The original idea behind PowerPC processors was to create a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) and focus on making those instructions as efficient as possible. This was in direct contrast to Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC), which kept adding more and more instructions, which meant more decoding and processing had to be done by the […]
Category Archives: Low End Mac Round Table
On June 23, 2003, Apple introduced the first Power Mac G5, which represented some big changes from the G4. The Power Mac G5 was the first Power Mac with built-in USB 2.0, the first to use PCI-X expansion slots, and the first with onboard support for SATA drives. It was also the first Mac to […]
Last Thursday, Nancy Caroll Gravly shared her opinion on The Mac Observer, essentially saying that there is no legitimate reason not to be running the latest version of OS X on your Mac. Here at Low End Mac, that caught our attention. Our thesis is that you often don’t need the latest hardware and/or operating […]
In terms of expandability, the G3 PowerBooks introduced in 1998, 1999, and 2000 set the high water mark. Each had two device bays, used standard IDE hard drives, supported lots of additional memory, and had a processor on a card that could be replaced by something faster – a G4 in some cases. The most […]
PowerBook 100 with floppy drive. Twenty years ago, Apple introduced its first laptop computer – the 16 lb. Macintosh Portable was portable, but definitely not a laptop – and forever changed the face of notebook computing. Although we take it for granted that laptops have a trackpad mounted in front of the keyboard, that was […]
