Words matter. These are the best Walt Mossberg Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Who have I picked fights with over the years? Bill Gates. Google. Mark Zuckerberg. Even – despite everything that’s written about my relationship with Steve Jobs – we had yelling matches.
Many tech company execs who visit to pitch products take time to peruse the shelves and exclaim upon various devices they owned in younger days.
It’s often hard to remember that the personal computing era is still quite young. It only dates from 1977, with the arrival of the first mass-market PCs.
Every few years, the feds and the courts change direction or fail to answer important questions. And every day, the Internet becomes more of a platform for lousy ads, for increasing the power of a few rich companies, and for intrusive tracking. It’s too important to leave unprotected.
Our lives and our culture have been significantly changed and improved by hardware, software, and services developed by immigrants.
Amazon makes mistakes, including launching a smartphone in 2014 that was a flop and to which I gave a poor review.
What we did with ‘AllThingsD’, though, was very different. We weren’t taking a newspaper and putting it on the web; we were creating a digital native product, and we did it inside of a very old, stuffy newspaper company at the time.
I spent 19 years as a Washington reporter covering a variety of beats.
I’ve been a regular customer at CVS Pharmacy, the country’s second-largest drugstore chain, for 20 years. I’ve spent a small fortune there over that span, visiting several times a week to pick up everything from milk to toothpaste to prescriptions.
Companies often visit my office, or invite me to theirs, to brief me on new products, Web sites, or software before they are released – usually a few weeks or days ahead of time. I don’t review most of these products.
Though the S8, like all premium Samsung phones, runs Android with the basic Google suite of apps, Samsung keeps trying to duplicate Android functions with its own software. It wants to be a software platform like its rival Apple, but it uses someone else’s operating system and core apps. Awkward.
Though many people mistakenly credit IBM with the first PC in 1981, the Apple II came out four years earlier, in 1977.
It’s no easy task to either make money online as a publisher or to advertise your product in a world where attention is so fleeting and divided.
If you buy the Chromebook Plus and intend to use it mainly as a Chromebook, I expect you’ll have a good experience. But if you plan to rely heavily on Android apps, you’re basically buying into the start of a journey, replete with odd-looking presentations of familiar apps, bugs and crashes.
There are lots of reasons email persists, even as faster and simpler forms of communication proliferate and your personal communications likely have mostly migrated elsewhere. But one big one is that new types of media channels rarely totally kill off old ones, even though everyone predicts they will.
In general, while Trump has been a master of Twitter, he has shown an aversion to, and ignorance of, technology itself.
In 1998, it was possible to make a big-screen romantic comedy about email. Yep, email – the same medium we often think of now as boring and even annoying.
What’s the third smartphone platform? Is it Windows phone? Is Windows Phone going to finally get off the mat in the developed world? Amazon believes their platform has a chance to become the third.
I actually looked at an Apple ad from 1978. It was a print ad. That shows you how ancient it was. And it said, ‘Thousands of people have discovered the Apple computer.’ Thousands of people.
I see retirement as just another of these reinventions, another chance to do new things and be a new version of myself.
Slack users I know, including me, love many things about the service. As the company likes to brag, it’s fast, it’s transparent, and it’s great for brainstorming.
Classic cable TV may have hit its peak, but it’s still a huge force, and the streaming apps of many cable networks still require you to authenticate that you’re a paying cable customer every time you want to use a new such TV app.
When I first reviewed the iPad, I wrote that, to succeed, ‘It will have to prove that it really can replace the laptop or netbook for enough common tasks, enough of the time, to make it a viable alternative.’
Arguably Apple’s least successful core hardware product in decades, the Apple Watch could have been nursed along, like a terminal patient.
People think of Apple as a maker of excellent premium hardware. In fact, many reviewers regard Apple devices as the best you can buy.
Back in May of 2008, the Kindle was still quite new, and we focused on that.
The Secretary of the State at the time was James Baker, who had also been Secretary of Treasury and White House Chief of Staff: very powerful guy. And I went to see him in his very ornate office at the State Department to say I wasn’t going to cover him anymore. It was just a courtesy call.
With Caavo, you don’t have to know the device name, the network name, the service name. Just which show you want to watch, regardless of whether it’s live, recorded, downloaded or streaming.
It’s called the Samsung Chromebook Plus, and it runs on an ARM processor, the same type of processor that powers the vast majority of smartphones and tablets. It was designed in close cooperation with Google.
I’ve known Bezos for decades, since the very early days of Amazon, so it’s no surprise to me that he’s smart or willing to make big bets.
In the tech world, you can reel off great products in several ways. You can have the once-in-a-lifetime gut instincts of a Steve Jobs. You can have the brainiac coding skills of a Bill Gates, Larry Page, or Sergey Brin. Or, I learned, you can have the deep intellectual curiosity and stubbornness of a Jeff Bezos.
Ultimately, I don’t think even a five-company platform oligopoly is good for consumer tech. By its very nature, it handicaps independent companies with new ideas. But it will end one day. I just don’t know when.
I don’t accept any money, free products, or anything else of value from the companies whose products I cover or from their public relations or advertising agencies.
Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of operations, has been called ‘Tim Cook’s Tim Cook’ by some.
I think Steve Jobs is a historic figure. He’s not only a historic figure in business, but really in America.
It was a June day when I began my career as a national journalist. I stepped into the Detroit Bureau of the ‘Wall Street Journal’ and started on what would be a long, varied, rewarding career. I was 23 years old, and the year was 1970.
People always worry that buying tech products today carries a risk of obsolescence. Most of the time, that fear is overblown.
I have on my wall right now a front page of the ‘Journal’ from January 1991, when I co-wrote a front-page story about Iraq firing missiles at Israel. By October, I was writing about tech products.
I was very proud to be at ‘The Wall Street Journal’. I have nothing bad to say about it. I had a great run there. In what turned out to be the final years of my tenure there, ‘AllThingsD’ occupied me more and more and was much more fun.
I simply believe that people who respect their customers and have faith in their own technology products should welcome competition and that consumer choice should be a paramount value in retailing.
The car is the ultimate mobile device, isn’t it?
If I do decide to review a product, I sometimes negotiate with a company the timing of the review but never its outcome or tone. I sometimes strive to be the first to publish a review, but I never promise a good review in exchange for that timing.
The next time you’re driving from New York to Boston on I-95, you should make a little detour in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to visit the Old Slater Mill national historic landmark. It’s the site of what is considered to be the first successful water-powered textile spinning mill in America.
I actually think it’s against the rules at Vox Media to work there if you’ve never dropped an iPhone.
When I walk into a Best Buy, I now see, right from the front door, a giant Apple logo. I see a giant Samsung logo. I see a giant Microsoft Windows logo. And those are stores within a store.
Apple very deliberately – and this was very much Steve Jobs’ point of view – Apple has concentrated its cloud efforts on being invisible. So in other words, stuff just would sync and appear. You change your contacts on one of your devices, and it would appear on all your devices changed.
What could a smartphone do for me that would make people go out and buy another one?
Streaming TV shows, movies, and other types of video over the Internet to all manner of devices, once a fringe habit, is now a squarely mainstream practice. Even people still paying for cable or satellite service often also have Netflix or Hulu accounts.
I was an early user of AOL – so early, I didn’t even have a number after my user name. For me, email was once vital, both for personal and business uses.
Big screens helped propel Samsung to top-tier prominence and helped iPhone sales explode a few years later. But for many, including myself, the biggest-screen models just weren’t practical, because their overall size made them too large, too bulky, and too heavy.
