I hate to be a hater, but I was never too impressed with Mossberg's reporting. My opinion is that his platform was stronger than his content. I suppose my claim is Mossberg was the New York Times Best Seller List of tech writing.
The tech press was then, and is now, a total joke compared to other forms of serious journalism.
I wrote this about Mossberg's colleague Kara Swisher a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8036679
I think my comments still stand.
The tech press is terrible at covering:
- Energy Use/Efficiency of tech (not just laptops I'm talking datacenters, etc.)
- Governance of the Internet
- Privacy (until recently - sort of [and it still gets buried])
- Software copyright issues
- Market/monetary prospects for new tech
(I think the article sort of talks about the fear of
"crushing innovation")
- Energy tech itself (new forms of power generation, batteries)
- Tech in our lives (and I'm not talking about the fear card)
- autonomous vehicles, medical devices, etc.
Things have improved slightly since I wrote that 3 or 4 years ago but there is still waaaaaaay too much noise about Apple's latest widgets. Instead we should be hearing much more about the socioeconomic, political, and societal impacts that technology has and the fact that Apple's entire business model is centered around filling our landfills with their devices that become unusable with their latest version of iOS.
P.S. The other smart phone manufacturers are just as guilty, but Apple makes the most profit from externalizing their costs. The other phone manufacturers basically lose money on the operation AFAIK.
>Apple's entire business model is centered around filling our landfills with their devices that become unusable with their latest version of iOS.
Let's review - what devices run on iOS 10 - devices made during the past 5 years (iPhone 5 came out in 2012).
Of course, Apple still supports devices way farther back than then.
You're a big fat hypocrite if you're entire argument is that it's Apple's fault. But I guess talking about Android makers doesn't get the up votes.
I'm probably wrong though, and I get the impression I would have had to follow his contributions from his early career through to his later work to truly appreciate his influence on the tech industry.
Also worth reading:
* JLG (as already mentioned)
* Horace Dediu at Asymco
* Kontra at Counternotions – posts very infrequently but always insightful