Long-time Apple and consumer technology journalist Walt Mossberg retiring

Heralded tech journalist Walt Mossberg is retiring in June after a 47-year career, 26 of it exclusively focusing on consumer technology including extensive coverage of Apple, and a great deal of time with Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.

Mossberg announced his intention to retire on Friday. He will be retiring shortly after the Code Conference in June — an event he founded with fellow ex-Wall Street Journal staffer and long-time colleague Kara Swisher.

Following graduation from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Mossberg signed on with The Wall Street Journal in 1970. He shifted over to his Personal Technology column full-time in 1991. In his Thursday Mossberg's Mailbox column at the paper, he frequently covered Apple's problems in the '90s and return to prominence following the iMac and iPod launch.

Mossberg famously hosted a discussion with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in 2007 during the All Things D conference, where both Jobs and Gates discussed the mobile future of computing.

"I can walk down the streets here in Washington and loads of people — most people you know have no idea who I am, but it's a little different if I'm at a computer trade show or something, where a lot more people do know who I am," said Mossberg to C-Span in 2009 about his fame and reputation as a make-or-break reviewer. "So, my reaction is it sort of comes with the territory."

He launched Recode with Swisher in 2014, which was acquired by Vox Media in 2015.

"[Retiring] wasn't prompted by my employer, or by some dire health diagnosis," wrote Mossberg, about his departure. "It just seems like the right time to step away. I'm ready for something new."

18 Comments

SpamSandwich 32917 comments · 19 Years

About 7 years ago

He probably got tired of dealing with the idiots at Vox.

dreyfus2 1069 comments · 17 Years

The choice between working with Nilay Patel and an anonymous death lead to the expected result. Good choice, Walt :-)

radarthekat 3904 comments · 12 Years

I didn't know much of him until I became an Apple investor/trader in 2011, and since then my view has been that he's sort of a tech journalist for the casual technology consumer, which is exactly the beat he covered. But he suffered from the same lack of real insight that most analysts suffer from, and likely for the same reason; like most analysts, he covered a wide range and so developed that broad but shallow view that so greatly frustrates us who dig very deep and have the time to imagine the future focused on just one or a few technology players. There are, in my opinion, only a very few outside the halls of Cupertino who bring real insight into the potential and likely future directions of Apple, a company I, for one, almost exclusively focus on and made my fortune investing in and trading. If only they could see inside some of the minds of those who participate here,

randominternetperson 3101 comments · 8 Years

SpamSandwich said:

He probably got tired of dealing with the idiots at Vox.

Or he's an elderly person who has plenty of money and just wants to enjoy life without deadlines.
More power to him. I think his generally-pro-Apple voice in the WSJ was invaluable to Apple in it's pre-iPhone incarnation. The credibility of the most widely read business publication was likely very important to Apple in the bad old days when it would have been easy to write-off Apple as relevant as the Amiga or the like. I remember reading his reviews of Apple products and thinking "that's right! That's why I love my Mac and it is qualitatively different from even fastest or most stylish Wintel offering." He really "got" Apple and could communicate the value of Apple products to the average person (and it just so happened that his average reader was a successful business person).
Enjoy your retirement, Walt.

macxpress 5913 comments · 16 Years

sog35 said:

dreyfus2 said:

The choice between working with Nilay Patel and an anonymous death lead to the expected result. Good choice, Walt :-)

LOLOLOLOLOLOOLOL!

Its TRUE! Walt's article began to get really low quality once he went to the Verge.

He even said the Note7 was better than any iPhone!

Nilay Patel is a real certified moron. Still puzzles me how he got that job.

I'm not about to make any comparisons between phones, but just because the Note 7 had battery issues it doesn't mean it wasn't just as good if not better than any iPhone out at that particular time. I never got to use a Note 7 so I'm not going to say one way or the other. Of course were all pretty bias here so its hard for most here to hear something is better than Apple product A, B, or C.