Author: David Cohen

The ever falling price of hard drive storage means that we can now own and manage terabytes and terabytes of space if we wish. But the ongoing increase of capacity and fall in price leads to a new problem – if you are anything like me, you will have a shelf littered with external drives, surrounded by a detritus of data cables and multiple “wall wart” power supplies. Mine act like a series of time capsules – the further back in time you go (based on when I bought each one), the smaller they become and the more disparate the type of data we retain.

It is always a pleasure to try a brand new technology on the Mac. There is something satisfying that comes with using a computer or gadget in a way that you have never experienced before, and the pace of technological development is such that there is always some new feature or bauble on the latest hardware or software to play with and coo over. Most often, this is something fancy and new that Apple has built in to their products, but in this case it is a Blu-ray writer from Other World Computing that is under consideration.

The twin drivers of mass market economics and corporate consolidation have lead us to a cornucopia of cheap, high performance electronics that would have been unimaginable only ten years ago. Back when you were dropping up to half the price of a small car on a laptop, it was always felt to be worth paying extra for a name brand. Build quality and service meant that Apple hardware commanded a premium price.

Adobe Acrobat 9.0 is the latest version (I was looking at the Professional variant – Standard is also available), and once you fire it up it is clear that Adobe has embraced the challenge of adding value with relish. A clean interface provides a series of drop-down buttons for the Acrobat workflow – starting with creation of new documents, and ending with commenting of existing PDFs.

The advancement of technology is a wonderful thing, particularly in the field of consumer electronics. Not only do devices get cheaper and more functional as time goes on, but they develop wonderful new capabilities.