What’s the best traffic app for your phone? WCCO-TV’s Liz Collin posed that question to me.

Quick answer: Google Maps.

Longer answer: It’s complicated, but there are good options for various usage scenarios and device types. If you use an Apple Watch with your iPhone, for instance, Apple Maps is a no-brainer.

Liz interviewed me in my home office, with an Apple Macintosh 128K just over my right shoulder, and Speed Racer over my left shoulder. More …

I recently marked a minor but memorable professional milestone: I wrote my 100th article for TidBITS, the venerable email newsletter and website focused on all things Apple.

I kind of stumbled into becoming a sometime TidBITS contributor in 2009. The role became formalized in 2015, when the editors added me to the masthead.

This is a big deal: A journalist with a passion for tech and especially Apple tech getting paid to write about it on a regular basis. More …

Warming up to the Apple Watch took me a while.

When the first version of the smartwatch came out in 2015, I delighted in having an Apple-branded product on my wrist. When the novelty wore off, though, I realized the gizmo wasn’t useful to me in any life-changing way, and ended up leaving it on its desktop charger most of the time. More …

Laptops with touch screens are pretty much the norm these days, with a prominent exception: Macintosh notebooks. Apple has stubbornly refrained from adding fingertip interaction to the displays on its MacBook-branded notebooks (while tryihg to accommode touch aficionados in other ways, like gargantuan trackpads and a controversial MacBook Pro Touch Bar.) So what’s a touch-y Mac user to do? More …

I love sit-stand desks, those contraptions that can be raised and lowered so you can work on a computer in a sitting or a standing position.

Standing desks have been hailed on health grounds, though the science on this is a mixed bag, at best. Prolonged sitting isn’t good for you, but switching to a standing desk doesn’t appear based on current evidence to be miraculous wellness enhancer. More …

Tech gifts for the holidays run the gamut price-wise from $20 or less to $1,000 and over, which can make shopping for such products confounding — especially if you are not a geek.

I recently appeared on WCCO-TV, my local CBS affiliate, to shed some light on this. Here are the products I featured in a WCCO Sunday Morning segment. More …

Just home from Florida vacation late last month, I headed to the airport again — this time on a work trip to Chicago.

I was off to attend my first Apple media event in years, and I was pretty excited about that.

Such press events are normally held on or near Apple’s California campus, but this one was staged at an inner-city Chicago magnet school. More …

I am beyond proud to be on the TidBITS masthead.

I therefore celebrate any improvements to this venerable, Apple-flavored tech-news operation.

TidBITS, run by amazing wife-and-husband duo Tonya and Adam Engst, saw a major upgrade last week: After months of planning and prep work, it debuted a spiffy new website.

It’s hard to overstate what an improvement this is. More …

As someone who’s ambivalent at best about listening to music, I’m not an obvious user candidate for Apple’s new HomePod speaker.

After all, the audio device is inextricably tied to the Apple Music service and aimed at those with ravenous appetites for all manner of melody. The speaker is, first and foremost, a music appliance.

Yet, I adore the HomePod.

More …