On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPod. The Economist reflected on how the device revolutionized both the music and tech industries.

The iPod’s wheel elegantly removed the scrolling problem. A tiny hard-drive built by Toshiba packed five gigabytes of memory (enough for 1,000 songs) into 1.8 inches (4.5cm), allowing the iPod to offer as much storage as any competitor in a smaller body. And the earlier launch of iTunes meant that every Apple computer had a programme dedicated to managing the device’s contents. Critics wondered whether ordinary music fans would fork out $399 (about $580 today) for such a strange contraption. By 2007 Apple had sold 120m of them, and soon launched the smaller Mini, the tiny Nano and the screenless Shuffle. The classic iPod gained a colour screen, then the ability to play videos, and finally a hard-drive of 160 gigabytes, which was more than most laptops had. Historians of Apple generally note that the iMac computer, which Jobs launched shortly after returning to the ailing company in 1997, revived its fortunes. But the iPod introduced most people to the firm’s aesthetic and technical brilliance. At its peak it accounted for 40% of Apple’s revenue.

It is fair to say IBM was not impressed with Google’s declaration of Quantum Supremacy. In post full of withering put-downs, the computer giant refuted many of the claims made in a paper published in Nature, and welcomed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Recent advances in quantum computing have resulted in two 53-qubit processors: one from our group in IBM and a device described by Google in a paper published in the journal Nature. In the paper, it is argued that their device reached “quantum supremacy” and that “a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task.” We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity. This is in fact a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced. Because the original meaning of the term “quantum supremacy,” as proposed by John Preskill in 2012, was to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, this threshold has not been met.

AT&T Customers have been having voicemail issues for weeks. The Verge tried valiantly to get to the bottom of what is going on, but the situation is not getting much clearer.

AT&T has been experiencing a weeks-long voicemail outage affecting some customers across the country. But it’s hard to tell exactly what’s causing the outage, or how long until it will be fixed — and AT&T is saying conflicting things about what’s going on. Here’s what the company told us, when we asked “A recent software update to some devices may be affecting our customers’ voicemail. We are working with the device manufacturer to issue a patch to resolve this and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.” That statement seems to suggest that only a single phonemaker is affected, and that phonemaker might share the blame for the outage — but that wouldn’t make sense, because AT&T customers are reporting a wide array of different phones are having the same issue.