Matthew J. X. Malady has posted an interesting proposal on Slate about changing the computer keyboard. He wants the Caps Lock key gone, an em-dash key added, the exclamation point relocated, a “.com” key added, and “@” accessible without using the Shift key.
Category Archives: Mac Musings
2012 – After years and years of offering a $100 rebate on inkjet printers, Apple discontinued the program this week. That got me looking back at the history of computer printing.
2012 – Bigger isn’t always better – witness the success of the iPhone and the MacBook Air – but it often is.
Apple usually makes the right choices, but it’s sometimes late coming to the party already underway on the Windows side of things.
Charles W Moore raises a good point in Thoughts on Using Older Macs as Work Machines: As much as we may love our old Macs, some of them just don’t have what it takes to be productive in the wired and wireless world of the Internet today.
2011 – Netscape Navigator was the first widely popular Web browser, and when Netscape finally threw in the towel after years of fighting against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, it made Navigator an open source project. That project, Mozilla, has been producing new versions of the Firefox browser for over seven years now.
2011 – Yesterday’s hot Mac rumor, since picked up by just about every site covering Apple news, is that Apple is questioning the future of the Mac Pro and may be discontinuing its most expensive (and undoubtedly most profitable per unit) computer.
Extreme Tech’s Sebastian Anthony says that Thunderbolt, which Apple introduced earlier this year, is already dead in the water. I beg to differ. Sometimes Apple has a better idea that the rest of the industry ignores, and it’s usually a simpler solution than the PC world embraces.
“What happened to my Excel?” my panicked wife asked. Tools were missing, and things just didn’t look like they had before. Had some gremlin messed up her Excel settings?
2011 – Apple released Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger six years ago. It would become the longest lasting version of OS X ever, not replaced by a newer version until 10.5 Leopard shipped in October 2007 – 30 months later.
We take the Low End part of our name seriously at Low End Mac. Until six weeks ago, my newest Mac was a refurbished 2004 1.25 GHz eMac – and that’s not even a production machine. I picked up a secondhand dual 1 GHz Power Mac G4 to replace the eMac as my production machine […]
I recently shared my story of migrating from my reliable old (introduced in January 2001) Digital Audio Power Mac G4 with its dual 1.6 GHz upgrade and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to my first Intel Mac, a 2.0 GHz 2007 Core 2 Duo Mac mini running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. But a few days after switching […]
2011 – I finally did it. I bought my first Intel-based Mac two weeks ago, and I’ve been making the transition from being PowerPC only.
When Apple introduced the Early 2011 MacBook Pro models with Thunderbolt, something clicked in the back of my mind. With Thunderbolt, Apple has delivered on a promise made when the original Macintosh was introduced in 1984 – and then some.
The first benchmark results are in for the 2011 MacBook Pro line. Primate Labs posted the first Geekbench results last Thursday, and Macworld followed with its Speedmark 6.5 benchmark suite on Friday.
2010: The Year PowerPC Macs Became Total Paperweights – That’s just one line from OSS Waves PPC Goodbye as Old Macs Turn Paperweights, a column by Fernando Cassia published on TechEye last September. His advice: “If you have an old PowerPC based Mac, the time to move is now, as software developers are dropping support of the platform left […]
2011 – The first MacBook Pro shipped five years ago, the first “pro” Mac to make the transition from PowerPC to Intel. (The 17″ 1.83 GHz and 20″ 2.0 GHz Core Duo iMacs were the first Macs to make the switch to Intel, and the Mac mini migrated to Intel at the end of February 2006.)
2011 – I ran across an article I wrote in January 2003 explaining why, after over a dozen years using the Classic Mac OS, I finally made the switch to Mac OS X as my primary operating system.
2011 – I have been very excited about the idea of a Mac App Store since it was first floated, and I’m very happy to see that Apple has finally started to make it every bit as easy for Mac users to find, buy, and install apps as iOS users.
There are a lot of companies offering upgrades for new and recent Macs, but not so many that focus on bringing new products to PowerPC Macs.
As a longtime Apple user – I cut my computing teeth on an Apple II+ circa 1979 – I get a kick out of reading articles about the 10 best or 10 worst Apple products of all time. The latest of these, Top 10 Worst Apple Products of All Time, appeared on the Australian PC […]
Monday, September 28, 2009 marked my migration to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Yes, you read that right. Leopard, not Snow Leopard – since none of my Macs are Intel-based, Mac OS X 10.6 isn’t even an option.
2009 – Apple is billing Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as its first fully 64-bit operating system, but this isn’t the first time the Mac OS has changed it bitness.
Apple has been promoting three key advantages of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that are hardware dependent: Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) OpenCL 64-bit operation
Long before they invented personal computers, I was a math geek. My favorite book on the subject was the Mathematics volume in the Time-Life Science Library. I’d spend hours reading about magic squares, the Pythagorean theorem, different number systems, and more.
2009 – Others have published their thoughts on the Best Mac Ever, the 10 Best Macs, and the 25 Best Macs, but I’m taking a different approach. I want to identify the 25 most important Macs ever, clones included. (In some cases, I’ll lump together two or more models that were introduced simultaneously.)
2009 – Brooke Crothers of CNET News states that the “PowerPC platform never lived up to the hype” and “the PowerPC platform had really failed long before 2005.” The evidence: the fact that Apple switched to Intel in 2006 and that some of the first-generation dual-processor G4 Power Macs ran hot. I beg to differ.
The Macintosh officially turns 25 on January 24, 2009, the anniversary of Apple’s announcement of the original Macintosh.
One of my interesting jobs at Low End Mac is compiling our price trackers, which have evolved quite a bit over the years. We do price trackers for all Macs that are supported by some version of Mac OS X, from beige G3 Power Macs and WallStreet PowerBooks through today’s Intel-based Macs. We also track the […]
It’s not the way most Mac users work, but I’ve been partitioning my hard drives since my Mac Plus days. Back then, it allowed me to boot into System 6 or System 7 from my 40 MB Microtech hard drive. (That was a good size drive back then.)
