About a week ago, someone in the Low End Mac Facebook group posted the following question: Obviously we’re all used to the horizontal drive orientation, and the externals tend to have vertical orientation, but is the vertical really a safe orientation? Obviously there’s the chance of it being tipped/knocked over, but even a mild tilt […]
Except for its earliest models (see Acorn 8-bit Computers), Acorn had built its computers around the 6502 microprocessor, which was also used by Apple, Atari, Commodore, and others. Seeing the end of the 8-bit era approaching, Acorn knew that it was time to move to a new architecture
Except for its earliest models, Acorn had built its computers around the 6502 microprocessor, which was also used by Apple, Atari, Commodore, and others. Seeing the end of the 8-bit era approaching, Acorn knew that it was time to move to a new architecture. However, the cost of existing 16-bit CPUs was prohibitive, and quite […]
One of the early “home computers” was hardly known outside of the United Kingdom, but in its home country, Acorn owned the education market. Launched by Cambridge Processor Unit Ltd. (CPU) in January 1979, a little over a year after the Apple II, Commodore PET, and Radio Shack TRS-80 came to market, the Acorn System […]
The Intel 80186 is based on the earlier 8086 CPU with the same 20-bit address bus as the 8086, allowing it to access up to 1 MB of memory. Introduced in 1982, the 80186 and 80188 are fully code compatible with the 8086 and 8088, but they also introduced 10 new instruction types.
There are noticeably few articles, if any, about the 2006 and 2007 Mac Pros, that help you diagnose memory issues. I am changing this by documenting my own experiences with my primary computer, a Mac Pro 2,1. This article should help you recognize any memory symptoms with your Mac Pro and resolve them quickly.
Although the World Wide Web had been created many years earlier, it was in 1995 that it rocketed into public view. Window 95 shipped in August, and Intel unveiled the Pentium Pro in November. Apple used the new PowerPC 603 CPU in its Performa 5200 and 6200 models, both running at 75 MHz. The 603 […]
Microsoft first shipped Windows 1.0 in 1985, and this DOS shell was content to run even on old 4.77 MHz PCs, albeit slowly. That was also the year Aldus invented the fourth major productivity software category – after word processing, spreadsheets, and databases – by releasing PageMaker. Desktop publishing was born, and Apple found a […]
It’s all about the hunt and the thrill of the deal. I scour online ads for days at a time, looking for that precious PC being cast aside. This week’s bounty: a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, an Atari 600XL, and a TI 99/4A.
I have a 2007 Mac Pro sitting in front of me that I wanted to make much faster than a hard drive allows. If having a single SSD (Solid State Drive) is nice, works well, and really brings the life out of these older Mac Pros, what if we wanted even more speed? What if […]
There is an earlier article by Dan Knight about CPU upgrades in the 2007 iMac that omits a few possible upgrades. This article is predominantly aimed at helping people get a “Penryn” Core 2 Duo CPU into their Early 2007 iMac, as the chipset does allow several “newer” CPU upgrades.
Sometimes we think too much into whether we can – so much so that we don’t question whether we should. This is a dilemma which faced me several times as I pushed the envelope, took the risk, and got away with jamming 64 GB of RAM right into my Mac Pro 2,1. In this article, […]
Despite the Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 (2006/7) models hitting past the 10-year mark, there is, surprisingly, a great amount of hardware that is still available for use. In contrast to the age of the older (first) Mac Pros, there is still some new hardware that is being released, which can be used on these […]
In nearly 21 years of existence, Low End Mac has been through a lot of changes. We originally had a very flat structure – files in the root level and one level down with folders for compact Macs, Mac II series, and LC series. And that structure kept getting broader and broader as we added […]
It was only $30 on Black Friday, and the 4″ screen on my iPhone 5 wasn’t particularly kind to my eyes. Facebook on a small iPhone is not a great experience, Clash of Clans and Euchre 3D, about the extent of my gaming, can be hard to read. Ideally, I’ll have an iPhone 6S someday […]
QacQoc is making a name for itself for its environmentally friendly and very affordable line of accessories, most of them with USB-C ports. None of my Macs have USB 3, let alone USB-C, so when QacQoc contacted me about reviewing their very nice USB-C hub, I had to share my predicament. They sent two items […]
It’s not particularly easy to create a bootable USB flash drive so you can try running Linux on a PowerPC Mac. It took me a couple weeks of research, asking questions of our Linux on PowerPC Macs group on Facebook, and experimenting before I could finally boot into Linux 14.04 from a thumb drive. I […]
QacQoc is making a name for itself for its environmentally friendly and very affordable line of accessories, most of them with USB-C ports. None of my Macs have USB 3, let alone USB-C, so when QacQoc contacted me about reviewing their very nice USB-C hub, I had to share my predicament. They sent two items […]
When Steve Jobs debuted the MacBook Air on January 15, 2008 at the San Francisco Macworld conference, he famously demonstrated its thinness by pulling one out of a manila envelope. He claimed it was the thinnest laptop in the world.
Apple made an unusual decision when it designed the original iBook, the one with the handle. Unlike most Macs before and since, iBooks do not have a PRAM battery. Neither does the 12″ PowerBook G4, which is based on the iBook G4. Instead, the parameter RAM (PRAM for short) is maintained by using the charge […]
If anything, Apple’s success in getting the Apple II family of computers into elementary schools was a mixed blessing. The education market kept the Apple II line going, prevented DOS PCs from getting a foothold in most elementary schools, but it also kept schools from buying Apple Macs because they couldn’t run all that Apple […]
No, it isn’t a typo. Compleat is a legitimate, albeit archaic, spelling for complete. As Kenneth G. Wilson says in The Columbia Guide to Standard American English: “This obsolete spelling of the adjective complete suggests an air of antiquity that seems to please some of those who name things….” We find that fitting for Low […]
When Apple designed the original iMac‘s system board, it left a connector marked “mezzanine” without explaining its purpose. The official explanation is that it was used for testing logic boards before installing them in the iMac’s swoopy case. But once people saw prototype iMacs with video output, the cat was out of the bag and […]
I’ve been doing a bit of reflecting lately, and it’s hard to believe that the G4 Cube is turning 18 later this year and that it’s now been over 8 years since one of my earliest articles was published, Reimagining the Mac Cube for the Intel Era.
Back in 2015, a proof-of-concept piece of Mac malware arrived under the name Thunderstrike. The name was chosen because the software specifically used the Thunderbolt port in newer Macs as its infection vector, and it was designed to use an ethernet adapter as its carrier. Apple addressed the issue with the Mac OS X 10.10.2 […]
The best thing about Macs is how long they can remain useful. I am typing this on an Early 2008 iMac. The 20″ model with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU. And it’s running macOS 10.11 El Capitan quite nicely since upgrading from the 3 GB this used iMac came with to its maximum, […]
It’s been a while my Low End friends, but moving your whole life is never easy. Settled nicely into my next home now, I have some catching up to do! Let’s start the New Year off discussing the age-old “idiot box” – better known as your television. As we all know, not all TVs are […]
Sad. Disappointed. Frustrated. Those are the words I would use to describe my feelings about “Throttlegate”, the recent revelation that Apple has indeed been slowing down older iPhones that have worn batteries.
Apple did a wonderful thing when it introduced the all-in-one iMac in 1998. It gave the world a fresh new colorful look at what an all-in-one computer could be with no floppy drive on the front. It included a built-in 100Base-T ethernet port and a 56k modem. And it forced the industry to recon with […]
The Opera browser was begun by Telenor, the leading Norwegian telecom company, in early 1994. In 1995, Opera was split off into a separate company, Opera Software SA, which remained in Norwegian hands until mid-2016, when the entire Opera browser business was purchased by a Chinese consortium for $600 million, leaving the parent company with […]
