When I brought a Mac into my home in 1989, after using one for several years at the office, I thought I had a truly high-end computer. It had chosen a Macintosh IIcx. Released that year, it sat just below the Macintosh IIx in the lineup, but was relatively affordable as Macs went, at least in those days. I equipped it with a 100MB Rodime hard drive which cost, all by its lonesome, $1,200. In passing, I see you can still buy one, in 2016, for $126.95 from a dealer. I suppose there are people with ancient computers who need new drives.

The entire system, with an Apple laser printer, came to $14,000 even with a discount. I leased the system, but how things have changed!

In any case, traditional storage seems to expand by leaps and bounds every year. Seagate has announced a lineup of 10TB drives, with a standard 3.5-inch 7,200 RPM Barracuda Pro costing a “mere” $535.00. Remember, that’s a tad less than half what I paid for that 100MB hard drive 27 years ago, but that’s what you expect from advancing technology. But even though manufacturers can cram more data in a smaller space — and a storage device that manages atom by atom storage has been announced — the traditional drive technology still has the same limitations.

Imagine what you have to lose if you have terabytes of data on a drive that fails? I assume you’ll want to buy a couple more for backup, just to be sure. But you’re still limited by the speed of traditional mechanical storage.

That takes us to SSD. Using the same flash technology as those tiny thumb drives, they’ve become reasonably affordable in recent years.  Before I get to that, however, they also do wonders for reliability and performance. Not being mechanical, you don’t suffer from the traditional sources of trouble with hard drives. They can also be many times faster than the standard hard drive, and that can do wonders with the perceived speed of your computer.

So a hefty portion of what you do on a Mac or PC relies on the storage device. Where it may take a minute or two for your Mac or PC to boot, when you swap in an SSD, that changes to seconds. Most apps launch pretty quickly too, and saving documents is faster. But getting lots of SSD storage can still be expensive, even though prices drop regularly.

Consider that $535.00 10TB Barracuda Pro from Seagate. What does that figure get you in solid state storage?

Well, Other World Computing is offering various Mercury 2TB SSDs starting at $575.75. That’s for the bare drive, and the price for a complete system, with installation hardware, adds a little more. Regardless, this is a close to what a 1TB SSD would cost you a year or two back, so that’s progress. Indeed, for most people, it’s more than enough storage. I assume professionals with expensive Mac Pro workstations might even assemble several of these for a RAID drive.

If you can get by with 1TB, it’s $337.50 and the sweet spot is a 500TB SSD (actually 480GB) for less than $200. If you stop around, you’ll find somewhat better deals, but OWC designs its storage gear to be fully plug-and-play compatible with Macs. Installation hardware, if needed, is available. So this may sound like an ad, but I outfitted a late 2009 iMac with a 1TB SSD last year. The performance improvement was a revelation. I followed up by putting one of OWC’s 500GB SSDs in a 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro, and most of the sluggishness I had experienced was history.

Apple’s Fusion Drive provides the best of both worlds. Although recent versions have smaller SSDs, the original model consisted of a 128GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive. By OS magic, data is first copied to the SSD. That includes the OS and most or all of your apps. Your most recently used documents are copied there as well, and as documents are less used, they are moved to the hard drive. In the real world, for most users who aren’t managing a number of documents that are multiple gigabytes in size, you get most of the speed of an SSD for a fraction of the cost.

Unfortunately, Apple continues to overcharge for extra storage. If you want your $2,499 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display to switch from a 512GB SSD to a 1TB SSD, the price increase is $500. Remember you can buy a 2TB SSD from OWC for not much more. Of course, RAM upgrades from Apple are also too expensive.

Now if Apple would wake up and smell the roses, they’d serve customers better. I don’t know the profit margins, but I’ll assume that they are paying far less for flash memory than any third-party company.

Regardless, I think the price of SSD is — aside from Apple gouging customers for upgrades — hitting the sweet spot when it comes to affordability. I do expect that we might see 20TB hard drives and bigger, and maybe that atom-drive will show up at a reasonable price before long. But hard drives are on the way out. Some years hence, the SSD will also become an endangered species.

As development continues on fall’s OS updates, Apple hasn’t stopped working to improve the current versions. So on Monday, expected updates appeared for OS X version 10.11.6, iOS version 9.3.3, watchOS 2.2.2, and tvOS 9.2.1. All told, Apple has been busy, and it’s interesting how these were all timed to appear around the same time.

The cynics might suggest that Apple set a hard-wired deadline, and fixed what it could before the deadline arrived. Fixes that didn’t make the cut might be pushed off to the future or, if not significant, perhaps set aside for the fall upgrades. But maybe I’m just guessing in light of how well the signs aligned in delivering these updaters.

On the same day, the third developer betas appeared for macOS Sierra, iOS 10, watchOS 3, and tvOS 10. The public will very likely get the first two in a few days, perhaps a slightly later version. But I suppose that depends on the condition of these releases. But Apple does appear to have settled on a two-week schedule for now. I would expect that to become a weekly affair once it gets close to the final release dates.

In case you’re wondering, I did update my iPhone 6 with the iOS 10 beta a while back. For the things I do, it has worked quite well, with each successive release running even better. But I won’t fall into the foolish trap of a few tech pundits who have reviewed Apple’s betas and complained about the rampant bugs. When you’re two months or so from the final release, what do you expect?

Sure, it’s appropriate to mention problems when trying to describe how a feature works, especially of those problems prevent it from working properly. But the responsible reporter would also explain that it’s beta, so such things are par for the course. Sometimes things that work well in one beta, may be broken in the next. I know of one notable example in macOS Sierra, but I don’t want to dwell on it since it’s obvious enough that I’m sure Apple will fix it before long. Let’s just say that I am not prepared to put the beta on my iMac’s production partition just yet.

When it comes to this week’s maintenance updates for the release operating systems, most of them involved fixing bugs and improving security. It’s possible those fixes will thus go unnoticed for most of you. watchOS 2.2.2, however, requires that you install iOS 9.3.3 first. I suppose that might be a source of confusion, but one or more of the fixes must involve how the iPhone and Apple Watch integrate. I suppose.

The only update that actually carries much of a list of fixes is OS X 10.11.6. The list includes:

• Resolves an issue that may prevent settings from being saved in accounts with parental controls enabled.
• Resolves an issue that prevented some network devices, such as speakers and multifunction printers, from accessing SMB share points.

The update also has a few updates for Macs in an enterprise environment.

• Improves startup time when connecting to a NetBoot server.
• Resolves an issue that may prevent startup from a NetBoot image created with an OS X v10.11.4 or OS X v10.11.5 installer.
• Resolves an issue that may cause Active Directory authentication to take longer than expected.

The security fixes are listed separately, and include the usual stuff about repairing problems that might make your Mac susceptible to being controlled or infected by a hacker. One notable fix dealt with a vulnerability that would allow someone to keep a Facetime audio connection open even when the call was terminated; a similar fix appears in iOS 9.3.3. This comes across as the sort of eavesdropping scheme you see on TV procedurals. Take that, “Mr. Robot.”

Unfortunately, nothing in the El Capitan release notes mentions Mail and that stalling issue I’ve experienced since the first beta. Perhaps it’s something that only impacts huge mailboxes, and some of mine contain messages dating back to 1999. To be fair to Apple, perhaps I should just archive all the old stuff. It’s not that I need to consult them in my daily work. I am not a pack rat either, but I do, on a rare occasion, search for a real old message for one reason or another. So I don’t want to just delete them yet.

Unless something nasty shows up from these updates, I would not be surprised if  these are the final updates for the current operating systems, although there will be security fixes for a couple of years at least.

The real question is whether these releases are stable enough to satisfy those who gave bad reviews to their predecessors. OS X El Capitan, for example, merits roughly three stars out of five at the App Store, and it’s not just about features. There are reports of bugs, but some problem reports make very little sense.

So one reviewer complains that Adobe CS2 apps won’t run. Of course they won’t! CS2 was released in 2005, before Apple released the first Intel-based Macs. Beginning with OS X Lion, Apple removed the Rosetta PowerPC binary translator, so it was never possible to run CS2 with that and later Mac operating systems. Adobe CS3, released in 2007, was the first “Universal” version of the Creative Suite. Clearly the customer is living in a bubble.

So maybe I shouldn’t take some of those negative reviews seriously. As I said, except for the Mail issue, which may be at least my fault in part, El Capitan runs just great.

Once upon a time, the computer placed on the desk of the typical employee in a large company wasn’t a PC at all. It consisted of a simple terminal, no local storage, providing just enough processing power to run a display with decent performance. The main computer was a mainframe placed in a special room or datacenter, managed by a team of system admins, and each terminal was connected via a physical cable. After all, this was long before the advent of Wi-Fi.

Over the years, most computing systems became independent, fully-capable machines that might still depend on a single network for data. The connection might still consist of a cable, but more often has become wireless, since performance may no longer be all that different.

With the growth of cloud-based services, most anyone can utilize an online network for data storage, rather than just email or web access. Apple’s iCloud Drive, Google Drive, and Microsoft One Drive, are key examples of interactive online storage systems that can serve as extensions to your computer’s storage device in extending its capabilities, and perhaps as a potential replacement.

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So Microsoft has amply demonstrated that the company is not ignoring the Mac any longer. On Thursday, the first Office for Mac 2016 Preview appeared, with new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, One Note and Outlook. Since a complete preview of Office 2016 for Windows has yet to show up, it does seem as if we’re at platform parity after all these years. Indeed, Microsoft is at last paying more attention to other platforms, witness the release of Office for iPad some time back, and a public preview of Office for Android, and there’s not a touch version of Office for Windows out quite yet.

I gather Microsoft’s new marketing plan is to accept Office 365 subscriptions regardless of platform, so long as the money is good. But the Office for Mac beta is free, and you’ll get free updates until it’s released; it’ll expire 30 days later. After that, the final version will require an Office 365 subscription, or a regular software license.

No matter, isn’t it curious that OS X and iOS users are getting first digs at new Office releases faster than Windows users? Also, an Android version is being beta tested. This is quite unlike Microsoft’s traditional practice, which was to release Mac apps months or years after the Windows version, usually with fewer features and worse performance.

The new versions, however, will supposedly be interoperable among all platforms, including the enhanced collaboration features that seem to be the most important changes.

If you want to compare the Office upgrade to the number of enhancements routinely added to iWork, it comes up short, although the former has far more native features. Office for Mac requires OS X Yosemite, which allows Microsoft to focus on a user interface that combines some Windows conventions with a true Mac look and feel. In this case, it’s the thinner, flatter theme of Yosemite. Since more than 50% of Macs have been updated to OS 10.10 so far, I suppose that’s a good thing. If you use an older OS on your Mac, whether because of choice or compatibility, you’ll be stuck using Office 2011 so long as it’s supported.

But by emphasizing the interface, Microsoft appears to be taking the same tact as they did with the notorious Office 2001 for Mac upgrade, which was mostly about making it compatible with OS X. The feature enhancements were otherwise slight, but Microsoft didn’t give you a discount for a mostly compatibility-driven upgrade.

At least if you have an active Office 365 license, you’ll get Office 2016, Mac or Windows, as part of the package, so maybe it won’t make you feel you’ve been ripped off.

But as you go through the apps that make up the suite, you won’t see so many significant charges.

So Microsoft is making a big deal about hype over substance. We know, for example, that Office 2016 for Mac is “Unmistakably Office,” as the result of the ribbon, cross-platform features and keyboard shortcuts. “Designed for Mac,” describes the Yosemite interface, although some features of OS X, such as Auto Save and Versions, aren’t supported. This is supposedly due to the lack of compatibility with Microsoft One Drive. The “Cloud connected” capability is about OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint. iCloud isn’t mentioned. But Retina displays are now supported.

Typical of the slim roster of improvements, aside from enhanced collaboration tools, Word has a Format Object task pane that handles pictures, shapes and effects.

Excel’s enhancements are mostly about consistent keyboard shortcuts across platforms and analyzing and visualizing your data. PowerPoint brings improved animations and coauthoring capabilities. What this means is that it’ll be pretty easy for even new users to follow online training guides to get up to speed.

If you’re currently using OneNote, Microsoft’s digital note-book app, you’ll get the version that’s already been released. The public beta for the Outlook email/contact manager was made available a few months ago for Office 365 subscribers, but there appear to have been some performance improvements. And, after several years, you no longer get “port attribute” errors when you run Keychain First Aid in Keychain Access after adding your email accounts to Outlook. Finally!

I’ve had ongoing problems getting attuned to Outlook, and I suppose it’s best used by those who work on Outlook for Windows, and/or encounter holes in Apple Mail’s implementation of Microsoft Exchange support. That Outlook’s contact lists appear to exist separate from Apple’s is not a good approach. It forces you to make a choice rather than ensure compatibility.

All in all, if you require Office for your job, the promise of mostly consistent versions for OS X, Windows, iOS and Android will make it all the more convenient to use these apps without worrying about your platform choices.

But it’s not as easy is that. There are open source Office suites for the major computing platforms that work reasonably well in translating Office documents. Google Apps is relatively lightweight when it comes to features, but most of you don’t really need all that Office offers.

The one promising development is performance. Office for Mac, while still a beta, doesn’t feel near as sluggish as previous versions. It almost feels lightweight. But it’s also clear Microsoft is running out of ideas, since there aren’t a whole lot of new features to consider. If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, or you’re on a long-term Office contract, it won’t matter. You’ll get the new version free of charge. But those have to pay an upgrade fee after the public beta process is over should think twice whether it’s really worth it, and that is the biggest problem with Microsoft’s curious upgrade priorities that seem to favor form over substance.