Apple IIc and IIc Plus: Compact Apples with Internal Floppy Drives

The Apple II family was known for its expansion options – eight slots for adding capabilities. Inevitably one held a floppy controller, typically one held a parallel printer card, and another might have a serial card for a modem or printer. Some bought Microsoft’s Z-80 SoftCard to run CP/M. But for most users, most slots remained empty.

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 […]

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.

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.