RandomMaccess

[I neglected to link to this post I wrote over at The Mac Observer, but as I watched my son synching his new iPod touch over WiFi this Christmas, these thoughts came back to me; I figured they should be here as well. - Editor.] Apple released iOS 5.0.1 yesterday, mainly to address battery issues (…)

Steven P. Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple, has died, according to a statement released by Apple’s Board of Directors: We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world (…)

I haven’t really chimed into the controversy surrounding the release of Apple’s Final Cut Pro X (disparagingly referred to by some as “iMovie Pro’), but I thought this clip from the Conan O’Brien show illustrated the criticism perfectly (and hilariously). That an upgrade to a professional editing application could be fodder for a late night (…)

In his latest Technologizer column for Time, Harry McKracken takes a reasoned, thoughtful look at the current state of Mac security and comes to much the same conclusion I did: while Mac malware is still more reliant on social engineering than technological exploits, there’s no such thing as risk-free computing. (The) fact that the recent (…)

Apple made the unusual move of spelling out the topics for its WWDC Keynote next week: Apple CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next (…)

More on Dell’s new laptop from The Guardian: Noted in passing: advert for the Dell XPS-15, containing the phrase Finally, the power you crave in the thinnest 15″ PC on the planet*. Wow, the thinnest? But wait, what’s the asterisk? Small print time: “Based on Dell internal analysis as at February 2011. Based on a (…)

The phenomenon of other brands’ products “coincidentally” beginning to look like Apple products is nothing new, (think about cellphones before and after the iPhone or tablets after the iPad, for instance) so it’s not surprising to see that Dell’s new XPS 15z laptop bears a striking resemblance to the MacBook Pro. They’ve even copied Apple’s (…)

TechCrunch has leaked screenshots of the new Windows App Store: Compare that with this screenshot of the Mac App Store (also via TechCrunch): Now consider what smartphones looked like after the iPhone; tablets after the iPad; and now this. Seriously, isn’t anyone even trying to be original anymore?

The one-year anniversary of the iPad (I discussed it on a MacJury panel this week) and an episode of Shawn King’s Your Mac Life brought to mind a piece I wrote in 2004 to discuss the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh. Although the article is now seven years old, I think the analysis is still (…)

On the tenth anniversary of the introduction of Mac OS X, I thought it would be fun to take a look at this RandomMaccess column from April 1, 2003 — an April Fool’s Day look at an imagined reception of Apple’s then still-nascent operating system: “I blew it. It’s as simple as that,” said a (…)