The note's real claim is that higher education would not be challenged by better textbooks. It would be challenged by instant access to knowledge leaving the institution.
It overreaches. Colleges did not collapse, TV did not get remade in five years, and the phone did not remain a utopian social layer. But it caught the pressure: phones made information portable, contextual, and close enough to ordinary life that the institution no longer owned the delay.
The useful sentence is still "the perfect medium": not the smartphone by itself, but instant access to what you need, when you need it, with enough confidence to act.
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Information delivered instantly will be more powerful than anything else to ever happen in or to educational institutions, and it will be the factor that shuts them out. Programs will contribute.
The dream is to see hundreds of thousands of kids be able to walk up to their college withdrawal office with a smile on their face because they know there are stable and better alternatives out there.
TV will be revolutionized in the next five years, most likely by smartphones. Presents valid reason to invest in Apple again.
The reason educational institutions haven't changed is because they're too ancient, locked in tenure, and stubborn. The only thing that will fight them is alternate forces: instant access to information that makes it valid not to go to college; online programs, not just YouTube videos, but programs through schools, will challenge higher ed. School is finally changing now, and hasn't changed for the past 200 years, because we now finally have access to information faster, online, on our phones, on our watches, and soon to be served in front of us in real time, answers to questions in hologram display, or in contacts adjusting to context of current situation or thought train. The future of knowing everything instantly is what will put higher education out of business, not the better textbook solution.
I've worked full-time for two years, one year for an education tech company, and one for a financial tech company. During my time working at the financial company, I learned that software can and is replacing real human roles, ones that serve as careers for individuals: teachers, financial advisors, even doctors.
During the education tech company, I learned that execution is more important than the idea at Noodle, and at Flat World, your people create your company. This company won't be nearly as successful as the financial tech company because a) the culture is crucial and b) the future is determined by easier ways to do things, not competing platforms.
Facebook isn't the next Myspace because Facebook has every piece of data about you that the platforms of the next ten years will be built on.
Phones are the best thing to happen to a specific generation in a long, long time. Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook are connecting people in an almost utopian way that none of us would have ever envisioned. Bottom line - we love our phones, and people aren't scared to admit it.
The future is in digital platforms, and a lot of experiences will be built off of our mobile phone data - the all-knowing, the seed for all creation; the perfect medium: the smartphone.
Apple is not just a company that makes phones. Apple is a company that creates the future. They're going to remind us of that once they move past the phone and dominate the watch, then TV.
I found another note from 2015.
This one was written on March 22, at 12:24 AM. It is earlier than the May note about the future not being in a mobile app, and it has a different center of gravity. The May note was about moments. This one is about institutions.
The sentence that matters is not the Apple stock advice. It is this:
The future of knowing everything instantly is what will put higher education out of business, not the better textbook solution.
That is a real thesis.
It is rough. It is too sweeping. It wants the college withdrawal office to become a victory lap, which is a very 21-year-old way to imagine institutional change. But the underlying pressure is correct. Higher education was not going to be challenged by a nicer PDF, a cleaner learning management system, or a better textbook marketplace. It was going to be challenged by the fact that access to knowledge was leaving the institution.
The institution used to own the room, the expert, the sequence, the credential, and the delay.
The phone started eating the delay.
The better textbook trap
The note is angry at the wrong object in a useful way.
It keeps saying that better educational products are not enough. That is the important part. A better textbook still accepts the old world. It assumes the course, the semester, the gate, the institution, and the student waiting to be served.
The note is trying to say that the real competitor is not a better version of school. The real competitor is a different answer to the job school used to do.
Instant access to information. Online programs. Contextual answers. Phones. Watches. Eventually displays and interfaces that understand the situation before the person has finished turning the question into a search.
That is not a textbook problem.
That is a power problem.
The phone was the wedge
The funny thing is that this note is more pro-phone than the May note.
Two months later, I would write that the future was not in a mobile app. Here, I was calling the smartphone "the perfect medium." Those do not actually contradict each other.
The phone was the wedge. The app was just one temporary shape the wedge took.
The phone mattered because it put the internet into the ordinary moment. It made knowledge portable, social, visual, searchable, and emotional. It put answers in a pocket, then on a wrist, then in the expectation field around every question. That is why the line about "hologram display" and "contacts adjusting to context" still lands. The words are awkward, but the direction is clear: information would stop being a destination and start appearing inside the situation itself.
That is now the whole interface fight.
What aged badly
The higher education death sentence aged badly in the obvious way. Colleges did not go out of business. TV was not revolutionized in five years by smartphones. Facebook did not remain the clean foundation for the next decade of platforms. Calling social media "almost utopian" now feels like opening a time capsule and finding a live wire inside.
But I do not want to overcorrect into cynicism.
The note was right that software was replacing roles, not just tasks. It was right that information access was becoming the pressure point beneath education. It was right that phones were not merely devices. They were behavioral infrastructure. It was right that Apple was not interesting because it made phones. Apple was interesting because it could make a new default feel inevitable.
The note was also right about execution and culture, even if it says it in the bluntest possible way. People create the company. Easier ways to do things beat competing platforms. Distribution beats purity. The world does not adopt the thing with the best argument. It adopts the thing that changes the path of least resistance.
That is still true.
The old obsession
What I like about this note is not that it predicted everything. It did not.
What I like is that the same obsession keeps showing up under different costumes.
Knowledge should arrive when it matters. Institutions lose power when the interface changes. Software becomes serious when it changes what people can do without asking permission. The future is not a better version of the old object. It is a new situation where the old object no longer feels necessary.
At 21, I was saying that about college, textbooks, phones, Apple, Facebook, watches, TV, and jobs.
Too much, obviously.
But the center was there.
The real medium was never just the smartphone. The real medium was instant access to the thing you needed, in the moment you needed it, with enough confidence to act.
That is still the thing everyone is trying to build.