Actually, there never were any hard-and-fast rules governing system choices, but there were some fairly widely accepted and critically-unexamined assumptions, such as the above-noted one that that for a serious workstation you needed a desktop computer, and that notebooks were best relegated to an auxiliary role for road warrioring duty while away from your "real" work computer, and so forth.

Some of us have been living outside those arbitrary envelopes for a long time. I switched to using a laptop and as my workhorse computer way back in 1996, and have been advocating in this column since it was launched in 1998 that for most users, the laptop was, is, and continues to be "the logical Mac."

The world has been coming around to my way of thinking on this. Laptop Macs began outselling desktop systems back in 2001 or 2002, and are now the the undisputed anchors of Apple's system fleet.

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