1.  I see retirement as just another of these reinventions, another chance to do new things and be a new version of myself.
 
2. 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.
 
3.  I believe that tablets – and especially the iPad – are extremely versatile and productive tools for consumers, schools and businesses and are better for many tasks than the PC or the smartphone.
 
4.  The products I review are typically lent to me by their manufacturers for a few weeks or months. I return any products I am lent for review, except for items of minor value that companies typically don’t want back. In the case of these items, I either discard them or give them away to charity.
 
5.  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.
 
6.  The textile industry became a huge deal in 19th century America, kind of like the tech industry is today. And that immigrant tradition continues, especially in tech, America’s most dominant and dynamic industry today.
 
7.  Slack spread through businesses like wildfire, initially in the tech and media sectors, but now much more widely. At its public launch in February 2014, it had 17,000 users. As of April 1st, 2016, that number had rocketed to 2.7 million daily active users.
 
8.  Who co-founded Google? Sergey Brin, a Russian-born Jew whose family fled anti-semitism in the Soviet Union to settle here and who considers himself a refugee.
 
9.  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.
 
10. In the tech world, you can reel off great products in several ways. You can have the once-in-a-lifetime gut instincts of a Steve Jobs. You can have the brainiac coding skills of a Bill Gates, Larry Page, or Sergey Brin. Or, I learned, you can have the deep intellectual curiosity and stubbornness of a Jeff Bezos.
 
11. There’s a blizzard of metrics that social sites and messaging sites put out there.
 
12. Many tech company execs who visit to pitch products take time to peruse the shelves and exclaim upon various devices they owned in younger days.
 
13. I use my iPad many times a day, and it has cut my use of my laptop by more than half.
 
14. How you feel about the modern, multitouch tablet depends a lot on what you think Steve Jobs and company set out to do with the iPad back in 2010. If you believe he was out to make a bigger smartphone or to entirely replace the Mac and PC, you’re wrong.
 
15. Everyone knows that Apple crushed Microsoft in the mobile era. But it was exactly the opposite in the PC Wars of the 1980s and 1990s.