In 1985, I bought a Macintosh 128K from a friend who couldn’t grasp the potential of this little miracle (let alone a tenuous brush with reality). It came with an ImageWriter I printer, no hard drive, just the internal 400K floppy, and a mouse! The keyboard had no numeric keypad, function keys, or anything, but […]
2000: There’s no nice way to say it: Apple stock tanked on Friday. AAPL opened at $53.50 on Friday, dropped immediately below the $30 mark, and closed the day at $25.75.
2000.09.27: When I first started Mac Metamorphosis, I wasn’t quite sure how far this would go. The idea came to me when I was daydreaming at work and surfing all the Mac-oriented websites.
2000: The new iBook SE has a new feature called processor speed-stepping. Working similarly to the technology that prevents Mobile Pentium IIIs from running down notebook PC batteries too quickly, it allows you to slow down the G3 processor from 466 to 366 MHz, the same speed as the base model.
With all due respect – what a wonderful phrase. Often used as a precursor to a negative reply, but equally useful for a compliment or a sincere statement. It is with all due respect that I write this article about my 70-year-old mother and her first computer and Internet experience.
2000: In the age of broadband Internet access, pirated software (or “warez,” as it’s called) is easier than ever to obtain and use. Many users these days are getting DSL or cable internet and have CD burners, which is all you need to get and use warez from the Internet.
I ran across this memo on my hard drive at work. It was written in late 1996, when Windows 95 was making serious inroads by claiming to be “almost as good as the Mac.” This was not a good time for Apple: Between authorized Mac clones dividing the Mac OS market and Win 95 siphoning […]
2000: To get feedback on a product in development or to get a new version of a program out early, software developers often release a “public beta” version of the program.
The second-generation iBook replaces the bright blueberry and tangerine of the original iBook with a more sophisticated indigo blue and a bright key lime. New features include FireWire and video output. The 300 MHz G3 processor of the 1999 iBook has been replaced with the newer 366 MHz G3e, which includes an on-chip L2 cache that […]
The second-generation iBook Special Edition (SE) adds key lime as an alternative to graphite. It replaces the 366 MHz G3 processor of the earlier iBook SE with the new G3e running at 466 MHz. The G3e includes an on-chip L2 cache that runs at full CPU speed for improved processor efficiency (the larger backside cache […]
I recommend Rita Lewis’s Mac OS in a Nutshell – with mild reservations. The book is a concise (360 pages), inexpensive ($24.95) guide to Mac OS 8.x, with a primary emphasis on OS 8.5.
It was my last year of high school, and I had just moved up from typewriter to a handed-down word processor. There was an anonymous DOS clunker waiting for me to take to college. That orange-on-brown Zenith-whatever was like our old Chevy Malibu: it got you where you needed to go, but you were sort […]
Hi! I thought it was about time to make a FAQ (or sub-FAQ) to deal with all the Color Classic (Colour Classic outside the USA) questions out there, which seem to be on a Möbius type path. So, here it is. What I have done, is combined much of my email correspondence to answer many […]
The SuperMac C500 and C600 used the PowerPC 603e CPU in a great variety of speeds, ranging from 140 MHz to 280 MHz on a 40 MHz system bus. The best performance, short of a G3 upgrade, comes from using a fast CPU along with the Cache Doubler module.
2000: Linux and I have had a love-hate relationship since early 1996. Boot magazine (now Maximum PC) included Debian Linux with one of its 1996 issues. OS/2 was becoming a lost cause, and I had just gotten my first network administrator gig. While strong with Windows NT, my Unix skills were still muttering back then.
2000 – It’s been a couple years since Scott Barber posted information on running Mac OS 8.1 on a Macintosh IIsi. It was a fairly convoluted method that only worked with a few Macs and required first booting from an older OS, then from an OS 8.1 hard drive – but it was possible.
2000: Last week, Lee Dye of the Los Angeles Times reported on a research project by Ghassan Jabbour, an assistant research professor in the optical sciences department at the University of Arizona in Tucson, whose team is developing thin computer display screens so flexible that they can be folded and tucked away in your pocket.
2000 – With the introduction of the amazing new Apple Pro Keyboard (welcome back, full-sized keys) and the Apple Pro Mouse by Apple at Macworld New York, came something so new, so different, so amazing – the new Power Macintosh G4 Cube.
2000: It is amazing how time flies when you move from New York to California. Soon after my previous article, I purchased a car and drove cross-country to California via the Bible Belt. While the Bible Belt is not my lifestyle of choice, I have always been fascinated by it.
2000: I received a letter from a reader this week asking what sort of hard drive would work in his PowerBook G3 233 (233 MHz no-cache “MainStreet” version) whose original Toshiba hard drive had expired.
2000: Being a Low End Mac reader, you’ve probably also been to the numerous articles on other Mac advocacy sites whose stories are linked to in the Around The Web section of the home page.
On June 7, 2000, online Mac upgrade reseller MacCPU voluntarily closed its cyber-doors and shut down permanently. MacCPU principal Bob Moriarty explained dyspeptically in a column on MacNN that while, in his opinion, “CPU upgrades remain the single best idea we have ever seen in computing after the Macintosh Operating System . . . Apple […]
In my earlier articles about speed, I made the point that much of speed depends on what software you choose and how you set it up for the way you work. In How to Pick Faster Software, I gave some yardsticks you can use to measure how good your software is. Now I’d like to […]
2000: When you partition a hard drive, each partition functions as a separate volume and appears on your desktop with its own icon and name. I’m a fan of hard drive partitioning and have had four partitions on the 500 MB hard drive in my PowerBook 5300 and on the 2 GB unit in my […]
Stunningly compact, the Power Mac (not Macintosh) G4 Cube came as a surprise, despite numerable contradictory rumors. Just 7.7″ square and a bit under 10″ tall – about the same height at the 2013 Mac Pro, but with a larger footprint – the Cube does everything the iMac DV does (except contain a monitor) – […]
Claiming “two brains are better than one,” Apple introduced the first dual processor Power Macs since the 9600MP, which had two 200 MHz 604e processors. Although Mac OS 9 has some multiprocessing support, until OS X shipped, only a few applications – such as Photoshop – took advantage of the second processor. Fortunately for buyers, Apple added the […]
This model, available in Graphite and Snow, replaced the earlier iMac DV. Both models share a 400 MHz processor. Other than colors, the biggest difference between the new iMac DV and the previous model with the same name is the use of a CD-ROM drive instead of DVD. The Summer 2000 iMac DV sells for […]
The iMac DV+, available in Indigo, Ruby, and Sage, boosts performance over iMac DV by 50 MHz. This is the only 450 MHz iMac model. The iMac DV+ sells for the same price as the 1999 iMac DV and ships with the Apple Pro Mouse and Apple Pro Keyboard. Got an iMac? Join our iMac Group or iMacs […]
A Limited Mac The indigo iMac 350 replaced a virtually identical model that came in blueberry – but at US$200 less. The 350 MHz indigo iMac ships with the Apple Pro Mouse and Apple Pro Keyboard. It is the only Mid 2000 iMac without FireWire. Got an iMac? Join our iMac Group or iMacs & eMacs Forum. […]
I have been thinking a lot about speed lately. Speed is the most touted feature of each new computer, but it is equally relevant to low-end Macs. Low End Mac’s webmaster, Dan Knight, puts it this way: Eventually every computer becomes low-end.
2000: If you’re a regular Low End Mac reader, you probably remember my articles back in May about the Frankenstein Power Mac 9500 project, in which I was attempting to procure a decently fast and capable machine as a backup to my faithful WallStreet PowerBook by adding bits and pieces to a stripped 9500 my […]
Shock-what? Shock-huh? That’s been the usual response from Mac users when asked about Shockwave – until now.
In this article I’m going to look at three common types of Mac users and offer a suggestion for each that should make them faster.
As far as I’m concerned, the best news of the week came from Sonnet Technologies, which announced some of its G3 and G4 upgrade cards will be compatible with Mac OS X.
A few weeks ago I wrote a series of articles about fonts. In A History of Font Technologies, I looked at the four major trends in Mac fonts: bitmapped, PostScript, TrueType, and anti-aliasing.
