In almost 20 years of purchases, I have never bought a “consumer” Mac for use at home. Since the first Mac I bought for my own use — a IIci with an obscenely generous 8MB of RAM, for those wondering — it’s been pro-level machines for me. The last couple of iMac revs have made [...]

I’m back on the MacJury for the latest session, along with Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica, Scott McNulty of The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Warren Williams of the AppleWorks User Group. We had a fun discussion on two topics: Microsoft’s abandoned attempts to acquire Yahoo! and “Can we dump Microsoft Office yet?” It was a [...]

There are few things as satisfying to me as taking a really dumb argument and ripping it to shreds with logic and facts. If that stupid argument is delivered with pomposity and arrogance, it’s all the more fun. Few people have elevated this to the level of sport as well as John C. Welch. A hunting [...]

Via a post on Twitter, Rick LePage reports he has received word that Stan Flack, founder of popular Mac news sites MacCentral and MacMinute, has passed away. No other details are available at this time. MacCentral was one of the first major Mac news sites on the web until it was bought and its content [...]

Back in the late-nineties, I produced what would now be called a podcast on the long-defunct “GiveMeTalk” Internet Radio Network. They were mostly 10-15 minute scripted shows, wherein I offered some analysis and commentary on the day’s news. Topics back then ranged from the introduction of candy-colored iMacs to the passing of legendary Mac journalist [...]

I didn’t write my annual look at the state of the Mac for the upcoming year this time around mostly because it seemed what was ahead was fairly obvious, with the notable exception of what “one more thing” Steve Jobs might pull out of his hat at some point during the year. I had already [...]

Good riddance to a stupid idea. The interesting question to me is not so much what this means for iTunes, but what does the record industry think it means for iTunes? Three of the big four are selling their DRM-free tracks only on Amazon. Is it pure spite? Do they have promises from Amazon of tiered [...]

For the first time in years, Macworld Expo has exceeded 400 exhibitors. The South Hall of the Moscone Center is sold out for the January 2008 event, and space in the Moscone West is going fast. This is a tremendous accomplishment for a show that many had written off completely just a few years ago. Some [...]

I completely skipped running Tiger on the Macs in my office — mostly over networking issues that never seem to have been resolved. We have two newer machines (both DP G5s) that came with Tiger installed. We found some workarounds for most of the issues, especially those dealing with our company’s proxy server. In a desperate [...]

Don’t install things from porn sites that ask for your admininstrator password. Should anyone really need to be told that?