White, blue, green, pink, or yellow? I take a look at Apple’s colourful addition to the iPhone range.
MECC was for many years one of the major producers of educational content including courseware, videos, and educational computer games for the Apple II, Radio Shack, IBM PC, and later the Macintosh and Windows. MECC was instrumental in ensuring the US was ahead and invested sufficiently in educational computing.
HyperCard changed the way people on the Macintosh platform created programs. Furthermore, it changed the way they worked -and, for some, the way they learned.
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.
We all know about the early IBM PC clones, such as Compaqs and Dells. And some of us know about the Macintosh clones. But there were clones before the IBM PC existed – Apple II clones!
eWorld was Apple’s short-lived group of online services. Launched in June 1994, eWorld was an intuitive, easy-to-use, and heavily GUI-dependent new way to take advantage of the Internet. It included its own email service, bulletin board system (BBS), and more.
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.
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.
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 […]
Cable and satellite TV are growing more expensive all the time. If you’re looking to reduce your entertainment costs, an older laptop can be an easy way to do so.
Steve Jobs’ career at Apple was unique. His unconventional leadership helped create Apple’s two most important products of the 70s and 80s: the Apple II and the Macintosh. Unfortunately for Jobs, the CEO he had recruited, John Sculley, was not happy with the risks Jobs was willing to take. After a short power struggle that […]
Personal computer history doesn’t begin with IBM or Microsoft, although Microsoft was an early participant in the fledgling PC industry.
Way back in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was rare enough to have a personal computer in the home, classroom, or office. Today it’s common to have several computers, tablets, and/or smartphones in the workplace, school, or home.
From nearly the beginning, Macs have supported built-in networking using a protocol known as AppleTalk. While networking is common today, outside of large businesses and institutions, networked computers were the exception in the mid 1980s. Out-of-the-box networking was a major selling point for the Mac.
With Windows XP support officially ended, switching to Linux could be a way of saving low-end hardware. I compare two identical machines, one running XP, the other running LXLE. Let the fun begin.
I put my MacBook out of the way and installed LXLE on a 10” netbook. Find out what I think after an entire day of use.
This weekend, Linda relayed a question from a colleague who wondered what sort of tech gear to take travelling. As with most simple to ask tech questions, my best short answer is. “It depends.” So let’s expand on it a bit.
As Mac OS X was starting out in 2001, Jonathan Ploudre looked back at BeOS, which Apple had considered as a potential replacement for the Classic Mac OS when it gave up on its Copland project. BeOS had much to commend itself, including a whole different kind of system architecture that made even older Macs […]
In this series of articles from 2001, Jonathan Ploudre looks at the unfulfilled promises of PowerBooks – and where they really come through.
In early 2001, just as the first version of iTunes was coming to market, Jonathan Ploudre wrote a short series of articles on home networking and setting up an old Mac as a network appliance.
In 2000, Jonathan Ploudre did a lengthy series of articles explaining where work bottlenecks are and provided tips on how to best work around them. Speed Reconsidered points out the real world performance isn’t always related to hardware speed. Bottlenecks: What Is Your Mac’s Slowest Component? explains that the thing that most holds back your […]
Back in 2000, Jonathan Ploudre wrote a 4-part series on Macs and font technologies. Over a dozen years later, they still have some helpful insights. A History of Font Technologies looks at the way the Macintosh changed everything by displaying regular, bold, italic, outline, and different sized fonts on your screen. Macintosh System Fonts looks at the […]
I have a friend who has so far survived while living a smartphone- and tablet-free life. He is thinking of getting some small device to give him Internet access of the go. He quoted a mutual friend – an iPhone owner – who said that he got an iPad “because the apps are better”.
On January 24, 1984, Apple announced the Macintosh to its Board of Directors and to the world – and the computer world has never been the same.
LEM Swap is Low End Mac’s Google Group for buying and selling Mac OS computers and related goods. We also have Facebook LEM Swap groups for Mac and iOS users in Canada and the UK.
