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 […]
Author Archives: Daniel Knight
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.
Apple certainly knew what it was doing when it made OS X 10.9 Mavericks a free update available to anyone running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.7 Lion, or 10.8 Mountain Lion. Released on Tuesday, Low End Mac site stats show that it passed Mountain Lion on Wednesday.
I have OS X 10.9 Mavericks installed on my Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook, one of the older Macs to support OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and Mavericks. Until now I’ve held off upgrading past OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard because of software I’d have to leave behind, but with Mavericks available for free and a […]
Since installing OS X 10.9 Mavericks, I’ve been plagued by problems with security certificates. I couldn’t visit Twitter or LastPass using Safari or Chrome. And I couldn’t log in to Messages or FaceTime. But after a fair bit of research, I found a solution.
I must admit to having Mac Pro lust for the new Late 2013 Mac Pro that Apple has promised to deliver “later this year”. From its radical styling and cutting edge features to its sheer power, this Mac in a black can is definitely lustworthy.
When Apple introduced the iPhone 5S, it brought the first 64-bit smartphone to market – and Samsung immediately promised that it would have 64-bit in its next generation as well. But what’s the point of a 64-bit processor in a smartphone?
No real surprises today. All those sites sharing leaks about iPhones in multiple colors, a gold iPhone, and a better-than-ever iPhone proved to be correct. Earlier today, Apple introduced the iPhone 5C in five different colors and the iPhone 5S, the new top-end model, in three.
The SD memory card has come to dominate the world of digital cameras, both still and video, and it’s even made it way into recent Macs and many Android tablets. This is the story of the card’s origin.
Some carriers have been offering iPhone owners a $100 discount on a new iPhone. A lot of independent companies selling mobiles are offering to buy used iPhones outright. There’s always an active iPhone market on eBay, and now Apple had entered the trade-in game. But should you sell or trade in your old iPhone? Or […]
Mac OS X version 10.0 shipped on March 24, 2001, and in over a dozen years, the platform has proven particularly resilient to malware. Not that malware for the Mac doesn’t exist, just that it never seems to get any traction.
There are many ways to keep up on Low End Mac (LEM) as we add new content, update price trackers, and continue to migrate old articles from HTML files to the WordPress content management system.
The tech world has been abuzz with news of Google’s forthcoming Chromecast device, something Google hopes will change the way you use your TV. What exactly is Chromecast?
It all started with Mapquest in 1996. Suddenly you could used that new-fangled Internet for something practical, finding the best route from point A to point B – whether across town or across the country. All you had to do was print out the driving directions and keep them handy while you drove.
Mac sales have really taken off since Apple switched from PowerPC processors to Intel x86 CPUs in 2006. According to Apple’s data, over 90 million Intel Macs have been sold, with a peak of 5.198 million in the 2011 holiday quarter.
Need a copy of System 6.0.8, 7.0.1, or a newer version of the Classic Mac OS for your vintage Mac? You can dig through apple.com and try to find them – or you can download them using the updated links on this page. (Apple does rearrange things, making it more difficult to find things.) All versions […]
All I want to do is remotely control my old iPhone 3GS from my new iPhone 4S. It’s about 25′ away, hooked to a stereo, and used for iTunes and podcasts.
Photoshop began life as a program called Display that was made to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. Photoshop has grown to support layers, filters, brushes, text, 3D objects, video, and much others.
FileMaker Pro is a cross-platform (Mac OS and Windows) relational database (RDBMS) application published by Apple subsidiary FileMaker Inc.
Adobe InDesign was created as the successor to the aging Adobe PageMaker. InDesign supports features such as XHTML exporting, professional typographical controls, and long-document support. By 1998, much of the professional market had migrated from PageMaker to rival Quark XPress 4.1 due to PageMaker’s comparative lack of features. At that point, Quark announced that it […]
iTunes has grown from its roots as a program that let Mac users rip their CDs to MP3 format, manage their music libraries, and burn CDs. Today iTunes supports iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple TV, Apple’s online iTunes Store (which distributes music, podcasts, video, and software), and online video rentals.
Microsoft Word began life as Multi-Tool Word for Xenix in 1983. It was renamed Microsoft Word and ported to MS-DOS in 1983, the Macintosh in 1985, and Windows in 1989. It has been the dominant word processing program on the Mac since 1988 and on Windows since 1993.
2013 – A while back, I explained why TenFourFox is without a doubt the best browser option for anyone running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on a PowerPC Mac. Today I follow that up by looking at two contenders for the best browser on OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Two years ago I made the move from a mobile phone with a keyboard to a smartphone, an iPhone 3GS, and it has served me well since then. I’ve been using Facebook for ages – perhaps sometime in 2008 based on a look at my timeline.
Publisher’s note: This article, originally written by Ed Eubanks Jr and published on 2007.03.12, has been the most popular article in the history of Low End Mac with well over 2 million hits. It was written toward the end of the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger era and has been updated since its first publication. Most of […]
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was the longest-lived version of OS X with 30 months on the market. It was released on April 29, 2005 and replaced by OS X 10.5 Leopard on October 26, 2007. Tiger officially requires a G3 or later Mac with FireWire, 256 MB of RAM, and 3 GB of available […]
Every year, Apple has an update to the iPhone, and 2013 will be no exception. We can expect an improved version of the iPhone 5, which will almost undoubtedly be called the iPhone 5S, and we can expect the current iPhone 5 to replace the iPhone 4S at the $99 (with contract) price point.
Safari held its own for years, and Camino remains a very nice, speedy browser, but for OS X 10.4 Tiger users, Firefox had them both beat – and then the Firefox team stopped supporting Tiger and PowerPC Macs.
Who needs a screen saver when you can have real fish in your old Mac? Perhaps nothing else he’s done has brought Andy Ihnatko quite the same fame and notoriety as inventing the Macquarium – a compact Mac gutted and turned into a fishbowl. Following are links to online resources for those interested in converting […]
