On the surface, Apple is very similar to other high-tech companies. They build and sell hardware and software and, they hope and expect, make profits from them. That ought to be sufficient, and it is for most companies. But Apple, by word and deed, seems to have a far more expansive purpose. You can say, […]

On the surface, an iPad comes across as a pretty innocuous gadget. It’s just a rectangular object with a display, and buttons for volume and muting (or rotation lock if you prefer). It’s a blank slate in the best sense of the term, meaning it does nothing till its turned on and you start running […]

Back in the old days, they used to say that Macs were toys. In order to get “real” work done, you needed to use DOS, particularly in the form of MS-DOS, the text-based OS that was all the rage before graphical user interfaces (GUI for short) took over. Of course, that was until Microsoft begat […]

As the iPad 2 remains sold out most anywhere, the only question is whether Apple can build enough to satisfy the demand. But there’s another cloud hanging over production, which is the impact of the earthquake in Japan. Since many semiconductor parts are built there, any slowdown or halt in manufacturing is bound to cause […]