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 […]

So Apple gets ragged on by the media at times for not taking security seriously enough. While that may seem a sensible argument to make when a potential security threat is discovered and Apple doesn’t respond within five minutes, it remains true that the impact from such threats has not been especially high. Indeed, the only […]

It’s no secret that the first releases of OS X, starting with the Public Beta in 2000, were shaky. Your Mac suffered from subpar performance, even on the most powerful Power Macs of the time, missing features, and more crashes than you had the right to expect. After all, this was Unix, the industrial strength […]

It’s hard to believe that 14 years have elapsed since OS X — then Mac OS X — was originally released as a supposedly finished product. But it wasn’t quite the first version of Apple’s Unix-based OS to be available to the public. The previous September, Apple sold you a Public Beta, for $29, designed to […]