I hadn’t realized how much work it would be to move my wife from her iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5S. The project took many, many more hours than anticipated.
Category Archives: Mac Musings
As a community-based resource, Low End Mac depends on its readers to help cover our expenses. We came to you on March 8 to request $2,000 in support to cover monthly expenses, taxes, and give us a bit extra to upgrade our old Macs and iPhones. You came through with flying colors!
Last Sunday, March 13, we tried to launch a site redesign that had looked just fine on a test server. Well, some problems cropped up, but things are looking pretty good right now.
Low End Mac has been on the Web since April 1997, and one of the first community-building things we did was create an email list for Mac Quadra users later that year. While groups already existed for 68030 and earlier Macs as well as PowerPC Macs, 68040 Macs had been overlooked.
Those using G3, G4, or G5 Macs with OS X 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard are no doubt aware of TenFourFox, a port of the latest Extended Release version of Firefox to these old systems. With Chrome and Firefox due to drop OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 support, perhaps it’s time for a similar […]
I’ve been using an iPhone 4S since the days when the iPhone 5 was the top-end model, so sometime in early 2013. That replaced an iPhone 3GS, which was the entry-level model when I got it in late 2010. And with iOS 9.2.1, the 4S has become remarkably sluggish.
Low End Mac has been online since April 1997 and is composed of thousands upon thousands of pages. Everything from 2013 and beyond is in WordPress. Our most popular content from before 2013 is also in WordPress. But thousands upon thousands of articles are still in HTML files.
One of the great benefits of Apple moving to Intel CPUs is that we have access to Google’s Chrome browser, which rapidly displaced Firefox as the alternative browser of choice among Windows users after its release in Sept. 2008. For some of us, that is coming to an end in April.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in nearly 30 years using Macs, it’s that Apple will be Apple. They will change things for the better. They will change things for the worse. And they rarely change their mind.
Every four years, we get a February 29th. What’s the story behind that? And how long has this been going on?
Prior to 1986, the best Mac had 512 KB of memory with no expansion path, a 400 KB floppy drive, and no standard way of connecting a fast hard drive. The Mac Plus, introduced on January 16, 1986, changed all that.
The PowerPC platform had a long life at Apple. The first Power Macs arrived on March 14, 1994 – the Power Mac 6100, 7100, and 8100 running the PowerPC 601 CPU at speeds of 60, 66, and 80 MHz respectively. The ultimate Power Mac was the G5 Quad, which had two 2.5 GHz dual-core CPUs […]
Apple shook up the Mac world when it announced in June 2005 that it would switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs within a year. A lot of longtime Mac users felt betrayed. And when Apple introduced the first Intel Macs at the January 2006 Macworld Expo, we were shocked at how soon Apple had begun […]
With Apple on an annual development cycle for Mac OS X, it’s interesting to see what patterns develop between the official launch of one version and the launch of the next version. Today we look at Yosemite’s first year.
The PC market has declined about 10% this year, yet Apple sold more Macs than ever in its 4th fiscal quarter (July-Sept. 2015). iPhone sales didn’t set a record – that usually happens in the holiday quarter – but they are up over the same quarter in 2014.
iOS 9 has better battery management than any previous version, sometimes adding hours to the life of an iPhone’s battery. Unfortunately, the current version of the Facebook app can more than offset the extra battery life iOS 9 give you.
Over time, the distribution of Mac OS versions among Mac users changes as new versions of the OS are released, old Macs are retired, and new models arrive that only support the most recent version. Today we’re looking at six years worth of data.
A while back, I picked up a used 8 GB iPhone 4S as a backup or emergency phone – and also to see how (im)practical an 8 GB iPhone is these days. And on Wednesday afternoon, I installed iOS 9, which almost went without a hitch.
I’ve had my Mid 2007 Mac mini for several years, upgrading RAM from 1 GB to 3 GB and the hard drive from a pedestrian 5400 rpm 80 GB to a 7200 rpm 320 GB WD Scorpio Black – and now to a 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD. How fast is it now?
We came home from vacation three weeks ago, and my Mid 2007 Mac mini began giving me problems almost from the moment I powered it up. The 320 GB 7200 rpm internal hard drive was having issues, and after looking at prices, I decided that SSD could be the way to go.
Eight years ago, the iPhone had a 412 MHz single-core processor, a touch screen but no keyboard, no third-party apps, and it was probably the last new smartphone model to ship without 3G networking. Yet it sold like hotcakes even with no discounts available.
Since returning from vacation earlier this month, my 2007 Mac mini began to have problems and then died. More precisely, it would no longer boot from the OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard partition on its internal 320 GB Seagate hard drive, which I’ve used for years. It would display a blue screen and continually try […]
By 9:30 last night, buyers were lined up at Holland (MI) High School in hopes of buying one or more iMacs, MacBooks, or iPads. There were so many that they began the sale this morning at 7:00 AM, and within an hour everything was gone.
The big talk among Mac fans in western Michigan this past week has been the sell-off of older Apple gear by the Holland Public Schools scheduled for Thursday, August 13, 2015 starting at 9:00 AM. There are some real deals there! [Update: All items have been sold.]
Hard drives die. Sometimes early, within warranty. Sometimes after years and years of use. Sometimes with a little warning. Sometimes with no warning at all. And all you can do is be prepared.
The big news this morning was that Firefox was suddenly blocking all Flash content by default. Flash is frequently used for streaming video, ads, and interactive media on the Web, where it is heavily used for video games on Android devices. (Flash is not supported on Apple’s iOS.)
Where is the “low end” in Low End Mac? It’s a question we’ve addressed many times over our 18 year history, and it was a topic of conversation in our Facebook group this past week. Exactly what do we mean when we apply the label low end?
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard marked an endpoint in the evolution of traditional OS X. After this, Apple introduced OS X 10.7 Lion, which moved the Mac in the same direction as iOS – a whole new direction for desktop Macs. Also, for those using software written in the PowerPC era, Snow Leopard gives us […]
My wife had been wanting an iPad, so now and again I’d scan Craigslist for local deals. This past winter I found a pretty good price on the original iPad that I could just afford with the cash I’d been setting aside. It even had a case and dock cable, although no power adapter.
On May 16, 2006, Apple introduced the consumer MacBook, the 13.3″ replacement for the old 12″ and 14″ iBooks. The first MacBooks had a wider 1280 x 800 display (vs. 1024 x 768 for G4 iBooks) and used Intel’s Core Duo processors. The biggest differences between the consumer MacBook and the MacBook Pro are the […]
