An article in from San Jose Mercury News—Apple’s hometown paper, no less—brought her findings to a wider audience. Halio told the reporter that “never before in 12 years of teaching had I seen such a sloppy bunch of papers,” and compared giving a Macintosh to a student to giving a sports car to a 16-year-old. Paraphrasing her conclusions, the News wrote, “the same icons, mouse, fonts and graphics that make the machine easy to use may well turn off the brain’s creative-writing abilities.”

Apple fired back, pointing out that this was not a scientific study and lacked control groups to compare the findings against. And at least 20 of Halio’s academic colleagues agreed. In an article in the journal Computers and Composition, they lamented the attention Halio’s piece was getting, arguing that the “article is so seriously flawed by methodological and interpretive errors that it would probably have been dismissed had it appeared in a journal directed to an audience of professional writing teachers. Publication in Academic Computing has given it wide circulation, however, not only among faculty members involved with writing instruction, but also among administrators responsible for purchasing equipment for their campuses. Its potential impact is therefore considerable.”

In the end, it turns out Jobs was right—no surprise there—and GUIs changed the world for good. Since then, Apple has reinvented them again by making touchable GUIs mainstream with the iPhone (which had its own early skeptics). Now, the new frontier is interfaceless voice-controlled computing. And the worries about that have already begun.