I've heard it said that portable micros have no place in serious computing. Not the 28lb Charles Atlas portables, the A4 Epson/Tandy 100/NEC/Olivettit/H-P 110 style.

These lightweight portables, some say (and you can recognise them by the redness around the eyes that comes to anyone who spends any time with their head in the sand), have deficient displays, sparse storage, and few real functions.

The truth, as usual, is a platitude - you don't miss something until it's not there any more, in this case - computing power.

There is one undeniable satisfaction about writing for a magazine that appears halfway around the world from where I live, and that is that unless I show it to here, there's no likelihood of my wife accidentally coming across my column. So I can confess: during the twelve days I just spent in Pakistan, I missed a computer more than I missed my wife and kids.

This may sound heartless, especially as families (under favourable circumstances) can be just as portable as micros. But however strong they may be on moral support wives and offspring come up woefully short in the data processing department. I blame the system designer.

In fact, before I go anywhere again I'm going to make sure I take along a portable with word processing and database software, especially if I go with a group of 56 reporters, TV production people, various hangers-on, and the stars of the show - a group of Japanese, Korean and US wrestlers staging charity bouts to raise funds for Afghanistani refugees.

And especially if I'm responsible for keeping everybody advised as to their schedules, which for reasons various and sundry broke the 56 down into two large groups, four small, and three of only one person each. All of them spent a lot of time going to different places at the same time.

The inclement weather and an innate Third World inability to treat time, space and the universe on any but a fatalistic, carefree, "what's everybody getting so excited about" level and numerous other cataclysms required endless and countless changes to the schedules I'd so neatly prepared, personalised and printed back home on my desk-bound micro, schedules that looked like a Race Tote scratch sheet by the end of the trip.

In any case, if I wasn't before, I'm now a firm believer in portable computers, disk drives and printers, and have also had good cause to promise never again to complain when the micro and the rest of the hi-tech stuff I surround myself with performs less than perfectly. I've seen tech at its lowest.

Our group had the no-so-easily arranged privilege (I spoke with one reporter who after three months had still not received a permit!) of visiting an Afghanistani refuge camp. Like most chip-heads I admite our more capable fellows who can scrape electronic bits and pieces to build computers, but my mind is still numb from the sight of people who must scrape together their homes, so low-tech that the building materials are straw and mud, and who must daub the outsides with cow-dung so it will dry faster so that they can use it as fuel, and then live on the 50 cent allowance they receive as refugees (the cost of a Coca-Cola in our hotel).

Now I've got that off my chest, back to the purpose of the column, which is personal computer news. Apparently Air Pakistan has recently modernised its offices by buying some 200 Apples, and has worked out some kind of deal to manufacture or assemble or act as sales agents for Apple in Pakistan.

This may not be big news for you or me, but now that I've seen how the other two-thirds of the world lives, I'm in favour of any step forward. Apples as fruit might be more appropriate than micros but who's going to quibble? Micros are working minor miracles everywhere else, why not where miracles are noticeably thin on the ground?