CustoMac: 3.1 Ghz i7-5557u-upgraded 11″ 2015 MacBook Air

The 11″ Early 2015 MacBook Air ships with a 2.2 Ghz i7-5650u as a BTO/CTO option, making it the absolute fastest 11″ ‘Book ever. This hasn’t at all stopped users online from shoehorning an even better CPU in there, which inadvertently or intentionally upgrades the GPU also. Out with the old Intel HD 6000, in […]

Firmware Update Supports 8 GB in Aluminum MacBook and Late 2008 15″ MacBook Pro

When the Aluminum Unibody MacBook was unveiled in October 2008, its memory support ceiling specified by Apple was 4 GB. That was enough for most users at the time, and it was later discovered that these machines could happily support up to 6 GB of RAM – but while 8 GB could be installed, independent testing found that if an application […]

Mac ‘Book Power Management Adventures

2009 – My First Mac’s Chris Kerins says he’s been trying to get every last month out of his 6-year-old 17″ PowerBook G4, but it’s been not starting lately. He’s had power issues in the past, after he cracked the big PowerBook open to do a repair and broke a connector. Since then the power […]

My Apple Laptops: Past, Present, and Future

2009 – I had an email Monday from my daughter, who is the current custom users of our old WallStreet PowerBook, telling me that she had succeeded in getting OS X 10.4 .11 Tiger installed on the venerable ‘Book. This was particularly interesting, because I had myself failed in several attempts over the years that I […]

First Impressions of My Unibody MacBook

2009 – My Apple Certified Refurbished (ACR) 13″ 2.0 GHz Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook arrived last Thursday afternoon, just a couple of hours short of a week after I ordered it, having been air-shuttled by FedEx back and forth across the continent twice, from Rancho Cordova, CA, to Memphis, TN, to Calgary, Alberta, to Halifax, […]

Charles W Moore Going Intel with a Unibody MacBook

2009 – After equivocating for nearly three years about what hardware would become my vehicle for transitioning to the Macintel experience, I’ve finally made a decision. Last Thursday afternoon I ordered a 2.0 GHz Late 2008 Unibody Aluminum MacBook from Apple Canada – an Apple Certified Refurbished unit for Can$200 (14%) off the price of […]

1 GHz Pismo the Fastest G3 ‘Book Ever

Once upon a time, CPU upgrade vendor PowerLogix offered a 1 GHz G3 CPU upgrade for the Pismo PowerBook based on the IBM PowerPC 750GX CPU, doubling the clock speed of the fastest stock Pismo – and with a full megabyte of Level 2 (L2) cache also running at 1 GHz.

Upgrade Options for 15″ and 17″ Aluminum PowerBooks

The 17″ and high-end 15″ aluminum PowerBooks, aside from their modest (by today’s standards) 512 MB of standard RAM, are pretty lavishly equipped in standard trim. Even the “entry-level” 15-incher is no slouch. However, that doesn’t mean these ‘Books aren’t candidates for a bit of upgrading – especially now that we’re closing on three years […]

PowerBook G5: Long Rumored, Never Produced

Five years ago this week, on June 23, 2003 (although it seems longer somehow), Apple Introduced the G5 Power Mac, claiming it to be “fastest personal computer ever” and “first 64-bit personal computer”. Speculation soon began about the possibility of a G5 PowerBook. Not so much at first, since the G5 was launched as a power […]