Fascinating how things change. Back in the 1980s, when Macs became dominant in the publishing industry because of the LaserWriter and PageMaker, you didn’t read about the goings on at Apple in the mainstream press every single day. It’s hard to realize that Apple had a double digit market share way back when, although the total PC universe was a lot smaller. At the time, however, I was too busy earning that paycheck to think much about the computer I used to for my work.

I felt lucky when I only had one or two system crashes a day, that a floppy disk didn’t become corrupted, and that an attempt to output a high resolution document didn’t fail. No, things did not always “just work,” but you put up with the anomalies and the annoyances and persevered. Yes, there was also an occasional computer virus or two. I learned the hard way to get proper protection from such things, and accepted that, too, as the cost of doing business.

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When you think of security, the threat of malware comes to mind. Whether you call it a virus, a Trojan Horse or a worm, you don’t want to have to confront the nasty thing. You may prefer to think of such problems as exclusive to the Windows platform, but the first computer virus actually appeared years ago on the Unix operating system.

Over the years, there have been relatively few Mac viruses. Most were simply annoying, although some were destructive enough to cause you agony if you encountered them. But when Mac OS X arrived, and the closest thing to a virus threat was a proof of concept or two, or perhaps the periodic security updates from Apple, it was easy to come to the conclusion that it can’t happen here. That Mac OS X was also supposed to be more secure than Windows only added to your feeling of security. But it’s a false sense of security.

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As you may have heard elsewhere, Apple plans a Special Event on February 28th. Journalists are receiving cryptic messages in their mailboxes, asking them to “Come see some fun new products from Apple.” Fun? Well, that raises lots of possibilities. But if you take “fun” as representing a consumer computer, there is one set of prospects.

If you are a regular reader of these columns, you know that I don’t truck in rumors, and I do not claim to possess any magical powers to determine what Apple Computer might be up to in the foreseeable future. At the same time, when you look over the details and consider the trends, you can come up with some reasonable conclusions.

Of course, when it comes to reasonable conclusions, Apple has a nasty habit of confounding logic and reason and surprising us. So let that be my excuse if I happen to be dead wrong about all this, although others have presented similar ideas.

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Night Owl Rating:

There are lots and lots of keyboard and mouse combos that’ll operate on your Mac, but most were really designed for Windows, and you often feel that the makers made them Mac compatible mostly to throw us all a bone or two. But the fact that the Mac mini ships without input devices, and the growth of Mac sales in general, has apparently encouraged some companies to try to build special products for the platform.

In the past, I’ve heaped praise on keyboards from Matias, such as the tactilepro, a modern rendition of the original Apple Extended Keyboard, and the USB 2.0 keyboard. I’m also a huge fan of the original Logitech MX1000 Laser Cordless Mouse. Up till now, I wasn’t quite as pleased with the touch and other design elements of Logitech’s keyboards, but that’s poised to change with the company’s $99.99 Cordless Desktop S 530 Laser for Mac.

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