Category Archives: Uncategorized

If you’ve been putting off upgrading your smartphone or laptop, you’ll want to understand the impact on pricing due to a combination of recent issues — artificial intelligence, trade policy, and memory chip shortages — issues that are raising the prices of many consumer tech products. Analysts are calling this RAMageddon, the sudden demand for […]

The electric vehicle market is currently undergoing a major recalibration. While this may be a crisis for the industry, it’s the best thing that could have happened for those in the market for an EV. The landscape for EVs today looks nothing like it did two years ago. We’ve moved past the early adopter phase […]

A friend just alerted me to a dealer selling the new Chevy Equinox, a $40K 300-mille range EV, for $25K, a huge discount off it’s list price. The car has generally received good reviews and seemed on the surface to be a terrific deal. However, doing a little digging, it does not have Apple Car […]

This week I received a survey from Lexus asking about a new feature they’re considering. The questionnaire began by asking how often I park my car on the street, in my driveway, and in a parking lot. It went on to ask how worried was I about car theft, a car break-in, or someone hitting […]

The idea of combining your phone with your wallet has led to a a phone accessory category filled with different approaches. The idea began with plastic phone cases having a compartment to hold a couple of cards, and have expanded to include cases that can hold five or ten cards. The concept makes sense if […]

Over the years, my wife and I accumulated a decent wine collection—nearly filling a 300-bottle capacity wine cabinet. What started as a modest hobby evolved into something more substantial. But with growth came chaos. Our first tracking system was very low tech: wine racks with wine organized by varietal, When the collection outgrew that approach, […]

If you travel often enough, you learn to lower your expectations. Airlines shrink the seats and call it efficiency. They leave a few seats unshrunk and call it premium class. Hotels tack on resort fees for amenities that used to be included, even if they’re not used. Rental car companies charge surprise fees for cleaning […]

I moved my family plan from Verizon to T-Mobile and Verizon has made it particularly difficult, well beyond what’s needed to prevent fraud. I hesitated for years. We have seven phones and two watches spread across two cities five hundred miles apart — exactly the kind of family account carriers love. The bigger and more […]

The companies that once sold themselves as engines of freedom— empowering individuals, bringing people together, and helping the world—are becoming something else entirely. I understand only too well; I moved to Silicon Valley in 1996 to join the many that wanted to use technology to make the world a better place. But it’s become clear […]

Sony’s decision to place its iconic Bravia television business under majority control of China’s TCL is not just a corporate reshuffling. It is a clear signal of how far China has come from just being a low cost manufacturer to becoming an innovator. Under this new arrangement, TCL will own 51 percent of the joint […]

As noted in my previous column, online reviews have become one of the most powerful tools we’ve had to make informed purchases of products and services. From choosing a tradesman, contractor, or restaurant to buying appliances and electronics, user-generated reviews give us visibility into other people’s experiences. They help democratize information and hold businesses accountable […]

One of the Internet’s greatest gifts isn’t streaming video, social media, or even instant information. It’s something far more practical and revolutionary: online reviews. For the first time in history, ordinary people can share their real experiences with products, tradespeople, restaurants, doctors, contractors, hotels, airlines and just about anything else—and in doing so, help complete strangers […]

Apple has finally done what once seemed unthinkable: it has cut a deal with Google to use Gemini as the AI engine behind a revamped Siri. For a company that built its legend on owning its products end-to-end — hardware, software, and services — this is more than a partnership. It’s an admission that after more than a […]

There’s an excellent, bluntly titled article in The Verge this week — “Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards” — and if you care about the power Big Tech wields, you should read it. The piece lays out a simple, uncomfortable truth: Apple and Google loudly advertise their values — safety, responsibility, protecting users — yet refuse to enforce […]

As I read this headline today, “Google co-founder Larry Page cuts business ties with California as state’s new billionaires’ tax looms,” I felt revulsion, as many others should as well. What is wrong with these people? For decades, California has been the most productive wealth-creation engine in modern history. Its universities, public infrastructure, legal system, […]

Elon Musk has spent years cultivating the image of a once-in-a-generation genius. Tesla’s recent slide suggests something else: a CEO whose instincts are increasingly bad, whose priorities are misaligned, and whose own behavior is actively damaging the company he leads. Tesla didn’t lose the global EV sales lead to BYD because the market turned. It […]

As we begin 2026 and peer back at 2025, the tech landscape has been a mix of ambitious breakthroughs and some truly spectacular misfires. While “worst” is a matter of personal opinion, several products this year stood out for failing to meet their massive hype, suffering from critical design flaws, or simply offering poor value. […]

There’s a Verizon scam that’s been fooling many that we should be aware of, because it’s quite clever and initially fooled me. I received this text below, supposedly from Verizon, saying I had points that were about to expire and I needed to redeem them soon: I looked at the link and saw Verizon.com, which […]

More than a year ago we read how ChatGPT would just make things up and how it embarrassed a lawyer who used it by citing court cases that it just made up. After all this time, ChatGLT is no better and maybe worse. At least 25% of the time I use it, I find it […]

When a power outage in San Francisco last night caused Waymo’s autonomous cars to freeze in place, snarl traffic, and block emergency vehicles, it felt to me like a paradigm of big tech. It was a predictable failure. The tech industry loves to release breakthrough products, but consistently refuses to confront how fragile these systems […]