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
Category Archives: Mac Musings
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.)
If you thought buying videos through the iTunes Store was the online equivalent of buying them on DVD or Blu-ray, think again. In a completely unexpected development, owners of the October 2008 MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air have discovered that the new Mini DisplayPort includes High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) – and this makes it […]
2008: This one boggles the mind: The iPod and iTunes Music Store were essentially invented in 1979. That’s more than 20 years before the first iPod shipped – and three years before the first CD players came to market!
2008 – Low End Mac needs a good content management system.
2008 – The G3 range of iMacs had propelled Apple into the public eye, had sometimes been the best selling personal computer on the market, and had helped Apple come back from the brink. Between the iMac and the iPod, the whole world was watching Apple.
2008 – Ten years ago today, on August 15, 1998, the iMac first went on sale. Some Apple dealers had special midnight hours to help meet demand for the Bondi blue desktop that Steve Jobs had unveiled in May.
PC Magazine’s Lance Ulanoff says, “Macs are PCs, dammit!” He then goes on to explain that the “PC” at PC Magazine stands for personal computer. I am not convinced. You see, I was there when the first IBM PCs reached the local ComputerLand store in 1981. And I know that was not the birth of […]
In his blog, Tim Bray states: “There’s a design flaw in Apple’s current lineup of Mac keyboards; easily fixed though.” He goes on to complain about both of Apple’s current keyboards, the USB ‘board with its full complement of keys and the Bluetooth keyboard with its significant lack of keys.
2008: The iPod very much dominates the MP3 player market, the iTunes Store dominates the digital music market (and probably video as well), the iPhone has redefined the smartphone market, and the Macintosh is the #3 personal computer brand in the US – and the #2 personal computer operating system, growing at an impressive rate […]
2008: Has it really been five years since Apple introduced the Power Mac G5? Yes, and the new enclosure introduced on June 23, 2003, lives on as the housing of the Mac Pro.
2008: Bigger, more, cheaper! Those are the cries of computer buyers – and successful manufacturers answer in spades with faster CPUs, more RAM, bigger hard drives, and higher density displays. Oh, and sometimes smaller, cheaper computers as well.
2008: It’s called the KPC. It sells for $99 bare bones (no CPU, RAM, or hard drive), and as low as $229 configured. And it makes me wonder, “Can it run OS X?”
Is Microsoft a monopoly? Has Microsoft been guilty of monopolistic behavior? These are questions we’ve been asking for well over a decade, and the subject surfaced again this week [mid March 2008] after the US Supreme Court cleared the way for Novell to file an antitrust case against the Redmond behemoth over the way WordPerfect […]
2008: The prayers of many for an ultralight MacBook have been answered, but in an unexpected way. And that’s pure Apple.
2008: There’s been a huge buzz in the past week about an Apple patent application for “Run-Time Code Injection To Perform Checks”, which many liken to Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage program and speculate could result in Mac OS X and Apple apps including the kind of serialization and headaches that Windows users are familiar with.
Thursday is Thanksgiving Day here in the States, our once-a-year day dedicated to looking back at all the good things that have happened. We’ll be spending the next week with family, so this is the last new column we’re posting until next Wednesday.
Yesterday (October 22, 2007) Oobject published a list of the 16 worst Apple products ever (since updated to 18) – and we just have to disagree with some of them.
In October 1992, Apple introduced two updated PowerBooks, a new PowerBook Duo series, and the last members of the Macintosh II family. You couldn’t ask for a greater contrast.
We hate to say it, but it appears that the Mac mini is dead.
Ever since Apple released the first MacBook one year ago, the company has sold the MacBook with matched pairs of memory, recommended that users only upgrade with matched pairs, and stated that the MacBook has a 2 GB memory ceiling.
Yesterday Kirk Edwards asked, “Where are the Mirrored Drive Doors processor upgrades?” I replied that I didn’t know of any – and then did a little investigation.
2007: Has Apple been shortchanging MacBook and MacBook Pro buyers ever since the first Intel ‘Books shipped? That’s what Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley think.
2007: When Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, there were only two Macintosh computers: the original 128K and the 512K “Fat Mac”. When he returned in 1997, there were PowerBooks, Power Macs, and Performas – each model name followed by a four-digit number. Jobs decided to simplify and focus the product line with four quadrants: […]
Sometimes it takes a while to put one and one together to make two. In this case, the iPhone plus Apple TV equals the future of computing.
2007 – “What’s happened to Low End Mac lately?” It’s a question I hear from readers and staff members. “What’s with the spate of pro-Windows articles? Why do you let your writers advocate for Windows?”
Everyone it talking about the Zune, Microsoft’s attempt at an iPod killer. It adds one neat new feature to the product mix, but otherwise it pales in comparison to the real thing.
Low End Mac contributor Tom Hormby posted an article on OSnews examining Apple’s Worst Business Decisions. Hormby’s histories are some of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published, but I’m have to question some of his analysis.
Microsoft has done some stupid things in the past, and we’ve taken our pot shots at their PlaysForSure initiative. Microsoft is a big, easy target. But now they’ve taken the next step and created an MP3 player that’s not compatible with their own PlaysForSure standard or DRM protected WMA and WMV files (see Microsoft’s Zune Won’t Play […]
2006 – “The clueless shall inherit the earth, because there are so many of them.” The latest example of that truism comes from Mike Langberg in his Monday column in the Mercury News. In Apple’s iTunes Solo Act Is Getting Competition (free subscription required), he explains both the Windows monopoly monoculture and the closed iPod/iTMS system.