John C. Dvorak, the sharp-tongued technology columnist whose opinions shaped and provoked the personal computer industry for four decades, died at his home in Albany, California, on Monday, July 20, 2026. He was 80. His death was announced by No Agenda, the podcast he co-hosted with Adam Curry. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Voice of the PC generation
Dvorak was born in Fresno, California, on April 5, 1946, and began his writing career, improbably, as a wine writer. He found his calling as personal computers arrived in homes and offices, writing for InfoWorld and, from 1986, PC Magazine, where his columns ran for decades. Over the years his byline appeared in MarketWatch, Forbes, MacUser, Barron’s, The New York Times and many other outlets, and he wrote or co-wrote more than a dozen books, including Hypergrowth, the story of the Osborne Computer Corporation, written with Adam Osborne.
The famous contrarian
Dvorak was celebrated, and often mocked, for his skepticism. He doubted that people would want to use a computer mouse and famously argued that Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone. Readers argued with him for years, which was much of the point: his columns were designed to make the industry think. He was also part of the startup team at CNET, hosted Silicon Spin on TechTV, ran the panel show CrankyGeeks and was a regular on Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech.
No Agenda
From 2007 he co-hosted No Agenda with Curry, a long-running podcast dissecting the week’s news, in which Dvorak usually played the dry straight man to Curry’s wilder theories. Steve Sinofsky, the former president of Microsoft’s Windows division, called his writing “a voice of the PC generation.”