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 […]
Category Archives: Mac Musings
Apple made some interesting choices when it designed the new 12″ MacBook, which is the thinnest, lightest Retina Display Mac notebook ever. But its US$1,299 price is higher than the new 13″ MacBook Air, 13″ MacBook Pro, and new 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Where’s the best value?
As technology marches forward, old tech gets left behind. Some of us have been using Macs since the 1980s and have experienced a lot of it, but the 1998 introduction of the iMac probably takes the cake for offending the most – and the 12″ MacBook may take second place.
I don’t know how I ever got along before Dropbox, which lets me sync files on any of my Macs running OS X 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard, and 10.9 Mavericks.
The announcement that Dropbox will drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 clients in May has sent shockwaves through the low-end community. Many of us depend on Dropbox to sync files with our older Macs and newer kit.
I was disappointed to receive an email from Dropbox on Tuesday telling me that Dropbox will be dropping support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard on May 18, 2015. They recommend I upgrade to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Low End Mac has been through some difficult times since we moved from static HTML pages to WordPress. Site traffic declined by 88% from our peak of 17.1 million pages in 2007, but it is turning around.
In 2006 or so, Dan Warne published his list of the top 30 mistakes made by new Mac users. We want to revisit them.
If you follow Low End Mac on Facebook, you’ve probably seen a link to an article from Redmond Pi claiming that upgrading from iOS 8.1 to iOS 8.1.1 may free up to 500 MB of space on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. As the owner of an 8 GB iPhone 4S, I had to test […]
iOS 8 has one steep requirement for those who want to upgrade to it directly on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. You need 5.6 GB of free space to load and run the installer – even though the core iOS 8 installation is under 1 GB. That can be a real problem with 8 GB iDevices.
Low-end Mac and iOS users have a love-hate relationship with Apple. We love new hardware and new operating systems and new features. We hate old hardware and operating systems being left behind.
As widely rumored in recent months, Apple unveiled the iPhone 6 this week – and in the two sizes expected. The smaller model, with a 4.7″ display, is called the iPhone 6. The larger one, with a phablet-sized 5.5″ screen is the iPhone 6 Plus.
If you’ve been on Facebook this weekend, chances are you’ve seen a link to a Cult of Mac article entitled See How Mac Magically Decluttered Our Desks Over Past 35 Years. And if you saw it, you probably clicked on it and saw the animation showing how that took place.
Road Apples. That’s our category for the worst products Apple ever made. Products such as the Apple III and the Performa 5200 that just had to many compromises or reliability issues for us to ever recommend using them. We think it’s fitting to name them after horse droppings.
When Apple introduced the Power Mac G5 in June 2003, it made a big deal of the G5 being a 64-bit CPU. It even mentioned that on the box. But what does that mean to Mac users?
Remember when ergonomic keyboards were all the rage in fighting carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive stress injuries? Remember how incredibly huge most of those keyboards were? Well, I’d forgotten about them until I received this monstrosity with a recently acquired Power Mac G5.
We’ve published our first article on the Mid 2014 21.5″ iMac with its 1.4 GHz low-power dual-core i5 CPU, and Chris Carson was not impressed with its value. I want to treat is as fairly and unemotionally as possible, so let’s take a closer look.
LibreOffice is a free alternative to the not-inexpensive Microsoft Office suite. I’m using it to replace AppleWorks, which I’ve been using since ClarisWorks 1.0 shipped back in the System 7.0 era. Unfortunately, AppleWorks is incompatible with OS X 10.7 Lion and later, so I’ve had to find an alternative since installing OS X 10.9 Mavericks […]
It’s my birthday, and I realized I’ve been using Macs for half my life. I was 28 years old when I first used a Mac Plus way back in 1986, along with PageMaker 1.0 and the original LaserWriter printer. And 28 years later, I know a lot more about Macs – and myself.
There are frankly crazy rumors going about that Apple is ready to launch MacBooks, Mac minis, and perhaps even iMacs with up to four 4-core ARM-based CPUs. The next generation iPhone/iPad CPU will almost certainly be a 4-core 64-bit Apple chip named the A8. But in Macs?
Apple really overhauled iOS when it released version 7 last year with better multitasking, improved background processing, scheduled connectivity, optimized memory use, and a cleaner, lighter looking interface. What can we expect from iOS 8?
Apple is notoriously tight-lipped about upcoming OS versions and hardware. We fully expect OS X 10.10 to ship sometime this year, probably after a preview at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) held June 2-6, 2014.
Last July I looked at the then-current Facebook app, compared it with using Safari to view Facebook, and found the app lacking. Today I’m looking at the latest version, 5.0, and comparing it with three different browsers using my iPhone 4S running iOS 7.1.1.
Way back in the earliest days of the Macintosh, Apple did something very clever. In addition to standard OS calls for disk access and standard graphic routines every programmer could use, Apple adopted standard keyboard commands and recommended they be used in every app.
Back in 1997, when Low End Mac was getting started, Apple’s future was anything but certain. Could it find a white knight to come in and rescue the brand? Would Steve Jobs be able to keep the “beleaguered” company afloat?
We all get nostalgic about certain things. For some, it’s the first car. And sometimes, it’s the first Macintosh.
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.
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.
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.
