Arriving amongst the stash of things brought home from the VCF Midwest trip, it’s good to see all the plastics and internals survived on this heavily upgraded Power Mac 9600/300. Not sure what to name it yet, but I think it’ll remain a dedicated OS 9 machine. Probably gonna drop an SSD into here at […]
See: Part 1 / Part 2 . In Part 1: Walking in (first impressions) , Mr. Macintosh, OP Workshop (E101/E102), Retro Tech Foundation Bell & Howell Apple II, Whoa.. an Apple III?, NCG Engineering – analog broadcast tech, NTP Time with Jeff Geerling, The Computer Clan, The Macintosh Librarian, Ron’s Computer Videos, and meeting Stan […]
Part 1 couldn’t possibly contain everything I’ve seen over that weekend, and I didn’t wanna leave any parts out – so here’s part 2 as promised. I returned near the Retro Tech Foundation’s Apple Garage to see the other Apple computers next to the Bell & Howell Apple II. First time trying an Apple […]
Vintage computer collectors have seen it all too often: that familiar dirty yellow discoloration that develops after decades of exposure to light and air. It’s the color of a computer that looks like it spent 30 years sitting next to a smoker, even if nobody ever smoked anywhere near it. They weren’t made that way. […]
This was the absolute best weekend I’ve had in a really long time, and I can’t wait to have more of these adventures (I’m smiling on the inside)! VCF Midwest was an absolute blast (and even a bit overwhelming with how much there was!), met some acquaintances and familiar faces. Also met up […]
The average width of a human hair is around 50 to 120 micrometers (µm), or anywhere between three and five thousandths of an inch. Now let’s take five thousandths (0.005) of an inch and divide it by 63,500, which equals 2 nanometers – that is the transistor size inside the A20 Pro chip powering iPhone […]
The Logic Board In a previous article, I mentioned that I had a Quadra 605 logic board with a bad microprocessor. The 605 uses a MC68LC040RC25, a 25 MHz 68040 without a floating-point unit (FPU). It was perfectly adequate for most home users at the time, but the lack of an FPU and relatively modest […]
On March 6th 2014, Apple released Mac OS X 10.9.3 Mavericks Beta, which included built-in support for several new display options at the time: 4K displays can now have a “retina” resolution, and now there’s an option to enable 60 Hz. Prior to this update, 4K support was spotty. (Pictured: Mac Pro 2,1 using […]
I’m shaking with excitement, everyone. After being up all night working on getting this RocketRAID 2720SGL working with OS X El Capitan on my Mac Pro 1,1 -> 2,1, I’m happy to say it works! It was quite the multi-step process/rabbit-hole. Why am I so excited? This 1,1/2,1 now has SATA III 6.0 Gb/s. […]
This page details the full hardware profile of the Apple Silicon M5 Ultra chip. Note: This article covers a recently released chip, and not all specs are currently known. This article will be updated as soon as it is possible to discover more about the M5 Ultra. Name: M5 Ultra Chip Released: August 25th, […]
This page details the full hardware profile of the Apple Silicon M6 chip. Note: This article covers a recently released chip, and not all specs are currently known. This article will be updated as soon as it is possible to discover more about the M6. Name: M6 Chip Released: August 25th, 2025 Codename: – […]
So you have a spare set of Mac Pro parts laying around, or wanna trick-out a Mac Pro with some modifications? While in the process of building my own Mac Pro 1,1 -> 2,1 project working on getting a RocketRAID 2720SGL going in El Capitan, I realized I didn’t really have a spare SFF-8087 (36-pin […]
In a continued effort of looking at all the different odds and ends of our website, one of the issues gnawing at me was how non-latin alphabet letters suddenly disappeared off of Low End Mac, instantly converting text from multiple languages into “????”. Today, Low End Mac restores/converted all posts dating back to 1997, over […]
Crack! Dammit. Another piece of brittle ’90s Apple plastic bites the turns to dust. Last week, I finally assembled enough parts to build a working Quadra 605. I know, I know.. the 605 is one of Apple’s more boring machines, but there was a hole in my collection that needed filling. The little 605 fits perfectly […]
For a little while now, Low End Mac has maintained a small freeware/abandonware software repository to share with our readers and help get the most out of your Mac, where it makes the most sense for you. Intro Part of what makes any depreciating computer platform fun to play with (as well as usable) […]
A Little History My first experience with a Quadra 950 was back when they were new. Mike Bean, then president of the Arizona Macintosh User’s Group, had one. It was big. It was loud. It was fast… and it was beige. I loved it! Mike also had a Workgroup Server 95, the Unix-based file-server version […]
In continuation of the site updates posted before, we will continue covering changes in the form of periodic posts whether they’re big or small. We want our readers to see the changes done to the site, many small ones can be time consuming and hard to notice. . This article reflects site updates for the […]