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 [...]

Yet another example of why Microsoft is no longer worth worrying about. The idea that anything that can’t “prove” it’s legal is therefore presumed illegal is insulting, contrary to the American principle of law and potentially illegal itself. Microsoft’s willingness to hand over its users rights to Fair Use and essentially sell them out to [...]

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 [...]

Now that Apple has opened its 10th New Jersey store (in Cherry Hill, for those wondering), I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at how we covered the Garden State’s first store, which opened in Tice’s Corner in 2001. Back then, of course, there were only five retail outlets, and the [...]

The slides from my Macworld San Francisco 2008 session on setting up a WiFi network are now available as a PDF file. Thanks to all of you who attended and responded so enthusiastically. I was lucky enough to have great crowds for all four sessions — they were attentive, asked great questions and were very [...]

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 anyone interested, I’ll be giving a session at Macworld San Francisco this year. The nice thing is that it’s part of the Macworld Learning Center, so it’s free for all attendees — not just those who sign up for the conferences. I think the idea is to give the attendees a taste of what [...]