Practically every smartphone, tablet, and laptop is fabricated in a Chinese factory, even if they are designed here.
— Walt Mossberg
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'm happy to report that the first Chromebook designed from the ground up to run Android apps out of the box has arrived, albeit a little past the end of 2016.
As for the device we now call a TV or a cable box, I want it to be fast with a clean interface and seamlessly upgradeable to the latest software. I want it to be the primary source of all TV, not an ancillary device.
In August of 2011, Steve Jobs, the tech icon who disrupted a string of traditional industries, called me and told me he thought he'd figured out a way to revolutionize TV. He invited me to come see it at Apple in a few months, but he died just six weeks later, and that meeting never came to pass.
Amazon's 'Twitch' appears to be creating a service that operates like Twitter.
By the 2010s, almost everybody in the developed world, it seemed, had a powerful digital device that took little or no special skills or training to use.
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.
Email is a senior citizen. It's been around since at least the 1960s in one form or another. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a hot competition among consumer email services like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Gmail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple's advantage is that it designs and builds software together, so if the software isn't excellent, it does the superlative hardware a disservice.
No computer or smartphone can ever be considered 100 percent 'safe.' We're all engaged in a perpetual battle with criminals and hostile governments trying to use computers and the Internet to steal information and identities.
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.
Compared to running apps on a smartphone or, more aptly, an iPad, the app experience on the Samsung Chromebook Plus is distinctly subpar.
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.
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.
Open-minded tech tinkerers may still prefer traditional PCs for work because they allow much more customization than, say, an iPad.
In 2007, everything changed with the iPhone. As crippled as that first model now seems, with its lack of apps and glacial cellular connectivity, the iPhone was a practical, useful, self-contained computer a child could understand. It was an information appliance.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People think of Apple as a maker of excellent premium hardware. In fact, many reviewers regard Apple devices as the best you can buy.
In general, while Trump has been a master of Twitter, he has shown an aversion to, and ignorance of, technology itself.
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.
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.
If Apple, Amazon, Netflix, or somebody else can ever blast away all the ridiculous vestiges of decades-old TV content and technology we live with today, I'll buy whatever they come up with. Until then, I'm settling for a Caavo.
Microsoft makes numerous apps for both Android and iOS, as do Google, Amazon and Facebook. You can run iTunes and iCloud on Windows and Office on the Mac.
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.
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.
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.
I see retirement as just another of these reinventions, another chance to do new things and be a new version of myself.
I want to thank Vox Media, The Verge, Recode, the 'Wall Street Journal,' and CNBC for giving me a voice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
