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.
Category Archives: Mac Musings
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.