Apple made some interesting choices when it designed the new 12″ MacBook, which is the thinnest, lightest Retina Display Mac notebook ever. But its US$1,299 price is higher than the new 13″ MacBook Air, 13″ MacBook Pro, and new 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Where’s the best value?
As technology marches forward, old tech gets left behind. Some of us have been using Macs since the 1980s and have experienced a lot of it, but the 1998 introduction of the iMac probably takes the cake for offending the most – and the 12″ MacBook may take second place.
The Early 2015 MacBook Air (MBA) gets another speed bump, gains Thunderbolt 2, and is rated at 12 hours in the field – and if you don’t use your MBA regularly, it has 30 days of standby power. Built around 5th-generation low-power Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, the Early 2015 MBA has Intel HD Graphics […]
The Early 2015 MacBook Air (MBA) uses 5th-generation Intel Core processors and finally gains Thunderbolt 2. The 5th-generation low-power Intel Core i5 and i7 processors include Intel HD Graphics 6000. The stock CPU is a 1.6 GHz Core i5 with Turbo Boost to 2.7 GHz, and the 11-incher can be configured with a 2.2 GHz Core i7 that […]
The big news about the Early 2015 13″ Retina MacBook Pro is its adoption of the same Force Touch trackpad introduced with the 12″ MacBook. It’s also faster than its predecessor and has improved graphics. The base model has a 2.7 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost to 3.1 GHz, and the better model […]
The Flash Player hack for PowerPC has once again been updated – this time to 16.1.
Do you want the features of a modern iPhone without the expense. I take a look at the 2010 iPhone 4 as a budget handset.
iCloud contacts are great if you have iOS6 upwards. I show you how to export your iCloud contacts for use on older iDevices or other smartphones.
Way back in the Mac II era, someone discovered that certain Mac NuBus video cards could support slightly higher resolutions than the standard 640 x 480 pixels – but only with certain displays. This discovery gave birth to MaxAppleZoom, a $25 shareware control panel by Naoto Horii designed to support those higher resolution.
Radius was founded in May 1986 by Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, and other members of the original Mac team. Radius produced the first full-page display for the Macintosh, introducing the Radius Full Page Display for the Mac Plus. Other products included accelerators for the Mac Plus and Mac SE, video cards, monitors (including the first screen […]
What? It’s 2015, and it’s iPhone rumour time. Will we see a follow up to the iPhone 5c? Will Apple release a speed bumped iPhone 6 and 6 Plus? Or are they planning something different?
The rumour mill is rife with thoughts on Apple’s next version of iOS. What will we see next in Apple’s next generation mobile operating system?
Weather apps serve a basic purpose, to tell the weather, but Authentic Weather brings a new, rather rude edge.
Umax acquired the Macintosh clone operation and SuperMac name from Radius, going on to become one of the more innovative clone makers. Their corporate goal was to make quality Mac OS computers at prices that would give PCs a run for their money, something I believe they succeeded at. From the entry level C500 to […]
It can be frustrating when your beloved iDevice cries that it is full, but what can you do? I check out a new Mac tool called PhoneExpander that claims to easily free up some space.
Over the years, we’ve covered using a CompactFlash (CF) card with an IDE adapter to replace a laptop’s hard drive and make it quieter. As it turns out, there’s a lot we didn’t know about this subject until recently.
In my previous article, I looked at HTML5 video support in browsers compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard on PowerPC Macs. Today we’re looking at video performance on YouTube, which recently made HTML5 video its default.
On Tuesday, January 27, 2015, YouTube announced that it had made HTML5 video its default instead of Adobe Flash, which is still be supported. What does this mean for Mac users?
I don’t know how I ever got along before Dropbox, which lets me sync files on any of my Macs running OS X 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard, and 10.9 Mavericks.
The announcement that Dropbox will drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 clients in May has sent shockwaves through the low-end community. Many of us depend on Dropbox to sync files with our older Macs and newer kit.
I was disappointed to receive an email from Dropbox on Tuesday telling me that Dropbox will be dropping support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard on May 18, 2015. They recommend I upgrade to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
We’ve been posting The Rumor Mill articles by Anne Onymus since late 1999, and we’ve taken the time to port some more of them over to WordPress, often adding images and new links while also updating broken links.
We recently migrated several Apple Archive articles by Adam Robert Guha to WordPress. This often includes fixing broken links, adding images and new links, and sometimes historical comments.
This article was first published in September 1997 when two different protocols for 56k throughput, X2 and K56flex, were competing. Starting in March 1998, v.90 was developed to replace these competing protocols and provide a single standard for 56k modems. v.90 was finalized in February 1999. This article was last updated at about that time, […]
Yes, there were viruses for the Classic Mac operating system. Not a lot, mind you, especially in comparison to the vastly more popular Microsoft Windows platform, but they did exist.
I take the fantastic coloured Clamshell iBook and strip it back making it transparent.
In the 1990s, several Macs included infrared networking support, a legacy short range point-to-point technology often forgotten nowadays. It can be used to transfer files between Macs, to mobile phones, and to print to IrDA compliant printers, among other things. This article provides an overview of infrared networking on Macs and the models with built-in IrDA […]
Low End Mac has been through some difficult times since we moved from static HTML pages to WordPress. Site traffic declined by 88% from our peak of 17.1 million pages in 2007, but it is turning around.
This page provides a quick overview of all G3 iMac models. All G3 iMacs include v.90 (56k) modems, 10/100 ethernet, and 15″ CRT displays.
If you wanted an external drive for booting a PowerPC Mac, you officially needed a FireWire one. But it seems some PowerPC Macs can boot from USB.
Changing the hard drive in a Clamshell iBook G3 requires a complete strip down. I look at modding it to make it easier.
I love Macs, and I’ve been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I haven’t had much time to write lately, but that’s finally changing.
It’s debatable whether the Mac IIsi is really a Second Class Mac. The IIsi was a bit of an odd duck. On the one hand, it was the only Mac II to ship without a NuBus slot. On the other hand, it could be seen as a monitor-less SE/30.
I’ve been getting email since Remy Davison published The 10 Worst Macs Ever Built on Insanely Great Mac. Shouldn’t I add the Mac Classic to the Second Class Macs list?
When it was introduced in February 2006, the Core Duo Mac mini was the smallest desktop computer on the market – and the second-least expensive Macintosh Apple had ever built. As with other first-generation Intel Macs, the price was $100 higher than the model it replaced.
