Connect with us

Published

1 year ago

on

Daniel de la Hoz

It’s no secret that Generation Z grew up surrounded by technology, but the way these youngsters use certain features and gadgets may surprise you.

Generation Z, commonly referred to as Gen Z or Zoomers, is made up of people born after 1997, according to the Pew Research Center. They have already witnessed the rise of smartphones, social media and, more recently, artificial intelligence in their lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean they’ve counted out the ghosts-of-devices-past. 

For instance, they have embraced old-school digital cameras. The hashtag #digitalcamera has more than 1 billion views on TikTok after the devices were popularized by Gen Z’s desire to strike a more casual, nostalgic tone with their photos.

But make no mistake, the members of this generation will also school you with their unspoken rules for emoji use, auto capitalization and more.

Here are some secrets to how the youngest generation in the workforce uses technology:

Voice notes

Most Zoomers hate talking on the phone, but sometimes it’s easier to convey tone with your voice instead of through a text message. Enter the voice memo.

Voice memos, also called voice notes or voice messages, are a feature on messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp that allow you to record a message in audio form. 

It’s become a popular way to send notes to friends without having to type long messages, especially among Gen Z. Last year, WhatsApp said its users sent an average of 7 billion voice messages every day.

Zoomers love the voice memo feature mostly because it’s easy to use without having to speak with someone on the other end simultaneously. Whether you have a story to share that would take a while to type out or you just don’t want your tone to get lost in translation, voice memos are a simple alternative to a text.

Proper emoji usage

A group of emojis

If you thought you had emojis figured out, think again.

Emojis are the expressive characters that smartphone users can add to their text messages and social media posts for a little extra umph and pizzazz. The total number of emojis available around the globe was expected to climb to nearly 3,500 this year, according to a report from Statista. 

But as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and with Gen Z, there’s often more to emojis than meets the eye.  

For instance, Gen Z tends not to use the traditional laughing emoji to express joy or laughter. Instead, these users will often use the loudly crying face emoji, which features thick streams of tears, or the skull emoji when they find something funny. When someone shares a joke, a popular response among members of Gen Z is the phrase “I’m dead,” hence the skull. 

Gen Z users will also use the clown face emoji to signify when they think someone is behaving foolishly, or like a clown. The eyes emoji is often used to signify sly or cheeky intrigue in something, and the upside-down face tends to signify that things are not going according to plan. 

Emojis tend to come in and out of fashion among this generation, so it’s very possible that new trends will also emerge down the line.

No autocapitalization

Gen Z often chooses not to use capital letters.

Jake Piazza | CNBC

Much of Gen Z has decided it is out with the capital letters, and in with the lowercase.

For years, Zoomers have avoided using capital letters in texts, social media posts and other forms of digital communication. Many deactivate the autocapitalization feature that comes as the default setting in smartphones.

Discourse on X, formerly known as Twitter, over Gen Z’s lack of punctuation has occurred for years. It’s filled with playful banter calling out Zoomers for improper grammar and asking why Gen Z decided to “murder” the capital letter.

The answer to that is murky. There was never a secret virtual meeting to conspire against conventional English punctuation, and there are still plenty of Zoomers who stick to the auto-capitalization feature.

Some say they like the look of the lower-case letters and the care-free aesthetic that accompanies it. Other internet theories say the lack of capital usage is Gen Z’s dig at capitalism and the establishment. However serious the reasoning, Gen Z’s elimination of the capital letter is one of the more long-standing trends of the generation.

Group chat names

Gen Z names many of its group chats.

Jake Piazza | CNBC

If you find yourself in a text group chat with people from Gen Z, there’s a good chance they’ll assign it a name.

Gen Z labels many of its group chats. Sometimes it’s for practical reasons, like the name of a group project for a high school or college class. Other times it’s for fun, such as coming up with a quirky name for your chat with all your friends or family.

In many messaging services like Apple’s iMessage, any member of the group can change the chat’s name to whatever they please. The only things preventing a name change are whatever unspoken agreements the chat members made, and, of course, the fear that a separate group chat could be started without you.

There is also some practicality to the naming. It allows for easier searching when trying to find the conversation if it is not one of your more recent ones.

Anyone who would like to name a group chat in iMessage on an iPhone can do so by tapping on the icons in the top center of the conversation, then pressing “Change Name and Photo.” From there, you can type whatever name you would like. No pressure.

Digital cameras

Getty Images

From wide-leg jeans to claw clips, Gen Z is known for bringing back popular early 2000s trends. When it comes to tech, nothing says Y2K more than a digital camera.

More than 60% of Gen Z used or owned a digital camera in 2019, according to Statista. The digital camera market is also expected to grow about 2% annually through 2028, and it’s likely Gen Z has a hand in it. 

Zoomers love to take photos and value a good Instagram aesthetic, so digital cameras are a great way to accomplish both. Not only is using a digital camera nostalgic, they have sharper flash and crisper image quality than a smartphone. Because cameras have more physical space for sensors than smartphones, they have larger sensors and in turn better image quality.

Part of the allure of using a digital camera is also the experience. Since the photos are not instantly available on your phone, most Zoomers who use digital cameras appreciate the delayed gratification in having to upload the photos onto a desktop. This means you can take photos with your friends and then forget about them until you have time to sit in front of a computer later, which is a great way to be in the moment.

Using a digital camera is a creative alternative to iPhone pictures, and the process of taking them is a lot more fun. The photos they take are a great way to elevate your Instagram feed or just an exciting way to make your life feel like a big editorial shoot.

Photo filter apps

If you don’t want to take the time to upload your photos to your computer or spend money on a digital camera, photo filter apps are a great alternative.

There are tons of filter apps available to download on your smartphone, and they entail uploading a photo and adjusting the visual properties like brightness, white balance or contrast. Many apps that are popular with Gen Z, like VSCO, have presets that add the filter right to your photo. 

A lot of Zoomers like to use filter apps to make their photos sharper, brighter or more colorful. However, in recent years, Gen Z has revitalized filter apps that create photos with film-camera vibes. 

For example, apps like Dispo or Huji Cam force a waiting period before the photos are available to view, which is meant to emulate the experience of using a film camera. Other apps, like Dazz Cam, have the option for users to upload their own smartphone image and instantly add a film-esque filter to it. 

The reason why these filter apps are so popular among Gen Z is similar to the resurgence of digital cameras: nostalgia and creativity. Film cameras produce grainy and blurry photos, creating a distinct aesthetic that can make your social media stand out. However, Gen Z values convenience, so these filter apps make it easy to achieve the film camera vibe without the work.

Flip phones

Medioimages | Photodisc | Getty Images

Gen Z has also popularized the return of the flip phone – yes, the flip phone. 

Make no mistake, these tech-savvy youngsters aren’t trading in their smartphones completely, but many members of Gen Z have invested in a second phone as a way to stay present at social gatherings. A recent report from Common Sense Media found that teens can receive anywhere from hundreds to thousands of notifications per day, and escaping from the constant barrage of pings can be a challenge. 

As a result, some members of Gen Z are turning to flip phones. These devices can be found for under $40 at retailers like Walmart and Amazon, and their relative simplicity means they can provide some reprieve from frequent Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and text notifications.  

On TikTok, the hashtag #flipphone has more than 830 million views, and users rave about the devices’ old-school cameras, how they are less distracting and how they can serve as good conversation starters. 

In other words, flip phones are helping Gen Z unplug without going entirely off the grid.

Dark mode

Gen Z uses dark mode instead of light mode.

Jake Piazza | CNBC

Gen Z loves to tinker with the factory settings of their smartphones, and one way they do so is by switching their screen display from light mode to dark mode.

In iPhones and Androids, dark mode means that instead of defaulting to bright, white backgrounds, much of the screen backgrounds are black or other dark shades. It doesn’t make anything more than cosmetic changes, so you won’t have to worry about learning new phone commands.

This is another example of a Gen Z trend that has been around for years.

According to posts on X, some members of Gen Z say it’s easier on their eyes, and others like that the setting extends their battery life. Zoomers spend an average of 7 hours and 18 minutes on a screen per day, according to data from Zippia.

It’s not difficult to switch your iPhone to if you’d like to try. Just go to Settings, click on “Display & Brightness” and then you will see the light and dark mode options.

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Technology

Silicon Valley’s early return on Trump investment: Plunging valuations, delayed IPOs

Published

16 hours ago

on

April 5, 2025

By

Silicon Valley's early return on Trump investment: Plunging valuations, delayed IPOs

The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.

Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.

The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.

Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.

Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.

With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.

CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.

“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”

CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.

“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”

Tech will see an 'economic armageddon' if these tariffs stay, says Wedbush's Dan Ives

‘Cave rapidly’

During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”

A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.

Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.

Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”

That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.

At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”

However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.

“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.

Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington. 

Stephen Brashear | Getty Images

Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.

When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.

Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.

C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.

Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.

“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”

— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.

WATCH: Chime is reportedly delaying its IPO

Chime is reportedly delaying its IPO

Continue Reading

Technology

Tesla’s June robotaxi deadline looms as political backlash builds over Elon Musk

Published

17 hours ago

on

April 5, 2025

By

Tesla's June robotaxi deadline looms as political backlash builds over Elon Musk

Elon Musk has been promising investors for about a decade that Tesla’s cars are on the verge of turning into robotaxis, capable of driving themselves cross-country, after one big software update.

That hasn’t happened yet.

What Tesla offers is a sophisticated, but only partially automated, driving system that’s marketed in the U.S. as its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option, though many Tesla fans refer to it as FSD. In China, Tesla recently changed the system’s name to “intelligent assisted driving.”

Full Self-Driving, as it was previously called, relies on cameras and software to enable features like automatic navigation on highways and city streets, or automatic braking and slowing in response to traffic lights and stop signs.

Tesla owner’s manuals warn users that FSD “is a hands-on feature” that requires them to pay attention to the road at all times. “Keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times, be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic,” the manuals say.

But many of Tesla’s customers ignore the fine print and use the system hands-free anyway.

Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have been a source of inspiration for its stalwart fans. But they’ve also caused controversy and concern for public safety after reports of injurious and fatal collisions where Tesla’s standard Autopilot or premium FSD systems were known to be in use.

FSD does a lot of things “amazingly well,” said Guy Mangiamele, a professional test driver for automotive consulting firm AMCI Testing, during a recent long drive in Los Angeles. But he added that “the times that it trips up, you could kill somebody or you could hurt yourself.”

The pressure has never been higher on Tesla to elevate the technology and deliver on Musk’s long-delayed promises.

The Tesla CEO is the wealthiest person in the world and was the biggest financial backer of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Since Trump’s January inauguration, Musk has been leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to drastically slash the federal workforce and government spending.

The DOGE team has been connected to more than 280,000 layoff plans for federal workers and contractors impacting 27 agencies over the last two months, according to data tracked by Challenger Gray, the executive outplacement firm.

Musk’s work with DOGE – along with his frequently incendiary political rhetoric and endorsement of Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant party AfD – has led to a tremendous backlash against Tesla.

Protests, boycotts and even criminal acts of vandalism have targeted the electric vehicle maker in recent months and led many prospective Tesla customers to turn to other brands. Meanwhile, existing Tesla owners have been trading in their EVs at record levels, according to data from Edmunds.

Tesla’s stock dropped 36% through the first three months of 2025, representing its steepest decline since 2022 and third-biggest slide for any quarter since the EV maker went public in June 2010. Tesla also reported 336,681 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of 2025, a 13% decline from the same period a year ago.

Product unveilings and a “robotaxi launch” expected from Tesla in Austin, Texas, this year could revitalize investors’ sentiment about the company and hopefully lift its share price, Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note following the worse-than-expected deliveries report.

On Tesla’s last earnings call, Musk promised investors that Tesla will finally start its driverless ride-hailing service in Austin in June.

To see whether the company’s FSD technology is anywhere close to a robotaxi-ready release, CNBC spent months riding along with Tesla owners who use Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and speaking with automotive safety experts about their impressions.

Auto-tech enthusiast and Tesla owner Chris Lee, host of the YouTube channel EverydayChris, told CNBC that Tesla’s system “definitely has a ways to go, but the fact that it’s able to go from where it was three years ago to today, is insane.”

Many experts, including Telemetry Vice President of Market Research Sam Abuelsamid, remain skeptical. There’s been “no evidence” that FSD is “anywhere close to being ready to be used in an unsupervised form” by June, said Abuelsamid, whose firms specializes in automotive intelligence.

Tesla FSD will “often work really well, particularly in daytime conditions” but then “randomly, in a scenario where it did fine previously, it will fail,” said Abuelsamid, adding that those scenarios can be unpredictable and dangerous.

Watch the video to learn more about the evolution of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and whether it will be robotaxi-ready this June.

Continue Reading

Technology

Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Published

1 day ago

on

April 5, 2025

By

Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”

Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.

More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.

It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.

Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.

Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.

Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.

OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.

Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”

“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.

Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.

“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”

WATCH: Microsoft Copilot beginning of a seismic shift in AI integration, says Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman

Continue Reading

Trending