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.
Category Archives: Mac Musings
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 […]