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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.