13″ MacBook Air (Early 2008)

Apple took a completely different approach to ultralight notebook computers with the MacBook Air (MBA). Where netbooks used small screens, shrunken keyboards, and underpowered CPUs, Apple has gone very, very thin so the MacBook Air can have a 13.3″ LED backlit display, a full-sized keyboard, and a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU – along […]

Busting the Megapixel Myth

2008: In the world of computers, you can never have too many megabytes or megahertz. That sounds dated in this day of gigahertz and gigabytes, but the principle remains the same: More is better, whether you’re looking at CPU speed, system memory, hard drive space, or graphics processor speed and VRAM. Where it’s not necessarily […]

Word 2004 vs. Pages 05 for Writing a Book

I recently (nearly) completed a novel that I started over the summer. If you check my publication history, you can see that the rate at which I have published columns on Low End Mac has dwindled to nearly zero. That’s because nearly all my free time for writing has been dedicated to writing a novel.

Mac Pro (Early 2008)

It’s been 17 months since Apple introduced the original Mac Pro, which shipped with two dual-core processors (an 8-core model with two quad-core CPUs was introduced in April 2007), and the new Mac Pro is a big step forward: every configuration uses quad-core Intel Xeon CPUs for even more power.

Xserve Xeon (Early 2008)

Apple finally upgraded the Xserve from a base 2.0 GHz dual-core configuration to a base 2.8 GHz quad-core machine – with dual 2.8 GHz and 3.0 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon CPUs optional. It matches the power of the Mac Pro, whereas the previous model had lagged behind.

Is DRM in Mac OS X Anything to Fear?

2008: There’s been a huge buzz in the past week about an Apple patent application for “Run-Time Code Injection To Perform Checks”, which many liken to Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage program and speculate could result in Mac OS X and Apple apps including the kind of serialization and headaches that Windows users are familiar with.

Introduction to Emulation on the Mac

For years now, our PC brethren have been able to enjoy the simple pleasures of vintage games consoles through a process known as emulation, and article upon article can be found through a Google search relating to how to do this on a Windows machine. When it comes to emulation on the Mac, for the […]