I read a headline today, referring to iPad owners as people who are somehow “shackled” to Apple’s hardware/software ecosystem. It conveyed the image of slaves sitting in the bowels of an ancient ship, chained to their seats and forced to manage the oars used to propel the vessel. Sometimes the stories I read about Apple […]

Although March 24, 2001 signaled the release of the first version of Apple’s long-awaited industrial-strength operating system, with loads of warts and missing features, that wasn’t the first time I got to see it. You see, Apple released a Public Beta version the previous September, but I got a look even earlier. In those days, […]

In the early days of the Classic Mac OS, we had a few virus infections. I recall working at a design studio in the late 1980s, when we’d get loads of floppies that were infected by a so-called desktop virus. Without going into boring detail, the malware embedded itself into the desktop files used by […]

Consider Microsoft’s plight. Hundreds of millions of customers, ranging from home users to the enterprise, bypassed Windows Vista and chose to stick with XP. Worse, many of them actually downgraded computers equipped with Vista, because they didn’t want to deal with its problems, real or imagined. Without having the exact figures on hand, I think […]