David Pogue (2014)

I use an iPhone. But the primary reason isn't preference--it's velvet handcuffs. Apple (and Google and Microsoft and Samsung...) like to build ecosystems of computers, phones, and services that all work together--and the iPhone/Mac/iCloud one is the one I'm part of. Switching, for most people, would just be exhausting!

You know, I'm kind of sad that Microsoft's phones have tanked. I mean, this is the ONE time that Microsoft, long hated for being such a copycat, really innovated, really came up with something good. But nobody buys those Windows phones.

They're really really good, though. I think Microsoft was just late to the party.

You don't have to miss me at the Times.. my column at YahooTech is even easier to find on Thursdays now! And now they're free. :)

You can bookmark this page of my columns: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/david-pogue

Or you can get notified by email, using a free service called Blogtrottr. Here’s how to sign up:

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But why I moved? I'd been at the Times for 13 years, and, well, Yahoo made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Build a new site. Hire anyone I liked. Design it. Declare my own mission statement. Be a startup. I'd never had that kind of chance before!

Not at ALL! I think Inbox Zero is kind of self-delusion. All you're really doing is shuffling your unread mail around, putting it into other folders!

My Inbox is the center of my life. (I use OS X Mail, because it's so well integrated with the rest of the OS, but I spend half my time furious at its inability to find messages.) A message doesn't disappear from the Inbox until I've taken care of it!

You want to know the company that's doing the coolest stuff in science and technology?

It's the military!

Most of the most amazing stories we've done on NOVA tracked back to this or that government grant. Magneto-rheological fluid in shock absorbers...self-healing tanker trucks...gear for surviving extreme heat and cold...sooooo many memorable stories.

And DARPA...oh man, the stuff DARPA is doing is just amazing. We like to think that government is this sluggish clueless bureaucracy, and maybe it is...but some of their science projects are astonishing.

Oh, and Boston Dynamics (just bought by Google). The most amazing robots ever built.

A man walked into a bar. "Ouch," he said.

It's hard for me to imagine that they'll become big hits. The market for each is a subset of a subset (the Apple Watch works only with iPhones, for example), which makes the market smaller. Each has to be charged up every day. Each has serious limitations.

Google Glass in particular faces an uphill battle because of the smugness factor... you just kind of want to smash people in the face when they're wearing Glass.

But that said, I'll be happy to be wrong on either one!

MacBook Air. I've banged on this thing daily for two years--it's my main machine--carried it, dropped it, installed and uninstalled stuff, and it just carries on like a TANK!

It's my communications hub, my work center, and of course my movie screen. :)

Awww, aren't you nice! I've never though of myself as a beverage vessel before!

All critics (tech, food, movies, art, anything) like PR pitches--if they are SHORT and CONCISE and PERSONAL. No email blasts; address it to ME. Include a PICTURE of your gadget. Say why it's unique.

Simply delete the second paragraph, where there's an obligatory CEO quote that we all know he never said.

Concise and personal. That's it. We're busy!

Amazing question. It's night and day.

Yahoo has been an underdog for years. So they have this zealous, fire-in-the-belly sort of startup mentality. Everybody talks about "What should we build next?"

The Times is an amazing institution, but it's old and established, with certain ways of doing things. It's a much more settled, conservative atmosphere.

I love them both, but being part of a "startup" (of 14,000 people!) is a rush.

All of them.

Professional: YahooTech (I read our other writers' stuff), Techmeme, ProductHunt, Gizmodo/Engadget. Personal: Facebook, NYTimes, YahooTravel.

In the beginning, I accepted everyone on Facebook as a "friend." Pretty soon, I had 5000 "friends," most of whom I'd never met. It was useless to me!

So I finally bit the bullet and spent 3 weeks unfriending everyone I didn't know. Suddenly, I "got" Facebook. HEY COOL! It's all news from my FRIENDS!

It wouldn't surprise me if you discovered a lot of cool sub-features you didn't know about! When I write one of these books, I really wallow DEEPLY in the muck of these apps and features. It's incredible what these engineers bury in there--almost like it's for their own pleasure, because the OS company doesn't even tell people about it!

Oh, I have some great Steve Jobs stories!

He was famous for calling up tech writers to scream at them, or praise them, for stuff they wrote--and I wasn't exempt!

I gave iMovie '08 an "F," said it was unusable. He called me at home to rant. "You don't have any fking idea what we DO here at Apple, do you!?!?" You just held the receiver away from your head and waited it out.

Then another time, I did a music video called ["I Want an iPhone"] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vniMR6Ez9cE) that kind of made fun of all the hype, the people standing in line, etc.

Jobs called me on my cellphone. "I wanted to talk to you about this song you made," he said. I winced, preparing to be screamed at.

"It's the funniest goddam thing I've seen in ages. Can you send me the QuickTime file?"

I was once talking to a therapist. I remember her telling me that it's kind of a tough job, because all she ever hears about is people's problems. She spends all day surrounded by unhappiness and dysfunction.

It must be similar in a help-desk situation!

Have you considered periodic awards programs--either serious or light-hearted?

One of my favorite books (of the ones I've written) was "Tales from the Tech Line." It was a collection of the stupidest user-error stories, collected from help desks. I dearly wish I could hear some of yours!

Not neeeeeearly enough. I really blew it this fall. FOUR BOOKS IN FOUR MONTHS. On top of the TV and Yahoo and speaking stuff. I bit off wayyyyyy more than I could chew, and my family life really suffered!

But I learned something. :)

LOL!! OMG, any networking product. They INVARIABLY expand to eat up an entire weekend of futzing and hassle and tech support and conflicting IP addresses... I HATE THEM.

Hey thanks! Yes, I've been out of the NOVA game for 1.5 years, I think primarily because of budgetary constraints. But we've got THREE new miniseries under discussion for next year, all three of which sound amazing. Stay tuned!

You know, we did a NOVA segment about battery tech. The big problem is that our planet has only a certain number of elements, and they can be combined in only certain ways (nickel-cadmium, etc.) to create batteries. AND WE'VE TRIED THEM ALL!

So until we find another planet, I'm not sure there are many more big battery-chemistry breakthroughs yet to find. So the emerging battery technologies will have to rely on things like software and circuitry advances to milk more from what we have!

It's hard for me to imagine having ANOTHER gadget to charge every night--especially a WATCH!

Smartwatches have a tough slog ahead. Right now, there isn't much that they do that your phone doesn't already do. Is it so much harder to hold your phone up to your face...than to hold your wrist up to your face? I'm not sure the added convenience is worth $500 plus daily charging hassle.

Then again, nobody ever knows with Apple stuff until it's actually out. Remember? Most people thought the iPad was gonna flop!

The big problem at the Pogue house is the shipping! Products come in all the time. But I'm not allowed to KEEP anything, even if I wanted to. So it all has to be boxed up and shipped back. It's a royal pain that never ends. Thank god my assistant Jan does the tracking, and my daughter Tia does a lot of the packaging and shipping (yes, we pay her).

I don't think we OWN any more gadgetry than any other house, or use it in any other way. Each of my kids has a laptop. My oldest is building a Windows PC for gaming, and I have a Windows laptop and desktop, but we're mostly a Mac shop around here.

I try to encourage all computer use to be in the public space of the house...that's the only real parenting I do. Well, I also try to make the kids get up and move once every 24 hours....

There's this one kind of humor that absolutely busts my gut. Kind of absurdist, hyperbolic stuff. So Monty Python was and is among my favorites. Some of Louis CK's stuff is brilliant. Dave Barry.

As for music--you know, I spent 10 years conducting and arranging Broadway shows. So I love most kinds of music, but the kind I really TRACK is Broadway scores (and movie scores, actually). Love Sondheim, Loesser. Jason Brown's stuff is great. David Yazbek ("The Full Monty"). And the guys who wrote "Next to Normal"... amazing.

Great question! It's not looking good. What I mean is, the FAA is just about to start making up rules that govern drones... there have just been too many idiots flying drones over airports, sporting events, spying in apartment-building windows, etc.

The proposed rules sound like they'll treat drone pilots like plane pilots: Get a license. File a FLIGHT PLAN. Get re-certified every year. Aughhhhh....

And yeah, that'll put a huge damper on things!

If you're iPad and iPhone, you'll get INCREDIBLE mileage by getting a Mac laptop. The new Continuity features let your phone become an accessory for your laptop--so your laptop can take and make phone calls like a speakerphone, send and receive texts to any phone, and so on. It's a life-changer!

For anyone else: I sure hope you guys are tracking the rise of the Chromebook. I mean, these are thin, light, beautiful, fast laptops that start up in 6 seconds and run 8 hours on a battery -- and cost $200!

They don't run Windows or Mac programs--they're just for doing stuff online. But there is a LOT you can do online (Google Docs, videos, etc). Incredible machine for kids, kitchen, second computer, etc...

Man, you really do get me! Great minds thinking alike, I guess!

I think my arts background informs EVERY PART of my technical career! My reviews are very liberal-artsy, if you think about it...focusing less on the gadgets and more on how they affect us. I do a lot of music in my reporting, too... see my new ["12 Days of Techness" video series on Yahoo Tech, for example] (https://www.yahoo.com/tech/you-dont-have-to-spend-a-fortune-to-buy-nice-tech-104699225154.html).

I'll be making a new music video at CES this year, too... should be a blast!

There are those who say that everything I DO is basically corny and hammy, which is clearly related to my theatrical background.

So, for better or worse (and plenty of people say it's worse!), my artsiness and my science/tech careers are hopelessly entwined!

AHA! Nobody has EVER asked me that before!

I started the Missing Manual series in 1999. And there were two little cartoons. On the back cover, a guy turning a software box upside-down, shaking it to see why no manual was falling out.

And on the front cover: the dog, bringing you the manual. Get it? It's "the missing manual." The dog is bringing it to you. Fetching it, as a service.

Also, he's cute.

Yes, I think drones are coming on strong, and we haven't seen nearly the end of it. Wait till something as god as DJI's drones... come down to the price where almost anyone can buy them!

Drones are so heady because they TOTALLY change your reality. They make three dimensions, with the addition of altitude, part of how you see your world--instead of walking around on this flat plane all your life. It's a huge perspective shift.

I'd rank the joy I get from my work like this...

1. TV and video
2. Public speaking
3. Reviewing tech (always new, always fun)
4. Writing how-to books. God, those things are draining--they have to be updated EVERY YEAR, and usually all at the same time (the fall)!

But yeah, I plan to keep doing all of it!

OMG! "Hard Drive!" Copyright 1993! You're one of the few... the proud!

I had so much fun writing "Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power" (for middle schoolers), that I think my next novel will also be for young adults. Nothing like getting fan mail from kids!

But if I have a good enough idea, I'll write an adult-fiction book.

And oh--I was in Calhoun!

Often, I hire actors or comedians to play roles in my videos--especially this one guy, David Del Grosso. He's been in a bunch of them.

One time, he was representing the dying AM/FM radio industry. He lay like some kind of Mafia don in my bed, putting on this ridiculous accent, as I played the doctor with a new service (record-on-demand radio shows) that could revive him. David was so funny, we had to keep cutting because I was doubled over laughing!

That had to have been one of my favorite shoots... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX8vIILlh2s

YES!!! And The Far Side!

Well, thanks!

Yes, I was a music major. Never touched a computer until senior year in college. And I think that's maybe my ace in the hole: I never really was a techie! I came to technology as an outsider. So my point of view in my writing is always from that stance, like it or not!

It was a long, strange transition. I started reviewing software for a computer club in NYC because it meant I could get free software (review copies)! That was while I was still doing Broadway shows.... and over time, it slowly became clear that my writing and teaching skills were in more demand than my musical ones!

Sadly, I'm not much of a gamer. (We have our games columnist for Yahoo Tech, and it's not me!)

The main reason is TIME...it takes a lot of experience and playing to know what you're taking about. And time is the one thing that's in very short supply in my life!

Through my son, though, I've learned a lot about Portal and Portal 2, TF2, and Borderlands...

It's new feature in iOS 8.

At the top of the chat, tap Details. Scroll down a bit--you'll see the button that says, "Leave this conversation." That's the one you want!

It appears identically on the Mac, in Messages, by the way.

God, I hope so. :)