The launch of Mac OS X as a Public Beta in the fall of 2000 signified a sea change for Mac users. Coming four years after the purchase of NeXT, it represented the vindication of that deal, which also meant the return of Steve Jobs to Apple. Here it was, the long-delayed industrial strength replacement for the […]

Last year, the critics were wondering why so few were switching from iOS 7 to iOS 8. The theory went that the number of visible changes were fewer, and thus people were less inclined to update, and don’t forget the infamous 8.0.1 update that bricked some new iPhones. It didn’t help that Apple made the […]

I’ve long had a love/hate relationship with Apple’s approach to input devices. When Apple introduced small trackballs on the very first PowerBooks, I generally carried a standard mouse with me for comfort. I never took to trackballs, and I spent a year with one of the original Kensington TurboMouse. I tried real hard, after being […]

There’s this conventional wisdom, unfounded, that Macs were never susceptible to malware. That was certainly not true in the early days. I remember, in 1990 or thereabouts, buying a commercial app from a local computer reseller. This was an app from a major publisher, supplied on a floppy disk, in a shrink-wrapped box. I installed […]