling it. It’s not magic—it’s deep data collection and AI tuned to hook your attention. Good luck fighting it.

8. Zoom life

In 2020, a global pandemic called Covid-19 forces millions to work from home. Like, no commuting whatsoever. To communicate, everyone turns on webcams and installs a little-known app called Zoom. Our work and social worlds get reduced to grids of little talking heads. Google and Microsoft leap to compete with the upstart. You’ll spend a solid six months cranking out daily WFH tech tips for living, working and learning through screens.

9. Apple everything

In print, you’ll write the word “Apple” more than 750 times and “iPhone” more than 650. Some (Android-owning) readers will take this as proof you’re obsessed with the “iCompany.” In reality, you just know no other company is as adept at fusing hardware and software and that it’s the tech most of your readers are using everyday anyway. You’ll praise many products: iPhones, new Apple chip-powered MacBooks, AirPods. And skewer others: the butterfly keyboard, FineWoven cases, walled gardens, Siri and AirPower. (We hardly knew ye.)

And when you and your colleague Nicole report on how thieves are destroying digital lives with nothing but iPhone passcodes, Apple will roll out new safety protections.

10. Electric avenue

Tesla will show the world what happens when you build a battery-powered vehicle from the ground up. It will push cars to become computers on wheels, defined by giant screens and frequent software updates. And you’ll develop a new fear that your battery will die and you’ll be stranded at a Wendy’s parking lot forever. Self-driving cars become real. Waymo taxis, with no one in the front seat, will drive people around major American cities like it’s normal.

Hands on the steering wheel of a Tesla Model Y with self-driving features engaged.

In 2023, Joanna test-drove multiple EVs, including a Tesla Model Y with self-driving features. KENNY WASSUS/WSJ

11. AI craziness

In 2023, an obscure company called OpenAI will release the ChatGPT AI chatbot, and the entire tech industry will collectively lose its mind. Suddenly, we have “generative AI” that can write—and sound—eerily human. Then come the tools that generate images, video and audio, allowing you to clone yourself, and fundamentally shifting our concept of reality.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple will race to weave generative models into everything you touch. With Anthropic, another major AI startup, you will stress-test the AI “agent” idea in the most journalistically responsible way possible: by putting a bot-powered vending machine in a newsroom.

12. Agentic assistance

For this final column, you’ll “code” an app with Anthropic’s Claude Code that analyzes your hundreds of columns. Fun facts! Your average word count is 1,155. Battery-life mentions: 125. Kardashian mentions: Seven. (Hard to believe, but they will kind of fade away.) And yes, despite your editor’s constant trimmings, you’ll still kick off emphatic sentences with “Yes” more than 50 times. Of course you will. (“Of course” shows up more than 60 times.)

I know this all seems unfathomable to you right now. It also seems unfathomable that your next 12 years are full of dedicated readers and viewers who make this job the most fun, rewarding and meaningful one you’ve ever had.

The future is exciting, scary and full of surprises. The one waiting for all of us in 2026 is no different.

You got this,

2026 Joanna