Although most of you didn’t get your hands on the Public Beta of Mac OS X until September of 2000, I actually saw it a month earlier. You see, I was working as a Contributing Editor for CNET in those days, and one of Apple’s PR people met me in San Francisco to deliver the […]

So here’s the eternal argument. Apple’s critics complain that the Mac and mobile platforms are clamped down tight, giving customers restricted freedom to do what they want. They want us to either convince Apple to change their ways, or make you switch to a more “open” platform, such as Windows, or perhaps Linux and the […]

Back in the 1990s, as Apple struggled to build an industrial strength operating system to take it into the 21st century, they were exhorted to make sure preemptive multitasking was implemented. In those days, Macs had cooperative multitasking, which meant that each app had to play nicely with other apps and make sure they didn’t […]

As I read the complaints about the lack of a Web cam and “true multitasking” on the iPad, I’m reminded of the complaints folks voiced years ago about the original Mac OS. In those days, as I mentioned in yesterday’s column, Apple cobbled together a cooperative multitasking system to allow you to run more than […]