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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t recommend that average iPad Air owners upgrade to the Air 2. But what about the vast majority of iPad owners who own older models? That’s a different story. If you have an iPad 2, 3 or 4, the new Air 2 will make a big difference. Its thinness and lightness will be a dramatic change, and it will be faster and more fluid. However, here’s the catch: Upgrading to last year’s iPad Air would have pretty much the same effect, and that model is now, suddenly, $100 cheaper, starting at $399.

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