When Apple was really down in the dumps in the 1990s, their strategy seemed to make no sense. Efforts to build an industrial-strength operating system to replace the aging Mac OS had come up short. There were many Mac models, often with only slight variations, bearing different model names. It got so confusing even company […]

Several years ago, during one of their quarterly conference calls with financial analysts, Apple again dismissed the possibility that they’d ever build a cheap Mac. The reason, often stated, is that they didn’t want to build a crappy Mac. Well, it is true that, in the 1990s when Apple couldn’t do anything right (more or […]

This question may seem self-contradictory, but I have a point to make. Back in the mid-1990s, there were so many models of Macs to choose from, it was usually near impossible to pick one from the next. Even Apple’s own executives would fail this test. This was particularly true with the low-end Performa series, the […]

Those of us who embraced the Mac as the ideal personal computer solution early on might have been thought of as elitists at one time. That’s because we all paid substantially extra for the privilege, and that’s where the concept of the “Apple Tax” began. More to the point, for so many years, the Mac […]