One of the earliest superstitions bandied about when it came to a Mac was that it wasn’t a serious business computer. In those days, real computers used command line interfaces, and Apple’s graphical flourishes were meant as entertainment. You couldn’t, they said, get any real work done on one of those little boxes. But since […]

From the very first day the Mac appeared, the critics said it wasn’t a serious personal computer. The graphical user interface meant it was just a plaything for the rich and restless, and that you couldn’t get any serious work done on it. That was the function of the real computer, the one that you […]

Whenever I get a word processing document, I don’t have to look at the file extension or icon to know it’s probably in Word, or translated into that ubiquitous format in another application. A spreadsheet? Excel, of course, although things might be a little hazier with a presentation, since Apple’s Keynote does so many good […]