The Quadra 700 and 900 introduced the 68040 in 1991. In great part due to a much larger L1 cache (4 KB for data and 4 KB for instructions vs. 256 bytes in the 68030) and parts of the CPU running at twice clock speed, the 68040 provides 2.5-3 times the performance of the 68030 at […]
Mobile phones and smartphones might have progressed rapidly over the years, but are we just a slave to having the newest must-have feature? Could you break free?
It’s my birthday, and I realized I’ve been using Macs for half my life. I was 28 years old when I first used a Mac Plus way back in 1986, along with PageMaker 1.0 and the original LaserWriter printer. And 28 years later, I know a lot more about Macs – and myself.
Following on from my previous two articles, I ran further tests on my MacBook to see how it performs under different RAM and different versions of OS X and against an original Intel iMac.
In this comparison I look at how OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard compares when running my Early 2009 MacBook with 2 GB vs. 4 GB RAM, and I see how Snow Leopard compares to OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
Two machines and one operating system – which one performs better? I test them out with surprising results.
With the Motorola 680×0 architecture running out of steam and Motorola’s 88000 making haste slowly, Apple had to look a bit further afield for its next processor architecture. Here’s how IBM’s RISC project became the heart of the Mac.
This is part two of an epic saga about one man and his Macintosh SE. If you missed the first part or maybe you just need to get a quick refresh about part one, feel free to go back and enjoy it again.
Alex Schure founded the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in 1955 to take advantage of the wave of students studying under the GI Bill. NYIT was initially a correspondence school awarding technical certificates. It distinguished itself from the other technical schools by sending graduates a mess of electronics parts supposedly taken from Soviet warehouses […]
John Sculley, who had once been hailed as Apple’s savior for huge sales increases and good PR (like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs rolled in one) had presided over the splintering of the product line and a sharp decline in market share. The same trends continued after Sculley was forced out, and the […]
2005.11.15 From the day of his appointment as Apple CEO in February 1996, Gil Amelio presided over an ailing company. After the near-disastrous reign of Michael Spindler, Amelio promised to change the corporate ethos of Apple.
Low End Mac has just launched its YouTube channel, showcasing videos of repairs, upgrades, and mods of Apple kit, as well as general news and product videos.
Put simply, you can’t. With the introduction of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in August 2009, Apple removed all support for PowerPC Macs from its operating system. You cannot run OS X 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, or 10.10 on G5 Macs or anything earlier. They will only run on Intel x86 hardware.
Apple’s 2014 World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) brought much anticipated news of the next versions of Mac OS X and iOS. I sum up their main features.
There are frankly crazy rumors going about that Apple is ready to launch MacBooks, Mac minis, and perhaps even iMacs with up to four 4-core ARM-based CPUs. The next generation iPhone/iPad CPU will almost certainly be a 4-core 64-bit Apple chip named the A8. But in Macs?
I recently brought an original iPhone back from the brink, but it had audio issues. This article shows how to fix the reversed audio issue.
Changes to my writing content expanding to cover a variety of subjects, sees my column name change to Tech Spectrum.
I recently installed the lightweight Linux distro LXLE on a netbook and then on an aging laptop. Now I compare the two machines.
Apple really overhauled iOS when it released version 7 last year with better multitasking, improved background processing, scheduled connectivity, optimized memory use, and a cleaner, lighter looking interface. What can we expect from iOS 8?
I really dislike throwing out any tech kit. If it can be saved, I will do my best to revive it and reuse it. Recently I saved an original iPhone from certain doom.
With another “well duh” headline, Cult of Mac told us yesterday, Survey Finds Battery Life Is Most Important for iPhone Owners. Didn’t the fact that we use 3.5″ and 4″ smartphones while the Android world has gone bigger kind of make that obvious?
Apple is notoriously tight-lipped about upcoming OS versions and hardware. We fully expect OS X 10.10 to ship sometime this year, probably after a preview at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) held June 2-6, 2014.
Last July I looked at the then-current Facebook app, compared it with using Safari to view Facebook, and found the app lacking. Today I’m looking at the latest version, 5.0, and comparing it with three different browsers using my iPhone 4S running iOS 7.1.1.
Could the iPhone 3G be the ultimate basic iPhone for those who aren’t interested in keeping up with the latest versions?
How do you prevent unwanted email from showing up in your in box? If you’re a Yahoo! Mail user, it’s really quite easy.
White, blue, green, pink, or yellow? I take a look at Apple’s colourful addition to the iPhone range.
The inventor of the compact disc (CD), the most popular medium in the world for playing back and storing music, is often disputed, as one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc.
In my previous Low End Mac article, I wrote that I was planning a trip for later this spring. I wrote about options for take-along tech gadgets: digital cameras (small is good), mobile phones (get a local SIM at your destination), tablets (bigger than a mobile phone, less capable than a laptop, but good enough for […]
The Early 2014 MacBook Air (MBA) gets a speed bump 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 4th-generation low-power Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, the Early 2014 MBA has Intel HD Graphics 5000. And with Power […]
Once again the MacBook Air (MBA) takes a step forward with more processing power and improved battery life. The 11″ model is rated at 9 hours in the field, and if you don’t use your MBA regularly, it has 30 days of standby power. Built around 4th-generation low-power Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, the Early 2014 MBA […]
Over the weekend we updated to WordPress version 3.9, and there are some real changes writers should know about. Most of the changes show up in the Ultimate TinyMCE plugin we use for WYSIWYG editing.
Adobe Photoshop™ was, for a time, the killer app for the Macintosh. During the mid-90s, publishing and graphic design had supplanted consumers as the most important market to target, at least in the eyes of former Apple CEOs Gil Amelio and Michael Spindler.
Apple Corps was founded as a tax haven for the Beatles’ considerable cash reserves in January 1968. Apple Corps would finance a record label and other pet projects of the band members while also providing a “front” for their financial activities to reduce personal liability and taxes.
Apple had transformed from a small three man venture in the late 1970s into a huge, multinational corporation in the late 1980s. With these changes came troubles.
The first Apple proposal to move the Macintosh to Intel hardware did not begin with Mac OS X. It began in 1985, shortly after Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple. The project was quickly nixed by Apple’s management, but it would be revived several years later in a joint effort by Novell and Apple to port the […]
