Did you know that Apple once had a gaming console?
Category Archives: Low End Mac Round Table
Based on the headline on Cult of Mac (WTF? Ex-Apple Executive Apologize For The Original iPhone, Says It “Wasn’t Great”), you’d think Bob Borchers, Apple’s former Senior Director of Product Marketing, had really knocked the original iPhone, saying, “If you had the original iPhone I apologise; it was not a great phone, it was an OK […]
Can it really be just 10 years since Facebook launched? It feels like it’s been around forever, and many of us use it daily – often several times on a day thanks to apps on our smartphones and tablets. Today Low End Mac’s staff takes a look at Facebook, what it does right, where the […]
Introduced on January 24, 1984, the Macintosh forever changed the way we work with our computers. Instead of memorizing and typing arcane commands, we could point the cursor using a mouse and click to do things – all for well under the $10,000 price of Apple’s Lisa.
On January 19, 1989 – 25 years ago – Apple released the first all-in-one Mac to run faster than 8 MHz. The 16 MHz SE/30 was built around a 68030 CPU and supports up to 128 MB of RAM in a small footprint computer – far more than any other black-and-white compact Mac.
The Dock was a new Mac feature when OS X was first introduced. It had been part of the NeXTstep and OpenStep environments, where it was just an application launcher. In OS X, it would also show running programs and could hold documents. As you use OS X, you quickly determine which apps deserve an […]
Once you begin adding apps to your iOS device – whether an iPhone, an iPad, or an iPod touch – you’re faced with the question, Which apps belong on my home screen? In this Low End Mac Round Table discussion, our writers share what’s on their home screens.
Apple had introduced the G5 processor with the Power Mac G5 in June 2003, and the amount of heat the G5 processor generated required a case designed to keep air flowing so the computer wouldn’t overheat. The G5 also used much faster memory than the G4, running at one-half or one-third of CPU speed rather […]
The original idea behind PowerPC processors was to create a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) and focus on making those instructions as efficient as possible. This was in direct contrast to Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC), which kept adding more and more instructions, which meant more decoding and processing had to be done by the […]
Dan Knight (Mac Musings): It’s hard to believe that it was just three years ago that Mac OS X went Intel only. Macs had uses PowerPC processors from the System 7.1 era up until 2006, when the first Intel-based Macs arrived running a special Intel-only version of OS X 10.4 Tiger. With OS X 10.5 […]
Until 1995, Microsoft Windows took a back seat to the Macintosh. Although Windows 3.x supported 256 color 320 x 200 VGA mode, by default is used a higher resolution (and thus sharper) 16 color mode. There wasn’t the least thing pretty about it. By contrast, Macintosh System 7 was very impressive, with its support for […]
Computers die. Laptops get dropped or stolen. Hard drives fail. You deleted a file or folder and now realize that you need it back. You need to use an app that’s not compatible with your current version of Mac OS X. Your system just crashes and now refuses to boot from your hard drive.
On June 23, 2003, Apple introduced the first Power Mac G5, which represented some big changes from the G4. The Power Mac G5 was the first Power Mac with built-in USB 2.0, the first to use PCI-X expansion slots, and the first with onboard support for SATA drives. It was also the first Mac to […]
The Classic Mac OS had well under 100 viruses through its history, and Mac OS X has even less after 11 years. (Can you name even one?) That’s no reason to be complacent, because while OS X viruses are virtually nonexistent in the wild, there are other types of malware designed to infect Macs. Most […]
Last Thursday, Nancy Caroll Gravly shared her opinion on The Mac Observer, essentially saying that there is no legitimate reason not to be running the latest version of OS X on your Mac. Here at Low End Mac, that caught our attention. Our thesis is that you often don’t need the latest hardware and/or operating […]
In terms of expandability, the G3 PowerBooks introduced in 1998, 1999, and 2000 set the high water mark. Each had two device bays, used standard IDE hard drives, supported lots of additional memory, and had a processor on a card that could be replaced by something faster – a G4 in some cases. The most […]
The Macintosh was introduced in 1984 using the same 68000 processor that powered Apple’s $10,000 Lisa, introduced a year earlier. Over the years, Apple moved to faster and more efficient chips as they became available. At the same time, Apple was paying attention to a new design theory for microprocessors, RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing). […]
PowerBook 100 with floppy drive. Twenty years ago, Apple introduced its first laptop computer – the 16 lb. Macintosh Portable was portable, but definitely not a laptop – and forever changed the face of notebook computing. Although we take it for granted that laptops have a trackpad mounted in front of the keyboard, that was […]
