Apple CEO Tim Cook surely charmed Twitter users — and lots of others — with that famous comment about Windows 8 and the merging desktop and mobile operating systems. It would be very much like trying to combine a refrigerator with a toaster, he said, using extreme examples to get his point across. But maybe […]

For several years, I have written at great length about the problems that arise when Consumer Reports tackles tech gear. Yes, the magazine has a stellar reputation, in large part because tested products are all bought retail, they don’t take ads from other companies, and don’t even allow those companies to quote CR reviews in […]

It’s not just a legend but a fact that Steve Jobs and crew visited the famous Xerox PARC labs in the 1970s, and were thus inspired to build the Macintosh and the Mac OS, with the famous graphical user interface. Of course PARC didn’t just invent GUIs. They were responsible for key innovations in laser […]

Years ago, Microsoft would respond to serious competition by assuring everyone that they were working on an even better product. You’d even see it some day, but maybe they could interest you in the stuff they were working on now. This comes across as a classic bait and switch scheme, particularly when those promised products […]