As I noted in my crisis article, Low End Mac Needs Your Help, I wear a lot of hats here at Low End Mac. From the earliest days, I was a writer, a researcher, a proofreader and editor, and a designer.
2012 – Much has been written about Linux on PowerPC Macs. To some, it is a reliable alternative; to others, just a crippled port of the x86 original. What if there was another competitor in the game? There is one – MorphOS.
The Apple world rarely rests, and talks are already beginning about the next release of Mac OS X. I am typing this on my 2009 MacBook with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion installed (see last week’s First Impressions of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion). It has only been a few days. The initial dust has […]
Today marks the 15th birthday of Mac OS 8, but the operating system’s name is perhaps more significant than any of its features.
Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was released yesterday, and within a few hours of its release I had purchased it, downloaded it, and installed it. This is the first time I have ever bought a copy of Mac OS on launch day.
I love the Classic Mac OS, the Mac operating system prior to Mac OS X. Mac OS 8 has to be one of favourite classic OSes.
Apple announced a developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (Mac App Store link) in mid-February 2012, and it became available on July 25, 2012. As expected, it makes Macs even more iOS-like, continuing the trend begun with OS X 10.7 Lion in July 2011.
Mac Blu-ray Player has been around now for a little over a year, but until the UJ-267, which I recently reviewed, and the UJ-167, which both arrived mere weeks ago, there were no internal Blu-ray drives for the Unibody MacBook Pro. This limited Blu-ray playback to external drives on these late model portables, which needless […]
The Clamshell iBook has to be one of Apple’s most debated products. Some say it’s gorgeous, some say it’s hideous, and it’s described in some of the most bizarre ways – Barbie’s handbag and the toilet seat to name a few.
Low End Mac reader David M. was unsuccessful in his attempt to install OS X 10.2.8 Jaguar on his Beige Power Mac G3. The attempt caused the computer to boot into Open Firmware, and he found several similar results on the Web.
Computers die. Laptops get dropped or stolen. Hard drives fail. You deleted a file or folder and now realize that you need it back. You need to use an app that’s not compatible with your current version of Mac OS X. Your system just crashes and now refuses to boot from your hard drive.
From the headline, Microsoft Won’t Bring Office 2013 to Mac, but It Will Add SkyDrive Integration to Office 2011, you’d think that Microsoft was sticking it to Mac users. And from reading the article by Killian Bell, you’d never know that Mac users currently have a newer version of Office than Windows users – or that Microsoft has […]
I had some video files I needed burning to a DVD-video yesterday, so started looking around for something free, and I stumbled across a superb little application called Burn.
Blu-ray is officially a “bag of hurt” no more for those who want to take advantage of the high-end optical media format on the Mac without the distraction of external drives and wires. Enter the Matshita UJ-167 and UJ-267!
Is it really fair to compare a three-year-old operating system to a three-month-old one? Maybe not (for the three-year-old), but it is interesting.
Is tech racist?
Since the dawn of Mac OS X, there have been major and minor versions. That is, versions that introduced major features and those that focus mainly on speed improvements and streamlining, bringing only small new features or additions.
2012 – Without change, there’s no indication time is passing. The sun rises and sets. The moon changes it phases. Flowers open and close. Some degree of change is inevitable. And some changes we don’t like.
This is a very simple and easy-to-build project that provides a sensor on the pedal crank of any exercise bike and generates keyboard output triggering Google Maps Street View to advance via the up arrow key.
On June 23, 2003, Apple introduced the first Power Mac G5, which represented some big changes from the G4. The Power Mac G5 was the first Power Mac with built-in USB 2.0, the first to use PCI-X expansion slots, and the first with onboard support for SATA drives. It was also the first Mac to […]
Back in February, my first generation 13″ MacBook Pro died of logic board failure, and I was forced to sell it due to the fact that I was starting dual credit courses at my local community college and needed a small, cheap, lightweight laptop that could follow me around and take a beating. I was […]
2012 – The proverbial bell is tolling louder for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and PowerPC Macs.
Sometimes the math geek – which can always be a bit anal about numbers and how they’re presented – wonders why a particular headline isn’t a bit better. For instance, Cult of Mac published The SSD in the New MacBook Air Is 217% Faster than Before on Tuesday, which makes it sound like SSD performance in the Mid 2012 MacBook […]
2012 – According to Horace Dediu in The Evolution of the Computing Value Chain, Microsoft has had the dominant operating system almost since that day in 1981 when the first IBM PC shipped with PC-DOS, Big Blue’s version of MS-DOS. From DOS through Windows, Microsoft has held the top spot – until now.
2012 – When it comes to competing with Apple, Microsoft and Google are between a rock and a hard place.
What does thermal compound do, and why should you be concerned about it? Call me simple, but I had no idea what thermal compound was until about a year ago when I decided to upgrade the factory-installed RAM on my iMac G4. Apparently there is a two-part heatsink in the good ol’ Luxo Mac that […]
After reading Thunderbolt vs. USB, HDMI, PCIe Cable: How Does It Compare? on Cnet, it looks like we’re going to have yet another port war in the PC world.
Here at Low End Mac, we not only use older Macs, but also older iDevices. Released in 2009, the iPhone 3GS is now Apple’s low-end phone.
2012 – Yesterday Apple overhauled its entire notebook line, and perhaps the biggest surprise was the 15″ MacBook Pro with Retina Display (quite the name!).
Yesterday Apple overhauled its entire notebook line, moving everything to Ivy Bridge CPUs with Intel HD Graphics 4000 and USB 3. Ivy Bridge means a bit more processing power and improved energy consumption. HD 4000 graphics has one-third more cores than 3000 (16 vs. 12), and Apple is claiming up to 60% improvement there.
Yesterday Apple overhauled its entire notebook line, moving everything to Ivy Bridge CPUs with Intel HD Graphics 4000 and USB 3. Ivy Bridge means a bit more processing power and improved energy consumption. HD 4000 graphics has one-third more cores than 3000 (16 vs. 12), and Apple is claiming up to 60% improvement there.
For the first time, Apple has Macs with built-in USB 3.0 support. The improved USB specification is over 10x as fast as USB 2.0 and has half the bandwidth of Thunderbolt. There are already a lot of USB 3.0 drives on the market, and they are far more affordable than Thunderbolt drives. Best of all, […]
For the first time, Apple has Macs with built-in USB 3.0 support. The improved USB specification is over 10x as fast as USB 2.0 and has half the bandwidth of Thunderbolt. There are already a lot of USB 3.0 drives on the market, and they are far more affordable than Thunderbolt drives. Best of all, […]
For the first time, Macs have built-in USB 3.0 support. The improved USB specification is over 10x as fast as USB 2.0 and has half the bandwidth of Thunderbolt. There are a lot of USB 3.0 drives on the market, and they are far more affordable than Thunderbolt drives. Best of all, Apple uses the […]
This was the last of the 13″ MacBook Pro models with a 1280 x 800 pixel display. After this, Apple only made 13″ models with Retina Displays. This model was on the market from June 2012 until it was discontinued in October 2016, by which time its base price had dropped to $1,099. That is […]
