Mike Elgan

In what passes for “historic” here in Silicon Valley, Apple CEO Steve Jobs today unveiled his long-awaited iPad, an iPhone-like touch tablet. You’ve seen the speculation, rumor, hype and baloney. Finally, here are the facts – boiled down to 60 seconds of reading. The iPad will cost $499, $599, or $699 without 3G, depending on […]

You hear futurists talking about a coming age of “augmented reality.” What they mean is that mobile devices will recognize locations and objects and provide data about them in real-time. Yeah, it’s cool and it’s coming. But to young people, it’s nothing new. For teenagers, reality is already totally augmented. The Kaiser Family Foundation today […]

Google announcedon January 12 that December hacks on servers in China, plus recent “attempts” by the Chinese government to “further limit free speech on the web,” “may well mean having to shut down Google.cn” and close Google’s Chinese offices. But why would hack attempts, which Google says were both unsuccessful and not aimed solely at […]

Hype over Apple’s tablet, officially still a rumor, is reaching fever pitch. Commentators, including me, have predicted with varying degrees of certainty that the device will succeed in the market, and transform how we all do mobile computing. It’s easy to see why the preemptive press on this non-existent, unconfirmed, never-before-seen product is so positive. […]

Two weeks ago, I exposed the “Top Ten Bad Tech Predictions for 2009” — predictions made a year ago that turned out to be, well, less-than-true. These brave prognosticators aren’t the only ones who can make bad predictions. Behold! My 20 Bad Predictions for 2010!: 1. Apple will change the name of the “iPod Touch” […]

Walk into your local bookstore, and all is peace and order. But the tranquility masks an industry on fire. The traditional book business is being burned to the ground by technology, by recession, by the Internet — but mostly by Amazon. Here’s what’s going on. East Coast The epicenter of the traditional book publishing industry […]

What is it about the change from one year to the next that compels people to guess about what’s going to happen? In general, the worst kinds of predictions are from people who claim to have supernatural insight — psychics, spiritual hucksters and their ilk. The reason is that such people tend not to know […]

My birthday was December 3rd. One of my gifts this year was the Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM. (CD-ROM technology is dated, but it’s by far the cheapest way to own the best dictionary in the world.) I’m having problems installing the software, which choked on the installation. Tech support said my problem is a […]

True gadget fans (like me) seem impossible to buy gifts for. We have everything. We know everything. And we’re very picky about which devices we allow into our circle of trust. The holidays can be an unhappy time of year for us technology enthusiasts, for three reasons. First, everyone in the extended family wants free […]

Wikipedia, which is arguably the most valuable source of information on the Internet, is written and edited almost entirely by volunteers. But what happens when those volunteers stop volunteering? We’re about to find out. In the first quarter of this year, the Wikipedia lost an incredible 49,000 editors, literally ten times the number lost in […]