Walt Mossberg

Journalist

1947-03-27

Quotes by Walt Mossberg

• I try not to make snap judgments. I never, ever make conclusions about products I've never tried.

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• Taken as a whole, consumer technologies have made startling advances, but they still are not as easy to use as they should be.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• For many years, even as users became more sophisticated, personal computers took too much effort to use without problem-solving, keeping alive the yearning for greater simplicity. Microsoft's dominant Windows platform, in particular, was a home for all manner of bugs and problems that required IT people to straighten out.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Apple's iTunes program was once the envy of the world. A combined digital music store and player, it could also sync your iPod. And it worked on both Mac and Windows. It was reasonably fast and very sure-footed.

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• 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.

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• My Safari bookmarks only sync intermittently across my Apple devices. Unlike Amazon's Kindle app for Apple products, the company's iBooks doesn't remember where I left off unless I set a bookmark.

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• Practically every smartphone, tablet, and laptop is fabricated in a Chinese factory, even if they are designed here.

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• How you feel about the modern, multitouch tablet depends a lot on what you think Steve Jobs and company set out to do with the iPad back in 2010. If you believe he was out to make a bigger smartphone or to entirely replace the Mac and PC, you're wrong.

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• A great laptop running the new kinds of user interfaces and apps that people now love on phones and tablets would be a big, exciting event that would help seal the deal. But there hasn't yet been a product that emphatically suggests the era of the traditional PC is fading.

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• I believe that tablets - and especially the iPad - are extremely versatile and productive tools for consumers, schools and businesses and are better for many tasks than the PC or the smartphone.

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• 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.

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• Even Apple, notorious for keeping a tight grip on its products, allows fierce competitors like Google, Amazon, Spotify, and Microsoft to offer their apps on its phones and tablets.

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• Arguably Apple's least successful core hardware product in decades, the Apple Watch could have been nursed along, like a terminal patient.

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• The textile industry became a huge deal in 19th century America, kind of like the tech industry is today. And that immigrant tradition continues, especially in tech, America's most dominant and dynamic industry today.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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