Walt Mossberg

Open-minded tech tinkerers may still prefer traditional PCs for work because they allow much more customization than, say, an iPad.

I want to thank Vox Media, The Verge, Recode, the 'Wall Street Journal,' and CNBC for giving me a voice.

Over my career, I've reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of Communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.

I actually think it's against the rules at Vox Media to work there if you've never dropped an iPhone.

I was an early user of AOL - so early, I didn't even have a number after my user name. For me, email was once vital, both for personal and business uses.

It's often hard to remember that the personal computing era is still quite young. It only dates from 1977, with the arrival of the first mass-market PCs.

Man, he could sell. As he liked to say, he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. But there was a more personal side of Steve Jobs, of course, and I was fortunate enough to see a bit of it because I spent hours in conversation with him over the 14 years he ran Apple.

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.

There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers.