It was 2011, the year after Steve Jobs had unveiled the 9.6″ iPad to the world. Apple’s new tablet was exactly the right size, according to Jobs, with its 9.56″ by 7.47″ footprint. However, at 1.5 lb., it was no lightweight. It’s 1024 x 768 pixel display was that same resolution that had been used […]
Apple, Inc. opened its first two retail store locations 17 years ago – in May 2001 – in McLane, Virginia and Glendale, California. A year later, in 2002, my local store, Apple Bay Street in Emeryville, Calif. was opening its doors for the very first time. Let’s take a look back at the Apple Store […]
Iomega, founded in 1980, was a big name in removable media drives starting with its original 5 and 10 MB Bernoulli Box in 1982. Instead of using hard platters, as SyQuest did, the high capacity Bernoulli system was essentially a big floppy disk that used the Bernoulli Principle to keep drive heads from actually touching […]
This is a cautionary tale about listening to your gut feeling. I have always preferred the look of a blackbook (black MacBook) and had come across one on a local selling website. It was advertised as a 2008 MacBook in working order, except that the trackpad button didn’t click so it required an external mouse. […]
SATA standards are all backwards compatible, right? Well, not necessarily. Researching upgrade options for the 2010 iMac on my desk has been a real learning experience. Some SATA III hard drives are auto-sensing and thus compatible with SATA II and SATA I ports, but some SATA III hard drives are fixed speed only and thus […]
Are the Apple product lines due for a refresh? It has been more than a decade since Apple last changed its naming conventions, and with the reported planned move to its own chips in 2020 by the Cupertino, Calif. based tech company bringing its production in-house, maybe it’s time for a change once again.
Back in 2005, SATA was a big step forward for the Mac. The original SATA specification supports transfer rates up to 1.5 Gb/sec. Most Macs used UltraATA at 66 or 100 GB/sec, and SATA had 50% more bandwidth than UltraATA 100. From there, SATA has become even faster.
20 years ago this month — on May 6, 1998 — the iconic iMac from Apple was unveiled by then-interim CEO Steve Jobs. Two decades later, the venerable desktop computer that brought the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech company back from the brink and to the top, lives on.
Welcome to the first Reader Roundup for the “Leo and Mac” column on Low End Mac, where we take a look at a sampling of reactions shared by readers on articles I’ve written. All of the comments that follow come from ones made by members of the Low End Mac group on Facebook in a […]
The Commodore PET 2001 was one of the first three personal computers that came to market in 1977, launching the home computing era along with Tandy/Radio Shack and Apple. Commodore’s entry was unique for having an all-in-one design.
Mac sales have been growing ever since Apple moved from PowerPC to Intel processors, in no small part because that made it possible to run Windows on Macs at full speed. No more Intel emulation. No more DOS cards. Boot Camp and then virtualization apps made it easy to run other operating systems on Intel-based […]
What cards does Apple have in its hand regarding the future of its hardware and software? If various reports from across the Macverse are to be believed, the cards have already been laid out on the table for us to place our bets.
If you’ve got the passion, patience, and money, you too can be an online thrifter. For this week’s article, I thought I would share some of the tricks I have used to amass my collection at a fraction of the price.
When I started adding some profiles of Macs to my personal web space in April 1997, who would have thought that it would grow into something enduring? We used Macs at work, I had a Mac at home, and I was teaching myself how to make web pages using Claris Home Page. So I put […]
Call me a fool. After all, it was only April Fools’ Day on Sunday. But it was Easter on Sunday too, and on the theme of rising from the dead, could Apple be resurrecting one of its old products in a new form?
The PC Card was originally called the PCMCIA card when it was launched in November 1990. It is compatible with the Japanese JEIDA memory card 4.0 standard and supports a 16-bit ISA-compatible data bus. PC Cards may be 5V, 3.3V, or both, and 3.3V cards have a key that prevents them from being plugged into […]
After years of barely growing the number of Macs sold, in 2006 Apple moved to Intel CPUs – and sales took off immediately. Prior to 2005, Macs had peaked at 4.5 million units in 1995, dropped to 2.7 million in 1998, and hit a new high of 4.7 million in 2005.
We all love our iPhones. But is that love serious enough to warrant a union in holy matrimony?
As of April 1st, 2018, Low End Mac is changing its funding model. While we will still accept donations from people who find the site helpful, we will begin the process of taking each and every article apart, updating it for our new format, and waiting for the money to come to us.
My iPhone SE is approaching its second anniversary next week, and that’s old for a smartphone. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one when I read the announcement about the new device.
I was shocked to learn that Apple has introduced an update to its full-sized 9.7″ iPad line, giving it an A10 processor running at 2.34 GHz (vs. an A9 clocked at 1.84 GHz in the 2017 model) – and offering it at a retail price of just $329!
The Macintosh Quadra 700. This was always a Mac that interested me; essentially the same old beige tower, but with a twist. Sitting on molded plastic legs, the tower has a vertically placed 3 1/2” floppy drive at the top center of the computer. This Macintosh has a 25 MHz Motorola 68040 processor, can take […]
Most of the visitors to Low End Mac work comfortably in English, whether they grew up speaking it or learned it along the way. We think Low End Mac is a wonderful resource, one of many on the Mac Web, which has a wealth of wonderful English-language resources.
Macs have had networking since the “Fat Mac” shipped in late 1984, but over the years Apple has changed the file sharing system, so not all Macs can share files with each other. This article provides a brief overview of which Macs can share files based on the system software they are running.
We’ve all heard the saying “less is more” — but can a smartphone that does less offer more in terms of personal productivity?
I have been using my PowerBook G4 as a writing and e-mail tool for a while now, and I thought I may be able to make it a complete daily driver. I work as an IT manager for a small design firm, and I oversee a network of Windows and Linux servers and Windows workstations. […]
When Steve Jobs unveiled the first iMac, he shocked the tech community by jettisoning the 3.5″ floppy drive and Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) port in favor of new technologies like the Universal Serial Bus (USB). He was perfectly willing to kick to the curb technologies that had been cultivated at Apple, such as the little-understood […]
Adding broadband to Macs used to be a hit-and-miss affair in the 1990s before ethernet and WiFi became standard features during the second Steve Jobs era.
Patience is a virtue, or so it is said. It came in handy with a local seller who was selling a 1991 Apple “for parts” (as the ad stated). It was a small nostalgia and collectibles store that seemed to specialize in music, bikes, and anything else that caught the owner’s eye.
Life was simple when the iMac came in only one color, Bondi blue. The computer, keyboard, and mouse were all trimmed in Bondi blue and looked great together. Third party manufacturers could come close enough to Apple’s color to look good as well. And then Apple changed everything with Macs in different colors.
It was 20 years ago this month when the very first computer I ever bought was released. It was the Spring of 1998 and I was 19 years old, just months away from the end of my teenage years, when I made the big decision. What was the impetus for the purchase? I don’t quite […]
Facebook is really good at providing all sorts of information about groups. For instance, our group has 5,317 members, but only 3,356 have been active in the past 28 days. Men make up 89% of the group; women, 10%; and “other” or unidentified, 1%.
We had a good-natured discussion in our Facebook group on Thursday when I laughingly posted that Low End Mac’s new motto was Nerds Helping Nerds. And that led to a discussion of the meaning and negativity sometimes associated with the words geek and nerd. And the dangers inherent in calling ourselves geniuses.
It irks me every time someone refers to Low End Mac as a blog instead of a website, and that really begs the question: What is a blog? That’s a simple question without a simple answer.
Camino is a port of Netscape specifically to Mac OS X. It began in late 2001 when Mike Pinkerton and Vidur Apparao launched a proof-of-concept project to embed Netscape’s Gecko rendering engine in a Cocoa application. Cocoa is Apple’s native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for Mac OS X and is rooted in NeXTstep, which […]
