Tech pundits have a bizarre habit of declaring products dead long before they're actually goners. Me, I do my darndest to avoid the temptation to play premature coroner. I will say this, though: If the PC does end up mortally wounded someday, we may look back at early June of 2011 as the moment when its death warrant was signed. In the past eight days, Microsoft and Apple have shown off upcoming versions of their respective ...

I'm still not sure what I did to set it off. All I know is that I was blithely surfing the Web using Apple's Safari browser on my MacBook Air last week, and a page identifying itself as "Apple security center" popped up. It declared that my Mac had 75 viruses, then launched the installation routine for something called Mac Protector. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. I'm pretty smart for my age — and read my tech blogs — ...

"The first step to winning the future is encouraging American innovation." That was Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last January, when he hit the theme repeatedly, using the word innovation or innovate 11 times. And on this issue, at least, Republicans seem in sync with Obama. Listen to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or Mitch Daniels and the word innovation pops up again and again. Everyone wants innovation and agrees that it is ...

What's next for Microsoft Windows? With Windows 7 now nineteen months old, plenty of people are curious about its successor, a product which everybody's calling Windows 8 even though it hasn't been officially named yet. At the moment, however, all we know for sure is that we hardly know anything at all. Last month, for instance, the tech blogosphere was aflutter over leaked screen shots of a Windows 8 app store that looked very much like Apple's ...

Over the years, Apple has become almost as well known for the tight control it imposes on its innovations as for the tech and marketing genius behind them. If you buy an iPhone in the U.S., for instance, Apple makes you use AT&T as your carrier and it requires you to buy any new applications from its App Store. But some owners have been hacking their iPhones to get around these rules — a process known as ...

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a very rich, very clever man. He got up on a big stage and held up a new kind of computer. It was flat, and it didn't have a keyboard. This very rich, very clever man then tried to convince a bunch of reporters that in five years this flat, keyboardless computer would be the most popular kind of computer in the country. Some of ...

First, a disclaimer: unlike some of my tech-pundit peers, I don't claim to be uncannily prescient. Actually, I revel in the industry's glorious unpredictability. One of 2010's biggest stories involved a tech blog buying the top-secret, next-generation iPhone after an Apple engineer left it behind at a bar. In another, Microsoft canceled a much publicized line of phones two months after it introduced it. If you'd predicted either of these fascinating sagas a year ago, I would ...

Apple's long-awaited white iPhone 4, which hit stores April 28, is expected to be another smash for Steve Jobs. But how much will it benefit the American economy? Though invented in the U.S., the iPhone is manufactured in China, so, ironically, iPhones sold in the U.S. add to the trade deficit with the Middle Kingdom. Yet China contributes almost nothing to the value of an iPhone; it does little more than assemble parts from elsewhere. A host of other countries, ...

When Steve Jobs strode onstage and unveiled the iPad in January 2010, he should have ended his presentation by firing a starting pistol. The news left nearly every other big computer and consumer-electronics maker racing to get into the tablet market that Jobs' iPad had suddenly created. As it happens, the competition turned out to be a marathon. More than a year later, we're still talking about tablets that are huffing and puffing their way toward the showroom floor. There's RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook, slated to ...

Like a dried-apple doll's, Carmela's 99-year-old wrinkled smile was sweet but a little spooky. She had come to the hospital from home, with two daughters in their 70s, her little old medical doctor of 30 years, Dr. Jones , most of her teeth and one badly broken hip. They're not too impressed with high-functioning centegenarians in my hospital anymore; we get quite a few these days. But Carmela stood out. She was a little deaf and a ...