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Macworld Team

>> Postings for July 2011

Simon Jary - Mmmmmmm… Apple

Mon, 25 Jul 2011

Macintosh  In the past Apple didn’t think so hard about its product names: the Apple I was followed by the Apple II, and Apple III. The Lisa was named after a child, for goodness sake – possibly Steve Jobs’ child but equally possibly one of the engineer’s kids, or maybe a cat. The Macintosh was named after a type (or, more appropriately for a company run by Jobs, a ‘cultivar’) of apple.

Even then, for legal reasons, Apple couldn’t spell it the correct way (McIntosh). Despite Jobs’ attempts to muscle high-end audio equipment-maker McIntosh (I know, I’d never heard of it either), Apple had to jam an ‘a’ in there, in much the same way it now adds an ‘i’ to generic names for things.

Simon Jary | Read more...


Andy Ihnatko - Now everything fits

Thu, 14 Jul 2011

Two highly curious objects which arrived in my office recently provoked many hours of blank stares and idle speculation: a tube of sunblock and a Google Chromebook.

A piece of mail that arrived later in the week revealed that the sunblock was a gimmick to promote a backup service. So: one mystery was solved. I’m still stymied about the Chromebook.

Andy Ihnatko | Read more...


Simon Jary - Apple: to L and back

Mon, 04 Jul 2011

LaserWriter   Apple hasn’t just made computers, phones, tablets and iPad cases. It used to make printers, too, and in many ways it was the LaserWriter, and not the Mac itself that really got Apple’s new computing platform up and running in 1985. The Mac was fine and fancy, cute and cool, but the LaserWriter was actually a useful, professional tool.

It was the first laser printer to run Adobe’s PostScript language that described all 13 of its fonts in outline form – allowing for arbitrary size, rotation and position, as well as mixtures of fonts and bitmaps on the same page.

Simon Jary | Read more...


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