2001: The trackpad was launched by Apple in May 1994 as a replacement for the much-lauded trackball in its PowerBooks. It has been implemented in every subsequent Mac portable. It was used in lieu of a mouse in the Twentieth Anniversary Mac and is also used by the majority of PC notebooks now in production. […]
2001: Almost everyone loves the PowerBook G4 – Mac folk are calling it the greatest PowerBook ever, and some Windows users see it as the best laptop ever. Shoot, some might even convert from the dark side!
2001 – Hi everybody and welcome to iBasics.* The intent of this weekly column is to help you to tame your Macintosh and get the most out of it, whether it is old or new. Not everybody is a power user who relies on the use of a Macintosh for a living, but everybody wants […]
Greg Landweber is far better known for Kaleidoscope than for SmoothType. I know a lot of Mac users who love to play around with their interface; I know few as interested in how good text looks on the screen. Yet I suspect cleaner type does more to improving the interface than different colors, sounds, and […]
Red Skull: “I’m God” Captain America: “Then I’m Nietzsche.” From Earth X graphic novel (issues 1-12), Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, and John Paul Leon
2001: Thanks to several readers who emailed to suggest I pick up one of those plastic fish tank thermometers to measure the temperature of various parts of my PowerBook G4. Unfortunately, we had freezing rain overnight, so I don’t know when I’ll be venturing out to find one, but it sounds like it should work […]
2001: Monday morning, I received a Podium CoolPad from Road Tools. It’s a compact device measuring 11″ wide and 8.7″ deep. The base has a swivel, so you can easily turn a laptop from side to side. It also comes with adjustable risers, which let you raise the back of your notebook computer from 0.5″ […]
I don’t know when I first discovered Clean-Install Assistant (C-IA), but it’s been an invaluable tool ever since.
2001: I’ve put in a lot more hours and run a few more tests on Quicksilver, my 400 MHz PowerBook G4.
2001: Yes, it is a bit odd to own the newest PowerBook at Low End Mac. It doesn’t seem very low-end, does it? I could try to justify it: Apple has announced a 733 MHz Power Mac G4 and also has a 500 MHz PowerBook G4, after all.
I got my PowerBook G4 on Wednesday afternoon, spent a couple hours getting it ready, and shared my initial impressions Wednesday evening. Then I got to work moving all my files from my aging SuperMac S900 (a 1996 Macintosh clone with many upgrades) to the new TiBook – it took hours.
2001: For the past couple days, we’ve been hearing rumors that TiBooks (the Titanium PowerBook G4) are shipping. My dealer told me yesterday that mine had shipped from Taiwan via FedEx. They promised to let me know as soon as they had an ETA.
2001: A friend and I were having a “Mac OS stinks” discussion one day when, for once, he brought up a valid point on why the Mac OS does, in fact, stink: When you hold down the mouse button, the whole operating system comes to halt. Should anything interactive be running when you do that, […]
2001: Melonsoft’s Cabrio is a new and innovative Mac-only MP3 audio player.
2001: About two months ago, I received a DayStar Digital Genesis MP 600 with a 200 MHz quad 604 CPU module and a 132 MHz quad 604 CPU module as a gift from some friends of mine. If you have never seen one in person, this is big, heavy, and loud. Its metal case could […]
Apple doesn’t make it easy – this is the fourth model using the name Power Mac G4 and the same case. What most differentiates the Digital Audio version from earlier models is the 133 MHz bus on the motherboard with four PCI slots plus an AGP slot, one more PCI slot than previous models. There […]
The titanium PowerBook was announced on 2001.01.09 at the Macworld Expo. It is smaller and lighter than any of the G3 PowerBooks that preceded it, measuring just 1″ thick and weighing in at 5.3 pounds. Construction is titanium and carbon fiber, making for a very tough, very light computer. In the field, its battery yields […]
Here are two books that warrant the attention of serious Low End Mac readers: The Second Coming of Steve Jobs and Free For All.
ProTools v3.4 Digital Audio Workstation software was released on CD-ROM free of charge by Digidesign as a promotional effort in 1997. It is an older but fully-functional 16-track version of the program. Pro Tools v3.4 was only approved for use with some PCI-based Power Macs, but it is possible to run the program on many […]
This is our third and final look at Henry Bortman’s “Macintosh 2000” predictions in the March 1992 issue of MacUser.
This is rather unusual for us – two different Low End Mac staffers reviewing the same software. But what Battery Amnesia does can be so incredible that you might not believe just one of us. (Note that Lithium-ion batteries, which Apple has used since the PowerBook 3400c in 1997, are not susceptible to the memory […]
2000: Since I have been banging away at LinuxPPC like a madman day and night for the last few weeks, I thought it would be nice to share how to actually get a LinuxPPC system up and running. It is unclear how many articles I am going to do in this series, but there are […]
2000: Way back when, Apple stock was in the toilet, trading at $11 a share. Don’t look now, but the earnings forecast that came out on Tuesday brought investors close to that same spot. On Wednesday, AAPL closed at 14-5/16. Not a pretty sight.
It’s a good time to be reading about (and writing about) Macs. After the slow years of 1996 and 1997, we’ve seen a trickle of Mac books turn into a respectable stream. Part of the stream is two books that got their start in the early 90s and have just been updated. Enough has changed in […]
Extensions Strip 1.9.3, a $15 ($8 educational) piece of shareware written by Ammon Skidmore, is the best Control Strip replacement there is. Apple would do well to follow Ammon’s example.
Our Fair Computer Company has released some quirky yet useful features in its computer systems and OS, and then advertised them very little – if at all. Apple’s SCSI Disk Mode and it’s modernized offspring, FireWire Target Disk Mode, are excellent examples.
“Which is the better server for my home network, the Quadra 650 I’ve been using or the smaller Quadra 605?”
The Mac Classic uses an 8 MHz 68000 CPU. The installed hard drive is a 170 MB Quantum ELS170S formatted with LaCie Silverlining software. This was not the original hard drive, which was a slower 40 MB mechanism.
2000 – America Online’s Instant Messenger (AIM) is one of a host of chat applications that has become part of an Internet user’s standard suite of tools in the past two years.
The Mac SE/30 uses a 16 MHz 68030 CPU and 16 MHz 68882 FPU, just like the Mac IIx and IIcx. The hard drive in this SE/30 is an Apple-branded Quantum LP80S formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.
2000 – I’ve been using MenuChoice 2.1 for ages, probably going back to the System 7.1 era (1992-94). It’s one of those remarkable pieces of shareware that I’ve come to depend on – and it’s so well written that, despite the fact that is hasn’t been updated since April 18, 1994, it works flawlessly with […]
Hard Drive Troubles and a USB Adapter Upgrade – Charles W. Moore – 2000.11.13 In our last installment, I related how my BTO Umax SuperMac S900 would stall for several minutes during startup before finally completing the boot process. Several readers kindly emailed suggestions, but nobody nailed the cause of the problem. However, at that […]
I think we have enough time now with Mac OS X Public Beta to reach a painful conclusion: The transition will not work, at least not well enough to sustain the Apple we know.
2000: Author’s Note: This article is purely speculative – no John Does or rumor sites were involved its writing. This is solely based on what the author hopes Apple could have in the works.
2000 – So you want a G3. You may have noticed that there are a number of G3 upgrades on the market. You may have also noticed that the prices on real G3 computers are falling fast.