Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac FAQ

Microsoft PowerPoint began its life as Presenter and was published for exclusively Macintosh by Forethought, Inc. Microsoft acquired Forethought in 1987 and renamed the app PowerPoint.

Writing Tech News for Low End Mac

We’re trying to do something different with tech news: no rumors, no reprinted press releases, no minor software update notices, and nothing based solely on a third-hand report. We take our tech news seriously.

CPUs: PowerPC G4

First available in the Power Mac G4 in late 1999, the G4 processor is to the G3 as the 604 was to the 603 – and then some! Like the 604, and unlike the G3, G4 is designed for multiprocessor operation. It also runs about 25% faster for basic floating point math calculations and has a built-in […]

CPUs: PowerPC G3

Arthur, legendary King of England, became the code-name for the third generation PowerPC (PPC) processor, eventually named the 740 and 750. The successor of the 603e, these third-generation CPUs were optimized to run real software, not for some theoretical ideal.

CPUs: PowerPC 604 and 604e

The “power user” second generation PowerPC (PPC) CPU was the 604, unveiled in December 1994 along with the 603. Containing 3.6 million transistors, drawing twice the power of the 601, and with a dual L1 cache (16 KB for instructions, 16 KB for data), this workhorse could deal with four instructions per cycle. The 604 […]

CPUs: PowerPC 603 and 603e

The second generation split the PowerPC (PPC) line into entry level 603 and power user 604 chips. The 603 has only 1.6 million transistors, draws about half as much power as the 601, has two smaller caches (8 KB for instructions, 8 KB for data vs. a 32 KB unified cache in the 601), and […]

CPUs: PowerPC 601

The biggest change in the Apple product line prior to 2006 was the transition from Motorola 680×0 CPUs to the PowerPC (PPC) family of CPUs. Designed by a consortium of Apple, IBM, and Motorola (a.k.a. the AIM Alliance) and based on IBM’s POWER architecture, PowerPC became the most widely used RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processor with […]

1.4 GHz iMac: What Is Apple Thinking?

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.