During his appearance this past weekend on The Tech Night Owl LIVE, commentator Peter Cohen suggested that Apple’s Jonathan Ive has a “thin fetish.” He didn’t make that statement to be provocative, but to suggest that Ive had taken some wrong turns in design in the interests of style over substance. So it makes sense […]

Some lessons of Apple history: Back in the mid-1990s, Apple suffered from a severe bout of model proliferation. The consumer-based Performa lineup was available in so many configurations, it was hard to tell one from the other without a cheat sheet. In some cases, a model number was customized for a specific dealer, meaning that […]

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 […]

When rumors first arose that Apple planned to incorporate a retina display in the 27-inch iMac, I wondered what sort of price penalty it would entail. It’s one thing to pack those extra pixels into an iPhone, an iPad or a 15-inch MacBook Pro. I speculated it would cost several hundred dollars more for the […]