The first benchmark results are in for the 2011 MacBook Pro line. Primate Labs posted the first Geekbench results last Thursday, and Macworld followed with its Speedmark 6.5 benchmark suite on Friday.
Apple took some big steps forward with the refreshed 13.3″ MacBook Pro. The Early 2011 model migrates from the dated Intel Core 2 Duo to Intel’s newer Core i5 and i7 CPUs. These dual-core mobile CPUs have a 3-4 MB Level 3 cache shared by both cores and, thanks to Turbo Boost architecture, should be […]
The Early 2011 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pro models moved from dual-core CPUs to quad-core, which makes them a lot more powerful despite lower clock speeds. As with last year’s models, these CPUs support TurboBoost, which lets individual cores run beyond their rated speed, and hyperthreading, which lets the each core appear to the operating […]
The Early 2011 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pro models have moved from dual-core CPUs to quad-core, which makes them a lot more powerful despite lower clock speeds. As with last year’s models, these CPUs support TurboBoost, which lets individual cores run beyond their rated speed, and hyperthreading, which lets the each core appear to the […]
2010: The Year PowerPC Macs Became Total Paperweights – That’s just one line from OSS Waves PPC Goodbye as Old Macs Turn Paperweights, a column by Fernando Cassia published on TechEye last September. His advice: “If you have an old PowerPC based Mac, the time to move is now, as software developers are dropping support of the platform left […]
2011 – The first MacBook Pro shipped five years ago, the first “pro” Mac to make the transition from PowerPC to Intel. (The 17″ 1.83 GHz and 20″ 2.0 GHz Core Duo iMacs were the first Macs to make the switch to Intel, and the Mac mini migrated to Intel at the end of February 2006.)
On January 11, 2011, Verizon announced that it had reached an agreement with Apple and would soon be offering the iPhone 4 to its customers. Prior to this, the iPhone had been an AT&T Wireless exclusive in the United States. The new version of the iPhone 4 was CDMA only, where all previous versions had […]
2011 – I’ve done it. I’ve sold both my Intel iMac and my MacBook Pro (Late 2008). I took the money and spent it on a very nice trip with my girlfriend. Wonderful memories. That left me with my old configuration, a dual 1 GHz Power Mac G4 MDD maxed out with 2 GB of RAM. It […]
2011 – I ran across an article I wrote in January 2003 explaining why, after over a dozen years using the Classic Mac OS, I finally made the switch to Mac OS X as my primary operating system.
2011 – I have been very excited about the idea of a Mac App Store since it was first floated, and I’m very happy to see that Apple has finally started to make it every bit as easy for Mac users to find, buy, and install apps as iOS users.
In my quest for an up-to-date browser to use in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on my two old Pismo PowerBooks, one that I had consistently passed over was OmniWeb, which was the very first OS X web browser out of the blocks a decade ago. OmniWeb was originally developed for the NextStep platform in 1995, then […]
There are a lot of companies offering upgrades for new and recent Macs, but not so many that focus on bringing new products to PowerPC Macs.
One of the best ways to speed up your Mac is with a bigger, faster hard drive (adding more system memory is the other), but there are less hard drives for PowerPC ‘Books than before, and they tend to be lower in capacity than today’s SATA drives.
One of the best ways to speed up your Mac is with a bigger, faster hard drive (adding more system memory is the other), but there are less hard drives for PowerPC ‘Books than before, and they tend to be lower in capacity than today’s Serial ATA (SATA) drives.
Greetings and happy holidays, low-enders. It’s the most wonderful time of the year again!
It has been a roller coaster of computing in my life recently. About 18 months ago, after 10 years of being a hard-core dedicated Mac user, I decided that I wanted to try something else. Linux.
How do you run three operating systems on a PowerPC Mac, especially when one of those is Linux? This tutorial will show you how.
2010 – As an OS X 10.4 Tiger holdout on my two beloved 10-year-old Pismo PowerBooks, I’ve been tracking the accelerating rate of attrition in Tiger-compatible Web browser support, but there are a few encouraging signs of life for those of us whose Macs don’t support more recent versions of the OS.
I’ve been using the Macally iKeySlim for several weeks now, and the best thing I can say about it is that I’ve hardly noticed the change.
It’s been a week since Apple announced its best fiscal quarter ever – $20 billion income (up 66% over last year); $4.3 billion profit (up 70%); sales of 3.89 million Macs (up 27%), 14.1 million iPhones (up a whopping 91%), 9 million iPods (down 11%), and 4.2 million iPads – previewed OS X 10.7 Lion, and […]
The latest developments at Apple’s rival OS distributor and software giant Microsoft have something in store for us: An update to the Mac version of Office, Microsoft Office: Mac 2011. A recent purchase of Office 2008 (between August 1, 2010 and November 30, 2010) grants eligibility for a free upgrade to the 2011 version, which […]
Say good-bye to hard drives with the 2010 models of the MacBook Air (MBA). Solid-state drives (SSD) are standard across the board – and they’re built onto the motherboard. Apple claims this makes its SSDs twice as fast as conventional ones. Battery life is rated at “up to” 7 hours. Peripheral users will rejoice over […]
With the new 11.6″ form factor and the lowest speed CPU ever used in an Intel-based Mac, the smaller version of the 2010 MacBook Air enters netbook territory – but with a dual-core processor, a real graphics processor, better screen resolution, a full-size keyboard, and support for up to 4 GB of memory. Say good-bye […]
As a follow up to my previous article, Digital Audio Output: Apple’s DVD Player vs. VLC Player, I am taking things a step further. I thought about all the other PowerPC Macs out there, including various PowerBooks, iBooks, iMacs, eMacs, and earlier (New World ROM) Power Macs that lacked onboard digital audio (or, in the […]
It happens to us all – accidentally deleting a file. Or a folder full of files. Or worse! This time it was at the end of a Friday afternoon with a new client, transferring data from his old computer to a new one. The process took many hours, the client left for a while, and […]
Recently, I was experimenting with one of the finer features of my Hi-Res 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4 – the ability to output digital optical audio. All that I needed was a 10′ optical mini-jack-to-Toslink cable found for very cheap on Amazon….
I have recently been driving around in a new car. Well, I say new. In fact, it’s rather old.
The 4G iPod touch brought a Retina Display and Apple CPU to the iPod touch line, along with a front-facing FaceTime camera. The 4G iPod touch was also the first with 802.11n WiFi, the first with a built-in microphone, and the first with a 3-axis gyroscope. Performance is on par with the iPhone 4. Initially […]
New Macs are cool. They’re shiny, fast, sexy machines that can turbocharge your work and play. Apple is happy to sell you a new one as often as you can afford it! But whether you stay on the cutting edge or live the full Low End Mac philosophy, you will inevitably reach the day when […]
According to Google Analytics, Low End Mac has more readers in the United Kingdom (UK) than any country outside the US, with Canada in the third position. We asked Jason Walsh, a journalist based in Ireland and a longtime Mac user, to take a look at the UK Mac market.
Readers inclined to trawl back through the Low End Mac archives may know that one of my Macs is, in fact, no such thing. It’s actually a Dell Mini 10v netbook. (See Why I Didn’t Wait for the Apple Tablet.)
I am an Apple fan with a itch to scratch called Linux. I’ve tried being without a Mac, and I can’t do it, so I’m left with running Mac and Linux on the same machine.
To quote the Beatles, “It’s getting better all the time.” While much of the focus will be on the new high-end 12-core Mac Pro, the iMac has seen its share of significant improvements as well. All iMacs now use Intel’s Core “i” technology and support HyperThreading, which means they can function as though they have […]
The amount of processing power in the top-end 2.93 GHz 12-core Mac Pro boggles the imagination – as does the price. There are two audiences for the Mac Pro, those who need the most power possible in a Macintosh computer and those who need more expansion options than the iMac and Mac mini offer.
Apple has now moved the entire iMac line to Intel’s Core “i” family of CPUs, including the dual-core i3 and i5 as well as the quad-core i7. All CPUs used in the 2010 iMac support Hyper-Threading (on last year’s model, only the i7 versions supported Hyper-Threading). CPU speeds start at 3.06 GHz for dual-core models […]