MIT is part of it but Massachusetts is also home to a large number of other research universities including BU, Northeastern, Harvard, the UMass system, etc.

As you say, NYC (like Silicon Valley) has always been more concentrated in terms of technology focus.

I'd agree with this. Boston area has a lot of high quality post secondary educations that feed business and talent. I would argue bay area has some of the same dynamics (Stanford, UCB & UCSF amongst others).

Silicon Valley has a high degree of tech but also a fair bit of climate tech which shouldn't be discounted.

Yeah, the Bay Area is probably the one other place in the US that has comparable higher-ed quantity and quality to the Boston area/Massachusetts. Other good institutions are scattered around of course but they're more diffuse.

I think that there's a tendency on the part of a lot of people to view "tech" through the lens of web-related tech but obviously there's a lot more interesting/important work going on than just that--whether in the Boston area, Silicon Valley, or somewhere else.

The amount of top colleges in the Boston area is astounding. A school like Tufts (ranked #28 by US news) would be the crown jewel of almost every city in America, but it’s totally overshadowed in Boston.

Especially if you include Massachusetts as a whole it’s absurd:

MIT

Harvard

Tufts

Williams

Amherst

Brandeis

UMass Amherst

Boston University

Boston College

Northeastern

Wellesley

Olin

Babson

Smith

WPI