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Introduction and Background A little over 5 years ago I wrote about the mid-2010 Mac Mini being an outstanding Low End Mac for using as a media server in my article titled “Mid 2010 Mac Mini: The Perfect Low-End 1080p Media Center“.  It checks many of the key boxes given the fact that it can […]

In fall 2019, Apple announced their 16th major release of macOS, version 10.15 Catalina. This was the one which shipped with Apple SideCar, a system function/extension which allows you to use your iPad as a second display for your Mac. This means until October 7th 2019, there was no such analogue to the feature.. or […]

In late 2006, going right along their fall product cycle updates, Apple had introduced a 24″ iMac model for the first time. This was the largest ever produced of the “white” polycarbonate iMacs, sporting a 1920 x 1200 display, a 16:10 aspect ratio, and CCFL tubes to light up the screen. It’s a wonderful Mac […]

The Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, aka PCIe, is a longstanding serial computer expansion bus standard created in 2003. The Late 2005 Power Mac G5 was the only PowerPC Mac which took advantage of this technology, which had a production run of October 2005 – August 2006. As a result, AGP/PCI-based Macs received 1-2 years lesser […]

The first generation MacBook Air was the first ever Apple computer to ship with a Solid State Drive as a factory option for internal storage, in January 2008. Prices have come down dramatically over the years for SSD’s, making them a more viable option for faster, silent, and low power consumption operation. In the case […]

There was a time not too long ago in the past where one could simply open Safari on a PowerPC Mac, and be able to browse YouTube with relative ease. As web standards changed, resources required became more intensive, and the PowerPC platform was depreciated. Adobe Flash player was still in its hey day then, […]

Once upon a time (for those somewhat new to the Mac platform), there was this innovative connection that showed up in the late 1990s – early 00s called FireWire that came around shortly after the advent of USB (at least in terms of the consumer world – FireWire had been in development since the mid […]

There are objective standards to judge technology by, by how well they perform in relation to how much they cost, their longevity, repairability, etc; but how much they impact you are subjective. As a technology enthusiast, I understand this a result of having a few different Macs from various eras. And there’s a saying I […]

Officially, Minecraft 1.5.2 was the last version playable on any PowerPC Mac, as it was the last version playable on Java 5. The release date of 1.5.2 is May 2nd 2013, around the same time retina MacBook Pros just started shipping. Minecraft 1.8.9 was released December 9th 2015, adding several features and new textures over […]

Between 2006 and 2011, many iMacs shipped with a removable internal graphics card known as an MXM GPU. MXM (Mobile PCI EXpress Module) is an interface pioneered by Nvidia around 2004, originally intended for laptops, which had gone through several iterations before slowly phasing out as a platform interface connection standard. As our Macs age, […]

Some History on the Best Mac Value Ever: The Mac Pro 4,1 and 5,1 The Mac Pro has went through many iterations over the years and with the advent of Apple Silicon, things have certainly come to a crossroads. The Mac Pro 4,1 from 2009 and the slightly revised Mac Pro 5,1 (sold from 2010 […]

The Mac Pro 5,1 has rode a heck of a wave thanks to a talented team of developers who have worked hard to keep these old machines running smoothly with OpenCore/OpenCore Legacy Patcher (and some other tools/patchers that were developed earlier such as the dosdude1 patchers) and has allowed the Mac Pro 5,1 (as well […]

Mac Pro Evolution Each design of the Mac Pro over the years has had its advantages and disadvantages when it comes to overall system architecture and design, including the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) options available.  Many factors are at play when determining what kind of graphics card you can run with your Mac Pro as […]

Dear Low End Mac friends: Apologies for the very long hiatus on new articles on the website. Things haven’t been easy for a while. Over the summer/early fall, our founder Dan Knight decided to step away after around 24 years of running Low End Mac and its day to day operations as Editor in Chief.  […]

This is a bit of a throwback to my article from May of last year – Tri-Booting a Mac Pro 2,1 – not long before I had just procured my Mac Pro 5,1 (well technically a 4,1 that was flashed to a 5,1 with dual Intel Xeon 5680 CPUs with 12 cores at 3.33 GHz).  […]

Hello and welcome to our Mac OS news roundup #2. Christmas isn’t too far off and we’re all looking forward to the holidays, aren’t we? I’m especially curious about the new Mac OS related projects that are going to surface! SCSI2Ethernet board This is one exciting news! If you’re among the hordes lurking around ebay […]

Hello Low Enders! It’s been a while, so I’m going to enlighten all of you with a great new series on using the Mac as a media hub and how it has evolved over time. As we have gotten newer Macs throughout the years to integrate into our home theater setups, serving as our digital […]

It has been almost 10 years since I published my article Back to Mac OS 9, Because It’s All I Need on Low End Mac. Lots of things changed in my life since then – I got married, became a dad of three kids and I changed my job. But one thing remained in my […]