When he dispatched all the extraneous and confusing Mac models in the 1990s, Steve Jobs split the lineup into two camps — the consumer Mac and the professional Mac. This was best exemplified by the iMac and the Power Mac. The notebooks became iBooks and PowerBooks. The distinctions were obvious. Even after the first Intel-powered Macs arrived in […]

Back in 1998, Apple did the impossible, so to speak. With the introduction of the first iMac, the famous Bondi Blue model — Apple ditched the ADB, LocalTalk and SCSI ports, and replaced them all with USB. This was USB 1.0, thus fairly slow, but usable for anything but a hard drive. The floppy drive […]

I’m writing this two days before Apple is expected to take the wraps off the next iPhone, and you’ll read it a day before. But the discussion is already spinning towards its successor. in fact, there are a number of online complaints that the iPhone 7 won’t be such a big deal, that you might as well […]

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 […]