Last year, veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg denounced online ads for ruining the online experience. The model is bad for everyone, as advertisers and online sites scrabble over quality control and the fight for cheap digital real estate. Of course, the consumer has had no say other than to suffer in silence or deploy decreasingly effective adblockers. In this war, they are little more than innocent bystanders forced to wade through disingenuous attempts at engagement and bombarded with disruptive advertising that serve little purpose other than getting in the way of the content they actually want to consume. Up until this point we have consumed mass content--newspapers, radio ads, TV ads, display ads--knowing that we're going to get some crap with it along the way.

For years Apple has responded to complaints about the functionality of Siri and as more virtual assistants have popped up from their rivals, users continue to grumble about the things it cannot do. That was one of the biggest takeaways from a study of iPhone X users conducted by Creative Strategies, Inc. Ben Bajarin, principal analyst and the head of primary research, said in the report that iPhone X owners gave the product "an overall 97% customer satisfaction. While that number is impressive, what really stands out when you do customer satisfaction studies is the percentage who say they are very satisfied with the product," Bajarin wrote. In terms of the survey respondents who met that "very satisfied" mark, the report found it to be about 85% of iPhone X owners. SEE: IT leader's guide to the future of artificial intelligence (Tech Pro Research) But when the report authors broke it down by specific features, Siri stood out as one of the only things users were not happy with.

Andy Rubin, founder and CEO of Playground Global, a hardware incubator located behind Fry's Electronics in Palo Alto, Calif., showed off a neat Android phone built by his new company, Essential. Also, Bryan Johnson gave a Spotlight talk in which he tried to convince those of us in the audience to let his company, Kernel, put a chip in our brains. But there were no other new product announcements or in-depth discussions of enabling technologies in the pipeline.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham thinks the new gesture controlled DJI Spark drone is the wave of the future in computing. Today, we move to the hands. In one of the most jaw-dropping tech demos of the year, drone manufacturer DJI this week showed off a new quadcopter that can be flown with hand gestures. Move your palm left to fly that way, extend your hand to land it. As someone who spends a lot of time flying drones and juggling with video-game like controllers to operate them, this is the holy grail. No more worries about connections and keeping my head down to operate--just wave my hands in the air and let the drone soar.

This is my last weekly column for The Verge and Recode -- the last weekly column I plan to write anywhere. I've been doing these almost every week since 1991, starting at The Wall Street Journal, and during that time, I've been fortunate enough to get to know the makers of the tech revolution, and to ruminate -- and sometimes to fulminate -- about their creations. Now, as I prepare to retire at the end of that very long and world-changing stretch, it seems appropriate to ponder the sweep of consumer technology in that period, and what we can expect next. Let me start by revising the oft-quoted first line of my first Personal Technology column in the Journal on October 17th, 1991: "Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it's not your fault." It was true then, and for many, many years thereafter. Not only were the interfaces confusing, but most tech products demanded frequent tweaking and fixing of a type that required more technical skill than most people had, or cared to acquire.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode. This is my last weekly column for The Verge and Recode -- the last weekly column I plan to write anywhere. I've been doing these almost every week since 1991, starting at The Wall Street Journal, and during that time, I've been fortunate enough to get to know the makers of the tech revolution, and to ruminate -- and sometimes to fulminate -- about their creations. Now, as I prepare to retire at the end of that very long and world-changing stretch, it seems appropriate to ponder the sweep of consumer technology in that period, and what we can expect next. Let me start by revising the oft-quoted first line of my first Personal Technology column in the Journal on October 17, 1991: "Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it's not your fault." It was true then, and for many, many years thereafter.

Like many tech enthusiasts, I've been using a $180 Amazon Echo intelligent speaker at my home for a year or more. And, while I love using it for some things -- playing music and podcasts, setting timers, and re-ordering items from Amazon -- I've come to realize that, like Apple's Siri and all other virtual assistants, its Alexa voice-driven artificial intelligence system disappoints a lot. So I was excited to test Google Home, the $129 Echo competitor that puts the search giant's much-touted new Google Assistant intelligence technology inside a small, but powerful Echo-like speaker and microphone unit. Surely, I thought, after collecting all that info about the world (and about me) for years and years, Google would crush Amazon in the home-intelligence race. But after nearly a week of using two Google Home units in two different rooms, my conclusions are decidedly mixed.

Apple is once again looking to Asia to turbocharge its research and development process, this time to improve its artificial intelligence efforts. In an interview with Nikkei Asian Review, CEO Tim Cook said the future of the iPhone is AI, which will be supported by its new research and development center that will open by the end of the year in Yokohama, Japan. Cook seemed to suggest that AI in the iPhone would move beyond Siri and would actually help increase your battery life through resource management. It would also recommend music more skillfully, and perform other background tasks. As is typical with Apple, Cook stayed tight-lipped on specifics but said the Yokohama team will deal with "deep engineering" and be quite different from its planned R&D effort in China.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode. I've been familiar with Siri longer than most people. Way back in 2009 -- two years before Apple incorporated the intelligent digital assistant into the iPhone -- I stood onstage with the inventors of the service while they debuted it at a tech conference I co-produced. At the time, it was just a third-party app on the iPhone App Store. Not long thereafter, Apple bought the company, and the assistant reemerged in 2011 with a splashy introduction as a core feature of the iPhone 4s.

Fifteen years ago, when the time became ripe for post-PC devices that put a premium on integrating software and hardware, Apple was the best-positioned company to lead the charge -- and it did. The company's vertical integration, its attention to detail and innovation in both software and hardware and its willingness to make big bets gave it an edge. And it used that edge to reel off its now-familiar string of game-changing products like the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air and the iPad. Now, the iPod is essentially gone, and the other products are in mature or maturing markets, with either pretty flat or dropping sales. And the tech industry is turning to a new battlefield: Artificial intelligence, spread across many devices.