Walt Mossberg Quotes

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Who have I picked fights with over the years? Bill Gates. Google. Mark Zuckerberg. Even - despite everything that's written about my relationship with Steve Jobs - we had yelling matches.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Who co-founded Google? Sergey Brin, a Russian-born Jew whose family fled anti-semitism in the Soviet Union to settle here and who considers himself a refugee.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

There's a blizzard of metrics that social sites and messaging sites put out there.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- 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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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

- Walt Mossberg

Slack users I know, including me, love many things about the service. As the company likes to brag, it's fast, it's transparent, and it's great for brainstorming.

- Walt Mossberg

We need a wireless mobile device ecosystem that mirrors the PC/Internet ecosystem, one where the consumers' purchase of network capacity is separate from their purchase of the hardware and software they use on that network. It will take government action, or some disruptive technology or business innovation, to get us there.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

I've been on the Web from the beginning of the Web. The good part about writing about technology is that you never run out of ideas, because it's changing so fast. The bad part is that it's changing so fast that there's a million new products and ideas every day and every week.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Compared to running apps on a smartphone or, more aptly, an iPad, the app experience on the Samsung Chromebook Plus is distinctly subpar.

- Walt Mossberg

When I walk into a Best Buy, I now see, right from the front door, a giant Apple logo. I see a giant Samsung logo. I see a giant Microsoft Windows logo. And those are stores within a store.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

I was very proud to be at 'The Wall Street Journal'. I have nothing bad to say about it. I had a great run there. In what turned out to be the final years of my tenure there, 'AllThingsD' occupied me more and more and was much more fun.

- Walt Mossberg

I have on my wall right now a front page of the 'Journal' from January 1991, when I co-wrote a front-page story about Iraq firing missiles at Israel. By October, I was writing about tech products.

- Walt Mossberg

I want to thank Vox Media, The Verge, Recode, the 'Wall Street Journal,' and CNBC for giving me a voice.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Microsoft's Windows 3.1, released in 1992, was the first truly successful edition of Windows and juiced the Redmond juggernaut. Apple's Macintosh System 7.5, released in 1994, was another in a string of versions that lacked key architectural features that the Mac didn't have until Steve Jobs returned and brought with him the code that became OS X.

- Walt Mossberg

People always worry that buying tech products today carries a risk of obsolescence. Most of the time, that fear is overblown.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

I believe... we were told that the 'Bluetooth AirPods', whatever they are, can be used on anything that supports Bluetooth audio.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Amazon makes mistakes, including launching a smartphone in 2014 that was a flop and to which I gave a poor review.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Jeff Williams, Apple's senior vice president of operations, has been called 'Tim Cook's Tim Cook' by some.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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

- Walt Mossberg

Whether you are a consumer, a hardware maker, a software developer or a provider of cool new services, it's hard to make a move in the American cellphone world without the permission of the companies that own the pipes.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.'

- Walt Mossberg

I wrote a lot about the need for an information appliance. I think we've pretty much arrived at one: the iPad. A child could figure out how to use it quickly. Compare it to a DOS computer or even an Apple II; it's no longer nearly as much of a hassle or a mystery.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Everyone knows that Apple crushed Microsoft in the mobile era. But it was exactly the opposite in the PC Wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

- Walt Mossberg

Slack spread through businesses like wildfire, initially in the tech and media sectors, but now much more widely. At its public launch in February 2014, it had 17,000 users. As of April 1st, 2016, that number had rocketed to 2.7 million daily active users.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Man, he could sell. As he liked to say, he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. But there was a more personal side of Steve Jobs, of course, and I was fortunate enough to see a bit of it because I spent hours in conversation with him over the 14 years he ran Apple.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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

- Walt Mossberg

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

- Walt Mossberg

I've known Bezos for decades, since the very early days of Amazon, so it's no surprise to me that he's smart or willing to make big bets.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Many tech company execs who visit to pitch products take time to peruse the shelves and exclaim upon various devices they owned in younger days.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

The car is the ultimate mobile device, isn't it?

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

For those still outside the cult of Slack, it's a service - available as a desktop or mobile app, or a website - which is essentially a series of public chat rooms (called channels) on topics relevant to a company or to teams within a company.

- Walt Mossberg

Though many people mistakenly credit IBM with the first PC in 1981, the Apple II came out four years earlier, in 1977.

- Walt Mossberg

You have giant Facebook, which wants people to be more engaged, and they also want to grow and trade different things, including content.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

I use my iPad many times a day, and it has cut my use of my laptop by more than half.

- Walt Mossberg

Open-minded tech tinkerers may still prefer traditional PCs for work because they allow much more customization than, say, an iPad.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

There's always a mismatch between small entrepreneurial outfits and large companies, which often don't have the same outlook.

- Walt Mossberg

There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Our lives and our culture have been significantly changed and improved by hardware, software, and services developed by immigrants.

- Walt Mossberg

Back in May of 2008, the Kindle was still quite new, and we focused on that.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

Amazon's 'Twitch' appears to be creating a service that operates like Twitter.

- Walt Mossberg

Though it has plenty of competitors, Slack claims to be the 'fastest growing business application in history'.

- Walt Mossberg

I actually think it's against the rules at Vox Media to work there if you've never dropped an iPhone.

- Walt Mossberg

Has the smartphone begun to mature, plateau out?

- Walt Mossberg

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

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

What's the third smartphone platform? Is it Windows phone? Is Windows Phone going to finally get off the mat in the developed world? Amazon believes their platform has a chance to become the third.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

I spent 19 years as a Washington reporter covering a variety of beats.

- Walt Mossberg

In general, while Trump has been a master of Twitter, he has shown an aversion to, and ignorance of, technology itself.

- Walt Mossberg

What we did with 'AllThingsD', though, was very different. We weren't taking a newspaper and putting it on the web; we were creating a digital native product, and we did it inside of a very old, stuffy newspaper company at the time.

- Walt Mossberg

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.

- Walt Mossberg

People think of Apple as a maker of excellent premium hardware. In fact, many reviewers regard Apple devices as the best you can buy.

- Walt Mossberg

I think Steve Jobs is a historic figure. He's not only a historic figure in business, but really in America.

- Walt Mossberg

My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.

- Walt Mossberg

Apple is all-in on Apple hardware and still wants you to be all-in, too.

- Walt Mossberg

Everyone looks adorable singing with James Corden.

- Walt Mossberg