We all get nostalgic about certain things. For some, it’s the first car. And sometimes, it’s the first Macintosh.
Author Archives: Daniel Knight
Over the summer of 1997, Apple brought the era of authorized Macintosh clones to an end to keep Apple solvent.*
This article was originally published on 2001.05.29 and is adapted from a series of articles and sidebars in the February 1984 issue of Byte magazine. Although some of the details included in this article are specific to the original Mac, many also apply to other compact Macs, such as the Plus, SE, SE/30, Classic, and Classic II.
Almost everyone complains about the cost of cable and satellite TV, but few actually takes the steps necessary to ditch those overpriced services and use their internet connection to fill the void. That’s our goal in this series of articles.
Apple introduced its first G4 notebook, the Titanium PowerBook (TiBook), in January 2001; the last one was discontinued in Sept. 2003 and replaced by the 15″ aluminum PowerBook G4. All titanium models have 15.2″ displays, two USB 1.1 ports, FireWire 400, one CardBus slot, room for an 802.11b AirPort Card (not the newer 802.11g AirPort […]
The Power Mac G4 offers a lot of power, expandability (3-4 PCI slots and several drive bays), and upgradability (1.5 to 2.0 GB maximum RAM) with prices starting as low as $60.
Your best bet G4 iMacs are the last generation models (1 GHz 15″, 1.25 GHz 17″ and 20″ models), which have better video, support 2 GB of memory, and are the only G4 iMacs to include USB 2.0 ports. (Whether you’re looking at flash drives, scanners, printers, iPods, iPhones, or almost anything but keyboards and […]
G4 iBooks are a good option with prices starting below $100 including AirPort Extreme – well under half the cost of a refurbished 13″ MacBook. The biggest drawback to the iBook design is the tedious process involved in disassembling and reassembling it to upgrade the hard drive.
Apple last updated the 15″ PowerBook in October 2005, making dual-layer SuperDrives standard and putting in higher resolution displays along with a faster memory bus. Because of their 1440 x 960 resolution displays (vs. 1280 x 854 used by prior 15″ aluminum PowerBooks), these 1.67 GHz models are designated hi-res in our listings to distinguish […]
The 12″ PowerBook G4 was discontinued in mid-2006 with the introduction of the 13.3″ MacBook, yet it remains a popular choice as the smallest portable Mac with a built-in optical drive. It is available in speeds from 867 MHz to 1.5 GHz.
If you’re looking for a great desktop substitute PowerPC Mac at an affordable price, the 17″ PowerBook gives you 1680 x 1050 or 1440 x 900 resolution in a machine not much larger and heavier than the 15.4″ PowerBook.
This has not been a good year for Low End Mac. After switching to the WordPress content management system earlier this year, our Google rank took a nose dive, and while Google still accounts for most of the traffic coming to lowendmac.com, total traffic is about 20% of what it was in 2012.
Some resources for older Macs and Mac OS versions can be hard to find. Here are some useful software links for the Mac OS.
It’s a real seller’s market. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard retailed for $129 and is now selling online for $159 and up. However, you can save by ordering at the original price directly from Apple by phone at 800-692-7753.
For those who still need Classic Mode or have apps that don’t play well on Intel Macs (especially since the introduction of OS X 10.7 Lion, which no longer supports PowerPC apps), a G5 iMac with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger can be a better choice than an Intel iMac. Intel Macs and Mac OS […]
Although OS X 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion, and 10.9 Mavericks have each replaced it in turn, there are good reasons you may want to (or even need to) have Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Apple introduced the 5th generation (5G) iPod touch with the same 4″ widescreen Retina Display as the iPhone 5. The newest Touch has a dual-core A5 processor and comes in 32 and 64 GB capacities.
The Power Mac G5 line included the most powerful PowerPC-based computer Apple ever sold, also making it a powerful line for Classic Mode – especially the last generation dual- and quad-core models, as Classic then has unfettered access to one of the Power Mac’s cores.
By now you’ve probably seen Microsoft’s Scroogled TV commercial dissing the Chromebook. If you’re a Mac user, you’re probably amused that monopolist Microsoft is getting so upset at free-for-all “do no evil” Google.
It was pretty exciting news when Apple made it possible to install older versions of iOS apps on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, but if you’ve tried to download a new app that requires a newer OS than your device has, you’ve probably been stumped.
USB has been around since 1996, but it didn’t come into its own until Apple unveiled the first iMac in May 1998. While the PC world was content to add USB as one more port in addition to parallel and serial ports, the iMac dispensed with legacy ports in favor of a USB-only architecture. Anyone […]
One problem with personal computers is that you can’t run full diagnostics of your boot drive when booted from it. It’s very helpful to have an emergency drive you can boot from to run diagnostics on your primary drive, whether that’s a DVD, hard drive, or USB thumb drive. This article explains how to build […]
Apple introduced a new feature, Safe Sleep, with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther in 2003. When enabled, Safe Sleep writes the contents of your Mac’s memory to a file named sleepimage on its hard drive before putting the computer to sleep (this works like the Hibernate command in Windows). In case the Mac loses power […]
The first time I heard about Pandora, I was intrigued. The streaming music service analyzes music using 400 different factors and attempts to create playlists that will work with the performer or song you use to seed the playlist.
We listen to radio, podcasts, my iTunes collection, and iHeartRadio at work while we assemble high pressure air hoses. The air compressors in the next room over are noisy, and so is the machine that crimps the ends on each hose. It’s a good thing the stereo has lots of power and a big speaker […]
When I upgraded to an iPhone 4S this past summer, I had the option of trading in my iPhone 3GS for $100 credit or keeping it. I decided to keep it, as I was sure I could find many ways to use it. One of those is as a music player connected to a stereo […]
The iPhone grew out of the iPod, Apple’s first digital music player launched well over a decade ago. Listening to music was the reason the iPod existed, and Apple wanted to make sure that its iPhone (and later iPod touch and iPad) did it well.
Macs have had hard drives for nearly as long as Macs have been available, as is true of PCs, and a lot of those very early hard drives didn’t have great life expectancies. In addition to higher capacity and lower cost per data unit, hard drives have become far more reliable than those from the […]
This is the tale of three operating systems: Windows XP, its presumed successor Vista, and the recently displaced as king of the hill Windows 7.
I’ve been using iOS 7 on my iPhone 4S since a day or two after its release, and while the new interface and rearrangement of some things frustrated me at first, I very much like it now. That isn’t to say I’ve had no issues with it.
