TenFourFox Gives Us Firefox 4 Beta 7 for PowerPC Macs

2010 – As an OS X 10.4 Tiger holdout on my two beloved 10-year-old Pismo PowerBooks, I’ve been tracking the accelerating rate of attrition in Tiger-compatible Web browser support, but there are a few encouraging signs of life for those of us whose Macs don’t support more recent versions of the OS.

Snow Leopard Doesn’t Mean the End of the Road for PowerPC Macs

2009 – Low End Mac colleague Simon Royal says he didn’t believe the rumors last year that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard would be Intel only. I have to say that at the early point when it was reported that alpha builds of Snow Leopard were being seeded to developers as Intel-only software, the proverbial […]

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 […]

A Dozen Years of Low End Mac

2009-04-07: Dan Knight, Low End Mac’s publisher, informs us that today marks 12 years since he first posted some old Mac profiles on his personal website and started building Low End Mac.

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 […]

Making the Switch from My PowerBook to a Unibody MacBook

2009 – I finally switched to using my new Unibody Aluminum MacBook for production – just over five weeks after it touched down here. That isn’t how I had expected things to unfold, but I ran into some unanticipated snags in the transition from my long-established and highly evolved workflow on my previous Macs to […]

Migrating to an Intel Mac More Difficult than Expected

2009 – Two weeks after it arrived, progress with my new Aluminum Unibody MacBook is proceeding slowly. I had imagined that I would have switched over to it for production by now, but things have not gone as smoothly as I had hoped – not, I hasten to add, due to any problems with the […]

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 […]