Dan Knight
- 2006.06.27
Apple Needs a Midrange Mac
In response to Apple Needs to
Offer Less Mac for Less Money, John Brady writes:
I agree with you here. For some reason it seems like the Intel
machines all converge on the same (too high) price point. I really
think the Mac mini is a problem.
It's too expensive on the low end, and too crippled on the high
end, and by that I'm looking squarely at the GMA 950 graphics. I'd
rather the mini were two machines. A cheaper model like you
describe, and a perhaps somewhat more expensive, somewhat larger
model with upgradable graphics.
I know you're likely to say I want a Power Mac, and you're
right; that's what I've got now. I argue, however, that Apple
taking the hard line of $2,000 Power Mac or you get notebook
graphics really hurts market share, especially now the Intel
transition is in full swing. Because a legitimate appeal
could be made to gamers and other Wintel faithful with that
single change, dual booting makes a difference. A $500 optical-less
mini (to function as an educational terminal machine), a
$900-$1,000 Core Duo machine with two memory slots and a single X16
slot and no integrated graphics card would move units.
Would it cannibalize iMac sales? I really don't think so; the
only thing in danger might be the low-end tower, but as long they
kept the towers quad core across the line it probably wouldn't even
hurt them.
Sincerely,
John Brady
I think you're on to something, John. The Mac mini
is a bit dear on the low end, and the Power Mac (and its
forthcoming Intel-based replacement) are overkill for most users.
Most users don't need expansion slots or the ability to upgrade
video. Most users would be happy with a Mac mini, iMac, or
MacBook.
Power users need expansion slots, and the towers
are perfect for them. Slots and more slots. Drive bays. Lots of
power.
But there's nothing in between, no Mac with Core
Duo power and the ability to upgrade graphics. This was the niche
that the Cube filled. Despite being a
gorgeous computer and a marketing disaster (for which we take
partial blame, since we readily pointed out that for the small
difference in price the Power Mac was a much better choice), it
allowed users to upgrade the hard drive, the graphics card, and,
with third-party upgrades, put in a faster G4 CPU.
Apple would do well to consider a desktop line
between the mini and the maxi - er, tower. This in-between model
would use 3.5" SATA hard drives, perhaps offer Core Duo or Core 2
Duo power, and include just one or two PCIe slots. This would allow
low-cost drive upgrades, quick and easy CPU upgrades, and the
ability to replaced the video card and perhaps add an extra card
for eSATA or some other technology.
With one hard drive bay, one optical drive bay,
and just 1 or 2 PCIe slots, it would be a lot smaller and less
expensive than the tower models. And based on my many years of real
world Mac support, they would offer all the expansion most Mac
users ever need - it was rare in my IS days to see more than 1 PCI
or NuBus card in any Mac.
Price: Well under the US$1,999 Power Mac G5 Dual or the anticipated Mac
Pro replacement. And not too much higher than the US$799 Mac mini
Core Duo. I think a US$999 model with 2.0 GHz Core Duo would sell
like hot cakes.
Dan
iMac Internet Café Needs
Following up on Church Needs 5
Cheap Macs for Internet 'Cafe', Ted Bragg writes:
Hi Dan,
Well, the iMacs arrived yesterday, and aside from a few missing
their port flap/door, they're perfect.
I'm now looking for software that can do the following:
- Admin login & pass: to prevent the kiddos from accessing
the Finder and disk drives
- Prevent downloads
- Block offensive/porn/hate sites, etc.
- Keylog sessions, monitor where they go, etc.
- Lock the CD-ROM drive - don't want them playing and ripping CDs
to the hard drive
The Macs are all running OS 9.2 (yay!), and they're all
identical.
TIA - Ted
Ted,
It's a long time since I've really worked with Mac
OS 9 outside of Classic mode, but every version of Mac OS 9.x
support multiple user accounts. That's the place to start in
creating a non-administrative account.
Before you set up user accounts, you need to set
up your owner account with a user name and password using the
Sharing control panel. They you can open the Multiple Users control
panel and click the On radio button next to Multiple User
Accounts.
Next, create a user account by clicking the New
User button and assign a name and password. Both can be blank, and
you might find this useful for your Internet café. Or you
might want to call it Guest, User, or iMac 1 - just use a blank
password or the same password on all of these accounts to simplify
login. (You may want to create specific user accounts for certain
users later on.)
Your new account can be a normal user, a limited
user, or a panels user - the latter having no access at all to the
Finder and using a simplified launcher system. And you can edit the
user info to specify whether an account can change the password,
which apps they can run, whether they can access CDs or DVDs, if
they can open control panels, which printers (if any) can be used,
and many other things.
That should be enough to get you started. You'll
want to check your browser settings to restrict downloads, and
you'll need to add third-party software to log user sessions. As
far as blocking unwanted websites, that's probably most easily done
through your ISP (there are some specifically set up to address
your needs) or by setting up a firewall/proxy server that can do
all of that on a single device rather than running a program on
each of your iMacs.
I'm not at all familiar with these areas, but I'll
post this in the LEM Mailbag in hopes some readers can suggest
session loggers, ISPs, and filtering software.
Another good resource is our Mac OS 9 email list, which has many
helpful OS 9 users who may be able to answer your questions.
Dan
Internal or External 7200 rpm Drive for
Slot-loading iMac?
Doug Fehr writes:
My hard drive needs replacing in my iMac G3 500 MHz. If I go for the
internal replacement 7200 rpm 80 GB 8 MB buffer, will it
overheat? Or if I opt for an external FireWire enclosure, will I
get the same performance/throughput (running Tiger 10.4) and
can I use this external drive as my system drive? It seems external
may be cheaper and make more sense in long run - portable &
cost per gig is less.
Thanks, Doug
Doug, I haven't heard of overheating problems with
7200 rpm drives in slot-loading iMacs, but you might want to ask
around on our iMac list.
The slot-loading iMacs supports 33.3
megabyte per second (MBps) throughput on an Ultra ATA drive
bus. FireWire 400 has 400 megabits per second (Mbps)
bandwidth, which gives it a maximum throughput of 50 MBps. A good
7200 rpm drive can move data faster than that, so the FireWire
drive will be up to 50% faster than the internal bus on
slot-loading iMacs.
80 GB drives are cheap these days, and if you can
find an external FireWire 400 drive for less than a raw internal
drive, it's definitely the way to go. Even if it costs a bit more,
you gain the speed, the ability to move it to another Mac, and
(unless your old hard drive has died) more total storage space with
both an internal and an external drive.
Looking forward, you might want to look into a
drive with both FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 support. While USB 2.0
isn't any faster than FireWire in the real world, it will give you
more flexibility down the road. My personal favorite is the
Newer Tech
miniStack v2, which has a 3-port USB 2.0 hub and a 2-port
FireWire hub built in and also runs a lot cooler than the smaller
enclosures I use with many of my 7200 rpm drives. You may, in fact,
run into more heat problems with small FireWire enclosures than you
would putting the drive in your iMac.
An enclosure similar to the original miniStack
seems to be available from a variety of vendors under different
brands. See my review, NewerTech miniStack: A Great Drive
Even if You Don't Own a Mac mini, for more on this drive.
For the record, I run my eMac from an external 7200 rpm drive
in a miniStack enclosure not so much for speed but because it's a
real pain to swap hard drives in the eMac - and I can definitely
use the extra ports.
Dan
Low End Mac Broken with IE 4.5
"apathy" writes:
I thought I would send a mail to let you know (if you do not
already) that the site does not work in IE 4.5 for Mac. It is not
possible to scroll down the page.
I know IE 4.5 is ancient, but this is Low End Mac and it
would nice to be able to read and browse in quiet periods at work.
I work the night shift at a newspaper publisher in the UK, and all
the machines are beige G3s running OS
8.5. Browsing online in quiet periods is permitted, but only if we
use IE 4.5. Rather cunning, I suppose!
Once upon a time Low End Mac was done in plain
vanilla HTML that worked with all of the ancient browsers. Over the
years, we made small changes - adding Cascading Style Sheets, using
JavaScript to hide email addresses, and, a bit over a year ago,
moving from HTML to XHTML and a CSS-based design.
Looking at our site logs, we discovered that while
our pages supported older browsers on small displays, almost nobody
visiting LEM used those browsers or small screens. In other words,
they were reading about low-end Macs but not visiting the site
using them. So we decided to design to today and tomorrow, hoping
our design would work adequately with older browsers.
Our spring 2005 design worked nicely on all of the
then-current Mac browsers (with a minor glitch in iCab) and
degraded well with older ones that I tested. I was also
standards-based, meaning it should work for years to come. Looking
at our site statistics, I saw that about 99% of our visitors were
using clients that would render the pages more or less as I had
designed them.
Today 0.4% of IE users visiting Low End Mac are
using IE 4.5 or earlier. That's about 0.1% of our visitors, since
IE accounts for 28.7% of our traffic. (Safari is #2 at 27.9%,
followed by Firefox at 27.1%.) We have almost twice as many
visitors using iCab (0.2% of traffic) as IE 4.5 and earlier.
IE 4.5 for Mac was a pretty buggy browser, as a
quick Google search will show you. We had enough trouble getting IE
5.5 and 6.0 to render our pages properly (that's 25% of our traffic
today, and it was over 30% a year ago); we can't invest the time
and resources to support obsolete browsers.
I'm sorry your employer locks you in to an
ancient, buggy, obsolete browser with serious JavaScript issues
(probably the cause of this problem). Perhaps you can convince
management to let you try iCab or
WaMCom. (Download
WaMCom here.)
Dan
Compact Flash in PowerBook 150
RP writes:
Hi Dan,
I am an old Mac fanatic, out-of-control Mac-collector, and of
course a regular Low End Mac visitor. I read the article on the
compact flash for older Macs, and here's a site of someone who has
enabled an IDE PowerBook for use with compact flash. Of course,
this is not a Mac with internal SCSI drives, and as such it does
not answer the SCSI -> CF question (which is a semi-endless
chain of pricey converters and a lot of luck that the oversized
contraption will work), but I thought you might like it and share
it amongst other Low End Mac fans.
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/hardware/pb150/
Keep up the great site and articles, greetings,
RP
Thanks for the link, which I'm adding to our
PowerBook 150 page.
The PowerBook 150 was a very decent low-end
PowerBook. My ex used one for years, and I think we picked it up on
close-out for under US$1,000. Performance was decent, memory was
very expandable, but the 4-bit grayscale screen left a bit to be
desired. I can see it making a great field computer with Compact
Flash, as on the link you provided.
I'm still dreaming of a Mac Plus, Portable, or PB
100 with Compact Flash.
Dan
Compact Flash and Virtual Memory: 2 Years and
Counting
Jeff Wiseman writes:
Dan,
Just a note about using a CF [Compact Flash] card for VM
[virtual memory]. For about 2 years, I ran a 1400c (G3 upgraded) nearly every day and used
a CF card for my startup drive. It was a basic SanDisk 512 MB card
that I loaded my system and apps on to and used for VM. The card
ran fine and still checks out as 100% okay. I really think the
issue of CF card read/write life is overblown. I've actually just
ordered a 2 GB CF card that I'm going to use in the same
manner for a 3400c.
Best,
Jeff Wiseman
Setting Up a PowerBook 1400 for Writing
Tony writes:
I've got a 1400 sitting on a shelf
here. I've used it in the past when a desktop went down, surfed the
Web via ethernet and all. Problem is, I'd like to use it as a word
processor or maybe a little more, but I don't know the best way to
go about it, since the ClarisWorks it uses isn't compatible with
anything I've got now, and I don't know how to easily get documents
from it to my desktop (which at present is an iMac with system
10.4).
I hate to keep it sitting, it's a great machine.
Thanks.
The PowerBook 1400 is a great notebook computer,
and ClarisWorks is a very nice word processor (and spreadsheet).
Unless your iMac has an Intel CPU, it shipped with a copy of
AppleWorks, and that program should have no trouble at all reading
ClarisWorks files (since it is just a new name for that
program).
If you have a Macintel computer, your options are
to use the Save As... command and export your documents to RTF,
Word, or some other format - or you could install a copy of
AppleWorks 6.x and run it via the Rosetta emulation.
I've been using ClarisWorks since version 1.0 came
out and find it to be all the word processor and spreadsheet
software I need. I'd suggest AppleWorks 6 is probably the best
solution to your problem.
Dan
House Style Editor
Mark Hamilton writes:
Hi Dan,
I wonder if you will indulge me a question? We do some writing
and publishing to the web. The publication is noncommercial with a
wide ranging international readership. Our work is done solely on
Macs.
Our interest is in software that can function as a "house style"
watchdog. The PC people have access to products (like StyleWriter, which says it
does the sort of things we want). Are there such software solutions
for the Mac community, and do you have any knowledge as to how well
they work?
Thank you in advance
Mark
Mark, I haven't heard of such a product. If such a
program existed for the Mac, it would be wonderful. As far as I can
tell, StyleWriter is more of a grammar and usage tool than one to
enforce "house style".
For my purposes, a "house style watchdog" would go
beyond spell checking and understand that on our website "AirPort"
is far more likely to be used than "airport", for instance. And it
would let us switch between US English and International English
spell checking on the fly, as our policy is to use US English for
our American writers and International English for the others.
A tool that could check grammar, punctuation,
spelling, and usage according to our own needs would make my day -
and probably save me several hours per week.
Perhaps one of our readers knows of such a
tool.
Dan
Dead SuperMac Software Links
Nick Trentadue writes:
- Umax suggests updating the J700 and S900 to version 2.0.2 of the
Licensing Extension if you're using Mac OS 8 or 8.1.
<http://www.supermac.com/supermac/download/>
I'm trying to download this software so I can finalise my
[Umax SuperMac] J700 upgrade,
but the link is dead? Where can I get the UmaxTool and Licensing
extension for this? You seem to be the only ones who have it.
Thanks for writing, Nick. Umax dropped the
SuperMac clones about 8 years ago, and they no longer have drivers,
updates, and other software available on their website. Thankfully
there's SuperMac
Insider, maintained by Kennedy Brandt, a former Project Manager
with Umax. His page of software
downloads includes links for both pieces of software you
mention.
I'm updating our site to replace the dead link
with one to Brandt's page, but unfortunately the links on his page
to the Umax FTP server are themselves dead. I'll contact Kennedy to
see if he has archived copies available that we may be able to
share.
Until then, you might ask on our SuperMacs list if someone has these
files and can send them to you.
Dan
iCab 2.99 for Classic Mac OS
"libwww" writes:
I just read Nathan Thompson's 2006.02.03 "Embracing
Obsolescence" followup article about web browsers [Netscape 7, Internet Explorer 5, iCab,
MacLynx, WaMCom, WannaBe, MachTen, and More Movies Made on
Macs]. It might be useful to add that iCab (which I like for
its many preferences settings available) now has a v2.99 for Mac OS
earlier than 8.5, which at the time of Nathan's article was one of
his complaints. I haven't had a reason to try v2.99, but it is now
there at http://icab.de/dl.php
. Cheers.
Thanks for sharing this information. I've
forwarded your email to Nathan.
Eliminating Obsolete Email
Accounts
Alvin writes"
Hi, how's it been? When we were starting to learn and use the
Net, we logged on and subscribed to many services. We had our
emails with ridiculous names, information we thought we should put
it, when you can just put n.a. or undisclosed for your last name.
We've forgotten their passwords, the email we use (coz sometimes
we'll just do sdflskdjfs@nameofemail.com), or the sites where we
put those.
Is there a program that could cancel it, or at least find those
and retrieve the passwords for it, so you can manually unsubscribe
or delete information in them? At this time, it's just nice to
clean things up. Thanks.
God bless,
Alvin
You raise a good question, Alvin. I have no idea
how many email addresses I've used over the years, both on my own
domains and with free services (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.). Many
have long been forgotten.
I know of no tool for digging up obsolete email
IDs, let alone their passwords. If such tools do exist, they would
be of great interest to hackers, private investigators, and
national security agencies. Just sic them on a server and have them
discover accounts and crack their passwords. It's just the kind of
thing computers are very good at.
I think we just have to rely on the sanity of ISPs
to close out abandoned email addresses and delete their contents. I
know some of the free email services now state that they will
terminate any account not used for XX months.
Dan
Upgrading iBook from OS X 10.0.4 to
10.1
I've bought a used 12" iBook G3/500
MHz, 128 MB RAM for our daughter's babysitter.
I've been trying to update it to OS X and I've had some success
getting it to go up to 10.0.4. But it doesn't seem to want to go
higher. And I can't seem to install the prerequisite (aren't they?)
security updates before going up to 10.1.x
Any advice or help you could give would be most appreciated!
Jef
It's a long time since I first tried switching to
Mac OS X, and by then it was already up to version 10.1. I'm not
familiar with any updates to 10.0.x that need to be installed
before you can upgrade to 10.1 - perhaps a reader can supply that
information.
You might also try asking on our new Puma (OS X 10.1.x) email list.
Dan
Upgrading a Tray-loading iMac for OS
X
Jhan Jensen writes:
Hi,
I was reading an article you wrote, and it talks about upgrading
an old iMac to use Mac OS X. I have a Rev C iMac that I have upgraded the
memory and all that I need. My problem is that the Mac OS X
disc that I have is a DVD and my mac is a CD. Any thoughts on
getting around this other, then going out and buying a older
version of OS X that is in CD form?
Jhan Jensen
You must be going with Tiger, the first version of
OS X to ship on DVD instead of multiple CDs. Apple has an exchange
program. For about US$10 you can swap your Tiger DVD for a CD set.
You should be able to find details online or at your local Apple
Store - and perhaps even in the documenation that came with your
copy of Tiger.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
