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.
Category Archives: Mac Musings
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 […]
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.