Mossberg: All the Walt that’s fit to print

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

If you became a frequent computer user starting anytime between, say, 1990 and 2007, there’s a good chance that your idea of a PC is a desktop or laptop running a mouse-and-keyboard driven graphical user interface — most likely Microsoft Windows or, to a lesser extent, Apple’s (recently renamed) macOS.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

About a year ago, I wrote a column suggesting what the major tech companies should try and accomplish in 2016. For Google, I said: “It would be pretty great if Chromebooks could, out of the box, run all Android apps — provided that, unlike on the recent Pixel C tablet, the Android apps were able to adapt better to a bigger screen.”

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

News and commentary on almost every imaginable subject is abundant online. Websites, apps, social media and search results combine to create a fire hose of information. But finding a way you like to organize it for easy reading can be pretty hard. That’s especially true if you have a variety of interests and want to see articles and posts from multiple sources, all tailored to you.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

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. That feat was made possible by Samuel Slater, an immigrant to the U.S. who came here at the age of 21 in 1789 from England — a country with which we had just fought a long, bitter war. He had the mill going only a few years after the signing of the U.S. Constitution, and is sometimes referred to as the Father of the American Industrial Revolution.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

Last Saturday, as the New England Patriots were sloppily beating the Houston Texans 34-16 in a playoff game, I wanted to look at the highlight video of a play using the NFL app on my iPad. To watch that 14-second clip, I had to suffer through a 30-second ad for something so irrelevant to me that I can’t even recall what it was.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

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. Nearly every traditional TV network, sports league or video service — even those still primarily grounded in cable or satellite — has a channel or app for playing video on everything from set-top boxes and “smart” TVs to mobile phones.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

A couple of weeks ago, President-elect Donald Trump summoned the leaders of top tech companies to his New York skyscraper for a meeting. He showered them with praise. “There’s nobody like you in the world,” he said in the public portion of the session, adding, “we’re going to be there for you.”

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

For lots of people, the year 2016 can’t end soon enough. Whether it’s the bitter, divisive presidential election; the misery in Syria; the horrible terrorist attacks in various cities; or the deaths of beloved figures, it’s been a lousy year.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

In my many years of covering business, I’ve yet to encounter an industry as strange as wireless carriers. They are simultaneously successful and yet perpetually unhappy with their very trade. They spend tens of billions to build out huge cellular and Wi-Fi networks, and boast that they use smart network technology to serve their customers. But they constantly worry about being just a “dumb pipe.”

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

Almost exactly 15 years ago, in October of 2001, a major consumer tech product appeared that struck a nearly perfect balance between form and function, between beautiful design and practical engineering. It was the original iPod.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

Totally false news isn’t a new thing in the United States. In our fourth presidential election, in 1800, two of our most brilliant founders — John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — faced off in a vicious campaign that involved newspaper editors on the take and numerous false, often personal attacks. Some historians even claim that partisans for Adams spread the rumor that Jefferson was dead. (He won anyway.)

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

Apple is realigning its familiar laptop line, dramatically reshaping and in some ways merging the favorite options for both heavy-duty “pro” users and everyday customers. And the poster child for this more muddled future is the pricey new MacBook Pro, which appears in stores this week.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

Like many tech enthusiasts, I’ve been using a $180 Amazon Echo intelligent speaker at my home for a year or more. And while I love using it for some things — playing music and podcasts, setting timers and reordering items from Amazon — I’ve come to realize that, like Apple’s Siri and all other virtual assistants, its Alexa voice-driven artificial intelligence system disappoints a lot.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

For a long, long time, the PC was king. Whether it ran Windows, as most did, or was a premium-priced Mac, your desktop or laptop computer was your most cherished, most important digital device. For three decades, from roughly 1977 to 2007, people and companies gradually came to rely on PCs, by which I mean both major flavors of computers.

At long last — almost eight years to the day from when the first Android phone went on sale — Google is launching a smartphone for which it designed the hardware, software and cloud ecosystem: The Pixel. No longer will the tech giant be entirely dependent on other companies to present Android in its best light, or on hardware that varied wildly but was never built from the ground up to be the best physical instantiation of pure Google Android.

I wrote last year and last week about why it makes sense for Google to become, like Apple, a vertically integrated hardware maker. I believe this is the right move. I believe it will shake up the industry. But the question is: How did Google do? How good is the Pixel?

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

I’ve been familiar with Siri longer than most people. Way back in 2009 — two years before Apple incorporated the intelligent digital assistant into the iPhone — I stood onstage with the inventors of the service while they debuted it at a tech conference I co-produced. At the time, it was just a third-party app on the iPhone App Store. Not long thereafter, Apple bought the company, and the assistant reemerged in 2011 with a splashy introduction as a core feature of the iPhone 4s.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

Google’s decision to become a full-fledged, vertically integrated device maker — controlling and blending together hardware, software and ecosystem design — may one day seem inevitable, obvious or even a little late. But in the short and medium term, it’s a huge, bold move that will pose new challenges for the other major players in the tech industry.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

I’m writing this paragraph in Word for Windows on Windows 10. The process is as smooth as you’d expect on PC hardware built for Windows, with no hesitation or freezing, and all the features are enabled. But I’m not using a Windows PC; I’m using a three-year-old MacBook Air. And I haven’t had to give over the Air entirely to Windows. Instead, I’m running Windows 10 and its apps concurrently with the brand-new macOS Sierra. For instance, the Windows version of Word is running in its own window, right alongside open Mac apps, including Apple Mail and Safari.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

The tech industry loves to extol its ability to recover from failure. It regularly brags that, in contrast to older, more staid sectors of the economy, tech sees failure as a learning experience and bounces back with something different and better.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

Last week, I interviewed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos onstage at our third annual Code Conference. It wasn’t my first such public conversation with Bezos — we had done an earlier interview in 2008 at the D conference, the predecessor to Code. Bezos joked that he appeared at our conferences “every eight years like clockwork.”

Fifteen years ago, when the time became ripe for post-PC devices that put a premium on integrating software and hardware, Apple was the best-positioned company to lead the charge — and it did. The company’s vertical integration, its attention to detail and innovation in both software and hardware and its willingness to make big bets gave it an edge. And it used that edge to reel off its now-familiar string of game-changing products like the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air and the iPad.

Now, the iPod is essentially gone, and the other products are in mature or maturing markets, with either pretty flat or dropping sales.

For as long as I can remember, our family has used Tide laundry detergent. It gets the job done, and I buy it robotically every time we run out, never even casting a glance at All, Gain or Wisk. My wife and I have spent a fortune on Tide over the years, and we are satisfied with it.

But I would never “Like” or follow Tide on Facebook or Twitter. It’s soap — not a cousin, a colleague, a classmate, an old friend or a business acquaintance. Few people would consider it a source of intriguing ideas or art, unlike publications, or journalists, entertainers, political leaders, academics or advocacy groups. It’s just soap.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode.

Once, Apple’s built-in Mail app for iOS was a revelation. It was easy to use, yet rich with features, like simple account setup, in-line photos, fast search, a good junk mail filter, the ability to handle all the major email services and more.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Re/code by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Re/code.

For the past nine years or so, the smartphone has been such an amazing, versatile, powerful digital gadget that the industry’s desire to create other devices to complement the personal computer seemed to wane. The smartphone is still as awesome as ever, but it has matured, and even replaced the PC as the base computing device in many people’s’ lives. So other gadgets are coming back, often complemented by smartphone apps.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Re/code by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Re/code.

Not long ago, discussions of the modern workplace were colored by complaints about the tyranny of email. Employees, especially in office jobs, felt compelled to constantly monitor their work email accounts, even at nights and on weekends. Giant email chains were used to clumsily discuss vital work issues. Workers got roped into things they didn’t need to care about via reply-all or company-wide emails.