A biography for Walt Mossberghasn’t been written yet.
“The products I review are typically lent to me by their manufacturers for a few weeks or months. I return any products I am lent for review, except for items of minor value that companies typically don't want back. In the case of these items, I either discard them or give them away to charity.”
“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.”
“Arguably Apple's least successful core hardware product in decades, the Apple Watch could have been nursed along, like a terminal patient.”
“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.”
“I wasn't surprised to find Samsung's OLED screen to be bright, vivid, and clear. It's beautiful, although in viewing some photos and videos, I found, as I have in the past, that - to my eye, at least - Samsung tends to oversaturate colors.”
“I'm well aware that the Internet is global and can't be wholly affected by any one country. But the United States has outsized influence.”
“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.”
“Lauren Goode and I have agreed that the next version of the Mac software - all of them are named after places in California - should be named either Bridgeport or Warwick.”
“It turns out that CVS is one of about 40 merchants in a consortium that formed in 2011 to develop their own mobile-phone-based payment system. The consortium, called the Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX, is in large part all about eliminating, or at least reducing, the fees banks charge retailers for swiping credit cards.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Compared to running apps on a smartphone or, more aptly, an iPad, the app experience on the Samsung Chromebook Plus is distinctly subpar.”
“Has the smartphone begun to mature, plateau out?”
“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.”
“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.'”
“I shifted my career when I was 44 to quit the Washington beats. I had a great Washington beat, a series of them, and I quit to start my tech column, which was a different kind of tech column.”
“I see retirement as just another of these reinventions, another chance to do new things and be a new version of myself.”
“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.”
“Apple is all-in on Apple hardware and still wants you to be all-in, too.”
“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.”