Even Apple, notorious for keeping a tight grip on its products, allows fierce competitors like Google, Amazon, Spotify, and Microsoft to offer their apps on its phones and tablets.

Amazon's 'Twitch' appears to be creating a service that operates like Twitter.

My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.

Arguably Apple's least successful core hardware product in decades, the Apple Watch could have been nursed along, like a terminal patient.

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.

Samsung has drastically altered the rule that big screens mean huge phones. Even this smaller of the new Galaxy S models has a larger screen than the biggest iPhone, but it's much narrower and easier to hold and to slip into a pocket.