Apple 1: Apple’s First and Rarest Computer

Apple has a very impressive track record. It is the only personal computer company to have survived from the early days of 8-bit computing while once mighty Commodore, Radio Shack, and Atari no longer exist or long ago stopped making personal computers.

Origin of the Apple I and Apple II Computers

The first computer worthy of the name “computer” was produced more than 60 years ago. It was a monstrous machine, covering more than 136 square meters and used 18,000 vacuum tubes (the predecessors to the transistor). It was capable of computing the sum of 5,000 numbers ten digits in length per second. It’s name was ENIAC, […]

OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the First Year

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.

Low End Mac’s Guide to iPod touches

In June 2007, we got the first iPhone. Three months later, we got the first iPod touch, which was essentially an iPhone with the phone, camera, Bluetooth, and wireless data capabilities removed. We’ve come a long way since then.

CPUs: PowerPC G5

The G5 is a 64-bit member of the PowerPC processor family that is fully compatible with 32-bit code. It was first used when the Power Mac G5 was introduced in June 2003. Only three different versions of the chip were produced before Apple made the move to Intel CPUs in 2006. IBM was the only manufacturer […]

Low End Mac’s Guide to iPhones, Part 1

From the first iPhone launched in 2007 with its 480 x 320 3.5″ display, ARM processor running at 412 MHz, and EDGE networking through today’s iPhone 6S and 6S Plus with their 750 x 1334 4.7″ and 1080 x 1920 5.5″ displays, dual-core 1.85 GHz A9 CPUs, and 4G LTE networking, we’ve seen a lot of […]

Low End Mac’s Guide to iPhones, Part 2

Prior to the September 2012 introduction of the iPhone 5, every iPhone had used a 3.5″ display. Since the iPhone 5, all screens have been larger than that. At the same time, Apple abandoned the 30-pin dock connector it had inherited from iPods and adopted the new Lightning connector. This also marked the debut of […]

Now Is the Time to Bring Back the 17″ MacBook Pro

I still love my Early 2011 17″ MacBook Pro, as do many others despite its potential to exhibit a known graphics fault (see Apple Recall regarding discrete GPU failure), and it continues to be my daily driver and likely will remain that way for the next 4-6 years – unless Apple decides to reverse its course on a few […]

Parallels 11, Fusion 8 and VirtualBox 5 – Oh My!

Time for another look at virtualization software, letting Macintosh users run PC operating system such as Windows or Ubuntu on their Macs. There are three competitors in the Mac emulation market – Parallels Desktop (US$79 or as an annual $99 subscription Pro version), VMware Fusion (also US$79), and Oracle’s (free and open source) VirtualBox.

Apple Reports Record Mac Sales over Previous Quarter

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.

27″ Retina 5K iMac (Late 2015)

Apple took the 27″ Retina 5K iMac a step further with fifth generation Intel processor technology, state of the art AMD graphics, an even better Retina display with 25% greater color gamut – and at $500 less than the Late 2014 Retina iMac retailed for a year ago.

21″ iMac (Late 2015)

Remember the seemingly underpowered iMac that Apple introduced in June 2014? They’ve updated it from 1.4 GHz to 1.6 GHz and kept it available as a lower cost alternative to the 21.5″ Retina 4K iMac.