At one time, tech pundits wondered what company should buy Apple, and it’s true that, in the 1990s before Steve Jobs returned, that was not beyond the realm of possibility. In early 1996, Apple evidently negotiated with Sun Microsystems — do you remember them? — to sell itself. This came in the wake of the […]

When Walt Disney died at the “tender age” of 65 in 1966, the executives who took over his company were in a quandary. What to do next? What would Walt have done anyway? But the quest to look back also hurt the company’s direction for years. Critical decisions weren’t made, at least until they realized […]

A common theme about Apple is that the critics demand that features from other platforms be copied. You can find a list; it’s easy, because Apple never attempts to compete on the quantity of features but, mostly, on the quality of features. So the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, obviously. Before it arrived, you had […]

I dare say that Apple didn’t expect the outcry over the MacBook Pro refresh. It may have, in part, been about pent-up demand for the computer, but it’s also a symptom that’s peculiarly Apple. Right or wrong, Apple did things in designing the new model that were either misunderstood, or went against what customers wanted. […]