It’s been real hard to escape the promos. Award-winning movie director Peter Jackson, famed for the Lord of the Rings films and other fare, got the go-ahead to edit the unused footage for that dreadful 1970 Beatles documentary film, Let It Be. Featuring the Fab Four attempting to record a new album and stage their first live concert in three years, the original was dreary and depressing. Yes, I saw it — once!

Now I remember how it all seemed at the time. I was working as the head of the news department of a local radio station in the Philadelphia suburbs. Before my hourly newscasts, I’d run over to the wire service teletype machine — just as you see chugging away in the movies — to check on the the state and national stories.

As most of you know, I’ve been a fan of The Beatles since 1965, when I came to realize their talents were awesome, far beyond the image conveyed in “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” So I wasn’t terribly pleased to see the story, quoting a press release from Paul McCartney.

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So the logic seemed impeccable. Cable TV companies were grabbing more and more of your hard-earned money each year — and I’m referring mainly to U.S. services here — and you had to wonder why you wasted so much to get 300 channels and found little or nothing to watch. Surely there’d be a way to pick and choose in such a way that you’re not paying for content you don’t want.

Alas, bundling has not been an option..

Before I get to the troubles with the most common solution, it’s fitting to remember how it all began.

Now I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and I could watch the local stations with an antenna. But it wasn’t always the best solution. While you had the ability to set up a roof antenna in a private home, with apartment living you were stuck with something less sensitive. So I remember moving a rabbit ears antenna this way and that when switching channels in order to get decent reception.

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For many, Apple is the counter-culture company, or one of the remaining firms to fit into that category. No doubt that feeling revolves around the two founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Indeed the first project they delivered, before there was such a thing as an Apple Computer, was a blue box. That was a device designed to hack the touch-tone phone system to make free calls.

Officially, they sold between 40 and 100 of these devices for $170 each. So they weren’t so cheap, since that would be roughly $866 in today’s dollars. Regardless, hacking the phone system was illegal and the police soon shut them down. So no more blue boxes, and I suppose Jobs and Wozniak should have felt lucky that they weren’t jailed for their transgressions. The story goes that they gave up on the illegal stuff and decided to build legal gear instead.

Now even though Apple’s computers were decidedly normal technological gadgets, Apple’s renegade reputation stuck over the years. It certainly didn’t hurt that they opted not to conform to industry-standard processors and operating systems. Rather than “borrow” someone else’s achievement as a certain fellow gearhead was said to do, they went their own way.

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Let me put this in perspective: While I have had Mac portables since the 1990s, when they first appeared, I always regarded them as just too slow to manage my workflow. From tepid drive performance, to general sluggishness, I could never consider any of the PowerBooks or MacBook Pros I’ve owned to be suitable as replacements for my Mac desktops.

But it’s not that it’s convenient to schlep a desktop computer to a hotel, although I’ve done that a few times. But before I got my first PowerBook, I remember taking Barbara to another city for surgery. The Steinberg family set up shop, so to speak, in a hotel room. I found a store from where I could rent a PowerBook for a few days, and I copied over the critical work files before making the trip.

In those days, PowerBooks used trackballs rather than trackpads, and I’ve never liked either. Regardless, I made sure my critical writing assignments were mostly done before the trip so I could focus on finishing an article or two, editing the ones my editors would return for revision, and just manage email.

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