No, Apple hasn't made Pages freeware, or revived the late, lamented AppleWorks. I'm talking about Text Edit, the amazingly powerful and capable little word processor that comes bundled with every copy of Mac OS X. With the Leopard release of Text Edit, many users may find that it meets all of their practical word processing needs without the necessity of buying Pages, Microsoft Word, or another third-party word processor solution. Leopard's version of Text Edit can now even open MS Word files with basic formatting preserved, and save documents in Word's .doc file format. Sweet.

The state of the art in Mac OS POP 3 Email clients (from B to T)

I never set out to be the OS X Curmudgeon back when I launched my OS X Odyssey series on Applelinks back in 2001, really. At the outset, I anticipated a reasonably short transition in switching from the Classic Mac OS to OS X as my production platform. However, it soon became obvious that the journey would be more complex and protracted then I had expected, and some even suggested I had an anti- OS X bias. Not true from the beginning. I consider myself to be a Mac fanboy, but I'm not a cheerleader

Don't let your computer keyboard, which may carry 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat, or your cellphone, which is likely many times worse than that, make you sick

Stacks' restored Folder mode a welcome enhancement, but email throughput (at least on dialup) and Spaces stability still fall short. Leopard Graphics Update seems to help some

Many Apple notebook aficionados were eagerly anticipating a worthy successor to the 12" PowerBook G4. We didn't get one, and will the obsession with form factor thinness spill over to the larger 'Books?

And now as an Apple-authorized product too, but will an Apple subnotebook be its stiffest competition?

Anyway you slice it, 2007 has been a banner year for Apple. Its best-ever year as some folks are suggesting? Hard to say. Such evaluations really need some perspective of distance. However, there's no disputing that has been a very good year in the orchard - plus some personal notes on my year on the Mac

It's probably not going to be as hard as I expected, but there are some problems and angularities - not entirely unexpected, and flaky email support is an unpleasant surprise

Will you still be able to get at your stuff in 10 years?

Macs, iPods, and iPhones have in the main been elegantly, tastefully and attractively styled, consistently the best in the industry overall, but there have been some lapses....... A subjective critique of Apple design and style over the years

It still falls well short of broadband throughput, but SlipStream SP6.0 Macintosh, a.k.a Aliant Dial-Up Accelerator, actually works, and can speed dial-up page loads substantially