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.

This is my last weekly column for The Verge and Recode — the last weekly column I plan to write anywhere. I’ve been doing these almost every week since 1991, starting at the Wall Street Journal, and during that time, I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know the makers of the tech revolution, and to ruminate — and sometimes to fulminate — about their creations.

Now, as I prepare to retire at the end of that very long and world-changing stretch, it seems appropriate to ponder the sweep of consumer technology in that period, and what we can expect next.

Let me start by revising the oft-quoted first line of my first Personal Technology column in the Journal on October 17, 1991: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn’t your fault.” It was true then, and for many, many years thereafter. Not only were the interfaces confusing, but most tech products demanded frequent tweaking and fixing of a type that required more technical skill than most people had, or cared to acquire. The whole field was new, and engineers weren’t designing products for normal people who had other talents and interests.

But, over time, the products have gotten more reliable and easier to use, and the users more sophisticated. You can now hand an iPad to a 6-year-old and, with just a bit of help, she will very likely learn how to operate it quickly. That’s amazing, given that the iPad is far more powerful than any complex PC I was testing in the 1990s. Plus, today’s hardware and software rarely fails catastrophically like PCs did so often in the old days.

So, now, I’d say: “Personal technology is usually pretty easy to use, and, if it’s not, it’s not your fault.” The devices we’ve come to rely on, like PCs and phones, aren’t new anymore. They’re refined, built with regular users in mind, and they get better each year.

Anything really new is still too close to the engineers to be simple or reliable. Many people aren’t going to be able to hook up a dedicated virtual reality system, or want to wear the headset. And most of us can’t yet trust Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant for an accurate, useful answer much of the time. But it’s early days for those technologies.

So: Where are we now, and what’s coming?

The lull

As I write this, the personal tech world is bursting with possibility, but few new blockbuster, game-changing products are hitting the mainstream. So a strange kind of lull has set in.

The multi-touch smartphone, launched 10 years ago with Apple’s first iPhone, has conquered the world, and it’s not done getting better. It has, in fact, become the new personal computer. But it’s a maturing product that I doubt has huge improvements ahead of it. Tablets rose like a rocket but have struggled to find an essential place in many people’s lives. Desktops and laptops have become table stakes, part of the furniture.

The big software revolutions, like cloud computing, search engines and social networks, are also still growing and improving, but have become largely established.

Consumer drones and robotics are in their infancy, a niche, with too few practical uses as yet.

The biggest hardware and software arrival since the iPad in 2010 has been Amazon’s Echo voice-controlled intelligent speaker, powered by its Alexa software assistant. It arrived in 2015, and was followed last year by the similar Google Home device. I expect others.

But the Echo and Alexa are just getting started. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told me in an interview last year that artificial intelligence was not just in the first inning of a long baseball game, but at the stage where the very first batter comes up. And, while Amazon doesn’t release sales figures for the Echo family, third-party estimates say that, while they are growing fast, they were still well below 10 million units last year. For comparison, even in a relatively weak period, Apple sold 50 million much costlier iPhones in just 90 days last quarter, and the combined total sales of the far more prevalent Android phones no doubt were much greater.

Google just announced that there are now two billion Android devices in active monthly use globally, and Apple announced a year and a half ago that there were over one billion iOS devices in active use. These are mostly smartphones, and they are no longer novel.

Wait for it

But just because you’re not seeing amazing new consumer tech products on Amazon, in the app stores, or at the Apple Store or Best Buy, that doesn’t mean the tech revolution is stuck or stopped. In fact, it’s just pausing to conquer some major new territory. And, if it succeeds, the results could be as big or bigger than the first consumer PCs were in the 1970s, or even the web in the 1990s and smartphones in the first decade of this century.

All of the major tech players, companies from other industries and startups whose names we don’t know yet are working away on some or all of the new major building blocks of the future. They are: Artificial intelligence / machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics and drones, smart homes, self-driving cars, and digital health / wearables.

All of these things have dependencies in common. They include greater and more distributed computing power, new sensors, better networks, smarter voice and visual recognition, and software that’s simultaneously more intelligent and more secure.

Examples of all these technologies already exist, but they are early, limited and mainly attractive to enthusiasts. Compared to what’s coming, they are like the Commodore PET (look it up, kids) or those huge car phones in old movies.

Ambient Computing

I expect that one end result of all this work will be that the technology, the computer inside all these things, will fade into the background. In some cases, it may entirely disappear, waiting to be activated by a voice command, a person entering the room, a change in blood chemistry, a shift in temperature, a motion. Maybe even just a thought.

Your whole home, office and car will be packed with these waiting computers and sensors. But they won’t be in your way, or perhaps even distinguishable as tech devices.

This is ambient computing, the transformation of the environment all around us with intelligence and capabilities that don’t seem to be there at all.

It reminds me of a great Saturday Night Live skit from 2005, where cast member Fred Armisen, playing Steve Jobs, shows off an ever-smaller series of iPods, finally producing a model that’s literally invisible, yet holds “every photograph ever taken.”

Just in recent weeks, Facebook’s famed researcher Regina Dugan has announced that her secretive team is working on using the brain to type, and to control augmented reality devices. They are also developing ways to “hear” through your skin.

Their idea is that, even if augmented reality gets built into standard eyeglasses and can impose sophisticated virtual objects onto real life, it won’t be seamless if you have to push buttons, use touch controls or utter commands.

Apple reportedly has a secret project to monitor the glucose levels of diabetics with new noninvasive sensors, ending the need for daily test needles.

Google has changed its entire corporate mission to be “AI first” and, with Google Home and Google Assistant, to perform tasks via voice commands and eventually hold real, unstructured conversations.

Several small firms are pursuing the prospect of recharging mobile devices with power sent through the air, so power cords won’t be around.

I expect to see much of this new ambient computing world appear within 10 years, and all of it appear within 20.

Why it matters

Every one of these efforts has the potential to create a new world that’s unrecognizable. It’s a radically different way of thinking about tech.

When the internet first arrived, it was a discrete activity you performed on a discrete hunk of metal and plastic called a PC, using a discrete software program called a browser. Even now, though the net is like the electrical grid, powering many things, you still use a discrete device — a smartphone, say — to access it. Sure, you can summon some internet smarts through an Echo, but there’s still a device there, and you still have to know the magic words to say. We are a long way from the invisible, omnipresent computer in the Starship Enterprise.

Worse, those early computers were in your way. They were hulking objects that demanded space and skill. Even now, if you look around a restaurant, you’ll see smartphones on the tables, waiting to be used.

Computers have gotten vastly easier to use, but they still demand attention and care, from charging batteries to knowing which apps to use and when to use them.

Technology has been a great thing, but it’s been too unnatural, an add-on to life, for 40 years. What’s going on in the labs has the promise to change that.

The dark side

Some of you who’ve gotten this far are already recoiling at the idea of ambient computing. You’re focused on the prospects for invasion of privacy, for monetizing even more of your life, for government snooping and for even worse hacking than exists today. If the FBI can threaten a huge company like Apple over an iPhone passcode, what are your odds of protecting your future tech-dependent environment from government intrusion? If British hospitals have to shut down due to a ransomware attack, can online crooks lock you out of your house, office or car?

Good questions.

My best answer is that, if we are really going to turn over our homes, our cars, our health and more to private tech companies, on a scale never imagined, we need much, much stronger standards for security and privacy than now exist. Especially in the U.S., it’s time to stop dancing around the privacy and security issues and pass real, binding laws.

And, if ambient technology is to become as integrated into our lives as previous technological revolutions like wood joists, steel beams and engine blocks, we need to subject it to the digital equivalent of enforceable building codes and auto safety standards. Nothing less will do. And health? The current medical device standards will have to be even tougher, while still allowing for innovation.

The tech industry, which has long styled itself as a disruptor, will need to work hand in hand with government to craft these policies. And that might be a bigger challenge than developing the technology in the first place.

The oligopoly

Most of the work on this, especially what we and others can learn about and report about, is coming from the giant companies that make up today’s tech oligopoly — Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

But, as tectonic shifts like this occur in technology, oligopolies get shaken up. For instance: today, Apple is the biggest of the group. By all reports, it’s working seriously on AR, self-driving cars and health initiatives. But its strict and admirable privacy policies make it harder for it to gather the vast amounts of data required for the best machine learning.

Microsoft is still trying to find a way to meld its formidable software and cloud expertise with a significant hardware business. The ad-based business models of Facebook and Google, now so dominant, could prove fickle. And Amazon has only had one really giant hardware hit — the Kindle — in its existence.

But, even if these oligarchs all do fine, and their ranks swell by one or two, the country and the world will have to ask if they have too much power — and, if so, how to curb it without killing progress.

The bottom line

We’ve all had a hell of a ride for the last few decades, no matter when you got on the roller coaster. It’s been exciting, enriching, transformative. But it’s also been about objects and processes. Soon, after a brief slowdown, the roller coaster will be accelerating faster than ever, only this time it’ll be about actual experiences, with much less emphasis on the way those experiences get made.

As a gadget-lover, this makes me a little sad. But, as a tech believer, it’s tremendously exciting. I won’t be reviewing all the new stuff anymore, but you can bet I’ll be closely watching this next turn of the wheel.

Thanks for reading. Mossberg out.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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’re a smartphone company whose last major product caused fires and explosions and had to be removed from the market, you’d want to make sure your next big phone model really stands out and is an object of desire. Samsung did exactly that with the new Galaxy S8, which goes on sale this week for the very hefty starting price of $750 at most U.S. carriers ($720 at Verizon).

The S8 is a fast, versatile phone with fine cameras. But its biggest benefit by far is this: It fits a big screen into a surprisingly small, comfortable to hold, easy-to-carry body. The end result is a visual and tactile triumph.

There are some trade-offs that result from this design feat. And there are some unrelated aspects of the S8 that I found wanting in several days of testing. But I have never before held a phone that delivered so much screen in such a comfortable, beautiful way.

As with every new smartphone — especially premium models and especially Samsung’s (which often seem to have lots of wacky software) — there are many, many features packed in behind the S8’s vivid 5.8-inch screen. But most of them are either variations of old ideas, or catch-ups to competitors.

So I’m going to limit this column to the highlights of the S8 — the things I believe most of you will want to know, and which I stressed in my testing over the past few days. I’m also omitting the bigger model, the S8+, which I didn’t test. For more deep details, I happily direct you to my colleague Dan Seifert’s deep-dive review.

Design

We all know that many consumers seem to like smartphone screens so big that they were once laughed at. 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.

Samsung has drastically altered the rule that big screens mean huge phones. Even this smaller of the new Galaxy S models has a larger screen than the biggest iPhone, but it’s much narrower and easier to hold and to slip into a pocket. Samsung achieved this in three ways. First, it vastly shrunk the bezels. Second, using curved glass, it gave the screen useful territory right up to the edge, where it seems to melt into the body of the phone.

More importantly, it changed the aspect ratio of the screen and the dimensions of the body to make them taller and narrower. This makes the phone much easier to handle.

Samsung says the S8 has 36 percent more viewing area than last year’s Galaxy S7, and that the screen covers 83 percent of the front of the phone. That means you can see longer lists of items, and more of a web page or document.

To compensate for the thin bezels, Samsung joined most other Android phone makers in ditching the physical home button and replaced it with an icon, which can sometimes even be hidden, but which (as on the iPhone 7) has a tactile response built in to make it feel like you’re pressing a button.

The downside is that the phone is taller than standard-shaped models like the iPhone 7 and the Google Pixel, and pokes out of some pockets and purse compartments, which entirely contain those other models.

A more serious downside is that the screen is now so tall that it can be impossible in one-handed mode to easily reach the notification shade or the top rows of icons. So Samsung has a feature you can engage that shrinks the whole screen image to a shrunken vestige of itself. This makes reaching easy, but it also makes everything look tiny and ugly. I prefer Apple’s technique of just moving down the top of the screen image, at full size, if you find something hard to reach.

Also, a surprising number of popular apps, like Netflix and Dark Sky and Pocket, don’t fully fill the new elongated screen unless you press an icon on them.

Screen quality

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.

Battery

It was a battery problem in the exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7 that caused all the trouble last year. So Samsung chose not to increase the size of the batteries in this year’s S model, even though the screens are larger.

Nevertheless, in my tests, I found the battery life to be good enough to last a full day at 75 percent brightness. For instance, on one day, I streamed two movies and a TV show from Netflix, did a bunch of photo and video shooting, placed a few phone calls, and did email, texting and social media posting and reading. The battery lasted about 10 hours. As it was a Saturday, the phone wasn’t receiving nearly the typical weekday volume of emails, texts, tweets and Facebook posts. But I still think that, for most people who aren’t likely to be watching all that video on a work day, the S8 would get them through the day.

Cameras

In both indoor and outdoor scenarios, the S8’s rear camera — largely unchanged from last year — took really good pictures and videos. However, in my judgement, the Google Pixel, with which I compared it shot for shot, took slightly better pictures and videos. The color and detail on shots of flowers and a dogwood tree, whether from afar or up close, were just a little truer and sharper from the Pixel’s camera. In one indoor shot of a stuffed figure propped next to a plant, the S8 camera back-focused on the plant. The Pixel focused on the figure and had much better results.

You won’t be unhappy at all with the S8’s rear camera, but I can’t call it the best on the market — even the Android market.

As for the front camera, it’s got a bit higher eight-megapixel rating this year, and sports autofocus. It beat the Pixel’s front camera at selfies in my test, but not by much.

Assistant

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.

This year, the main example of that is something called Bixby, a built-in assistant that supposedly distinguishes itself by focusing on managing the tasks on the phone, as opposed to knowing things going on in the wider world.

However, the voice part of Bixby isn’t even shipping, and Samsung says it won’t be available until later this spring. For now, Bixby (which has its own dedicated key) is mainly a collection of information cards that looks like what Android and iOS offer. Far from being focused on phone tasks, it shows me things like what’s trending on Twitter and Facebook, calendar items, reminders, News and Sports.

But I am unimpressed with Bixby, at least for now. For one thing, the S8 also has Google Assistant, and it, too, can manage things on your phone. For instance, Google Assistant on the S8 had no trouble launching multiple apps, finding photos of specific items in my photo library, telling me the next item on my calendar or playing a song.

The one kind of cool part of Bixby is that, if you press an icon while using the camera, it can identify and even help you shop for objects the lens sees. This is not a new thing — it has been on the Amazon iPhone app forever — but it did work, mostly. For instance, it easily identified a box of Kleenex and a package of Twizzlers. Ironically, it had more trouble with a Samsung-branded Chromebook. This feels like one of those tech features that demos well but isn’t used much.

Maybe the voice part of Bixby, when it arrives, will blow us all away. But based on what I’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t buy the S8 to get Bixby.

Major downsides

In my tests, the Galaxy S8 had the least reliable, most frustrating biometric security measures I’ve ever tested. The fingerprint sensor has been moved to a high, awkward position on the rear, and I found that it constantly failed to recognize either of my two index fingers. Even enrolling the fingers was slow and jerky.

Facial recognition — in addition to being relatively insecure, according to Samsung — also failed almost all the time for me. And the same was true for a more-secure method, iris recognition, which was slow even in the minority of times it worked.

The result: I wound up typing in a PIN almost all the time.

I also found the Samsung keyboard and accompanying Bixby dictation to be far worse than their standard Android counterparts.

And then there was the bloatware. Samsung has cut way back on its once-laughably complex settings menus and some other features of its Android skin. But it still thinks it’s a software company. So, on my test unit, there was a passel of unnecessary, duplicative Samsung software, and another folder chock-full of bloatware from the carrier, T-Mobile.

I much prefer the clean experiences on my iPhone and Pixel. So does everyone I know. Maybe it’s finally time for Samsung to emulate Apple and use its brand power to bar pre-installed carrier software. Maybe it’s also time for Samsung to either get fabulous at its own software or stop trying.

Bottom Line

If you have $750 or so lying around (or enough for the installment plans) and like a big screen, the Galaxy S8 is a great choice. You’ll get a beautiful design, a wonderful feel in the hand, a fine camera, good battery life and a great display. Just don’t count on any revolutionary new features.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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.

Despite the never-ending debate on the question of the role of government in America, there’s been a strong tradition of protecting our undisputed, important natural treasures, or taking on great common engineering challenges. Few Americans oppose the policies — many of which originated with Republicans — that bar or limit commercial exploitation of unique places like Yosemite National Park or the Gettysburg battlefield.

Even people who opposed Dwight D. Eisenhower liked the interstate highway system, and John F. Kennedy’s most bitter political rival, Richard Nixon, cheered on the astronauts who fulfilled JFK’s challenge of landing humans on the moon. President Trump campaigned on creating a massive, long-overdue, national infrastructure project.

So, in the spirit of this grand American tradition, I’m going to propose here a way we can protect the internet, at least in America, from both political whiplash in D.C. and the constant commercial overreach that threatens it. I say we treat the internet as both a unique resource and a great common engineering project, something that merits government protection.

Stop typing that angry, snarky tweet right now, and let me state a few big caveats.

Some up-front caveats

First, I am in no way suggesting any sort of government ownership, management or censorship of the internet. I would abhor any of these, even if they were possible. What I am suggesting is that the government rise above all the death-by-a-thousand-cuts regulations and statutes it passes already about the internet and simply adopt the role of its protector. You know, kind of like an offensive line protecting the quarterback.

The thorny details of what that means would remain to be worked out, but the principle would be that there’d be a legal wall whose sole purpose is to protect the internet so it can flourish naturally.

Second, I am not suggesting some dreamy de-commercialization of the internet. It’s too late for that, and it’s not consistent with American capitalism anyway. But, in protecting the internet, we’d have to find a balance. For instance, you’d never be able to pave over Yosemite Valley and build condos, but there are plenty of commercial tour companies that will take you there. You couldn’t build a McDonald’s on the graves of fallen soldiers, but the entire economy of Gettysburg seems pretty much built on the tourism the battlefield attracts. We need a way to protect the resource that enables all the other economic activity.

Third, I have not been living under a rock since November. I’m well aware that the current administration, the current Congressional leadership and the current regulatory agency chiefs would neither want to give up power nor curb business interests. Not to mention that, even in 2017, while many senior federal officials can tweet, way too few really understand the internet.

But administrations and party majorities come and go, though there are plenty of corporate-influenced Democrats too. Times change. And the situation online keeps getting worse, with privacy, security, net neutrality and competition all threatened by everyone from the FCC to telecom companies to data-vacuuming advertisers to the dominant Silicon Valley players and (of course) the trolls. So why not float a proposal to fix it?

Finally, 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. The net was invented here, the browser was commercialized here, the most important modern PCs and smartphones were developed here, and many, though hardly all, of the most important websites and services are based here. What we do here matters.

Make a new plan, Stan

So here’s the idea. I suggest that Congress pass a broad law setting out the national interest in protecting the internet and the general principles by which that protection would be defined. This wouldn’t be one of those famous 1,200-page bills nobody can read. It would be meant as a sort of statutory manifesto.

Then, in that same bill, Congress creates a special, permanent, nonpartisan independent commission, or even a special, narrowly focused court, to adjudicate disputes about internet issues as they arise, by interpreting the law. This would build up a body of precedent. Notice I am not suggesting the writing of any regulations, because this idea aims for the lightest touch possible. This entity would also remove the politically charged, slow-moving, compromised FCC and FTC from internet regulation.

We already have a variety of such narrowly focused or adjudicatory agencies to cover other issues. Just to cite one example, there are special federal courts that only deal in tax matters, trade issues, veterans’ claims and more. And some economists have already proposed similar administrative forums for internet claims, modeled after how cable companies resolve carriage disputes.

There’s precedent for adjudicatory proceedings on technology issues to have massive consumer and business benefits. One of the most famous was the so-called Carterfone decision in 1968. In that case, the FCC ruled that it was legal for a tiny company, Carter Electronics, to sell a primitive-looking device that patched a two-way radio into the country’s landline phone network. The network at the time was owned by the old AT&T monopoly, which had convinced federal authorities to bar any device AT&T didn’t itself make from being connected. The dubious reasoning was that such devices might “harm” the vital network.

The FCC not only ruled for Carter, but threw out the ban itself, opening the door first for much better voice phones than the clumsy models AT&T’s exclusive hardware affiliate made, and later for dial-up modems, without which the internet revolution would have been at the very least severely delayed.

Bottom Line

If you don’t like this plan, come up with a better one, or a modified one. But we do need a plan. 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.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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. That’s not a typo.

So it seems fitting to me that I’ll be retiring this coming June, almost exactly 47 years later. I’ll be hanging it up shortly after the 2017 edition of the Code Conference, a wonderful event I co-founded in 2003 and which I could never have imagined back then in Detroit.

I didn’t make this decision lightly, or hastily, or under pressure. It emerged from months of thought and months of talks with my wise wife, my family and close friends. It wasn’t prompted by my employer, or by some dire health diagnosis. It just seems like the right time to step away. I’m ready for something new.

Over my career, I’ve reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of Communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.

And, in the best professional decision of my life, I converted myself into a tech columnist in 1991. As a result, I got to bear witness to a historic parade of exciting, revolutionary innovation — from slow, clumsy ancient PCs to sleek, speedy smartphones; from CompuServe and early AOL to the mobile web, apps and social media.

My column has run weekly in a variety of places over the years, most recently on The Verge and Recode under the Vox Media umbrella, where I’ve been quite happy and have added a podcast of which I’m proud.

So I see retirement as just another of these reinventions, another chance to do new things and be a new version of myself.

I will likely write a bit more about this before I stop. But, for now, I just want to thank you for reading, viewing and listening to me over the years, and for letting me know when you thought me right or crazy.

I want to thank Vox Media, The Verge, Recode, the Wall Street Journal and CNBC for giving me a voice. And, to name just a few individuals, I want to thank some indispensable career partners along the way: Kara Swisher, Norm Pearlstine, Paul Steiger, Larry O’Donnell, Jim Bankoff, Nilay Patel, Lia Lorenzano-Kennett, Stephanie Capparell and Katie Boehret.

I’m not going anywhere for a while, so you’ll still be seeing my columns, TV appearances and podcasts this month and next. I will enjoy creating every one of them, just as I enjoyed writing those stories from Detroit in 1970.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.