Someone once said that one of the advantages of religion is that it offers security in return for obedience. This point was not lost on the late Steve Jobs, the cofounder, savior and high priest of Apple. And it led Italian semiotician, philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco, in an essay published in the 1980s, to describe the Apple Mac as a Catholic machine, in contrast to the IBM PC, which Eco characterized as a Protestant device.

His reasoning was that the Mac freed its users/believers from the need to make decisions. All they had to do to find salvation was to obey the Apple way. All the important choices, including whether a mouse should have one button or two, had been made for them, whereas the poor wretches who had to use a PC had, like the Calvinists of yore, to make their own salvation: installing expansion cards, anti-virus software, wrestling with incompatible peripherals and so on.

Poor Steve has gone to the great computer lab in the sky, but the church he founded endures. And it still knows what is best for its adherents. Recently, the company launched the latest release of its OS X operating system, codenamed Mavericks. What happened was this: one day, while millions of the devout were tapping industriously on their keyboards, a small dialogue box appeared on the top right-hand corner of their screens. It informed them that important upgrades were available for their computers.