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 […]
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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.)
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.
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.
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.
Starting with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), Apple began to move away from the core BSD Unix-like system that was the genesis of the Apple resurgence on the desktop.
About two years ago, I asked whether smartphones could ever replace laptops. With subsequent advances in the iPhone and the rise of the Google Android market, smartphones are the hottest new toy – and I raise the question again.
Time and things move slowly in the Hatchett computer universe. I have recently moved from using my trusty G3 Pismo PowerBook (from 2000) to a 12″ PowerBook G4 from 2003. Since the 12-incher has an 867 MHz processor, I was able to install the Leopard (OS X 10.5) operating system, and after a small period of time, I […]
The 15″ and 17″ Mid 2010 MacBook Pro models have lower clock speeds than the models they replace. However, because they use the mobile Intel i5 and i7 CPUs instead of the older, less efficient Core 2 Duo chips, they are more powerful despite lower clock speeds. These CPUs brings something new to Apple’s portable […]
The 15″ and 17″ Mid 2010 MacBook Pro models have lower clock speeds than the models they replace. However, because they use mobile Intel i5 and i7 CPUs instead of the older, less efficient Core 2 Duo chips, they are more powerful despite lower clock speeds. These CPUs brings something new to Apple’s portable line, hyperthreading, […]
I held out. I waited until I could actually pick up an iPad and handle it. I had to wait until a couple of mall rats stopped playing video games on it. Then it was mine.
Leopard officially requires an 867 MHz G4 – but that doesn’t rule it out – and then there is Tiger. Depending on your needs and depending on your level of expertise, you will choose either Tiger or Leopard. It is time to revisit the options for low-end G4 users.
I have been out of the Mac world for a few months. But I am back, where I belong, using a Mac.
General Apple and Mac desktops is covered in The Mac News Review. iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV news is covered in The iNews Review. All prices are in US dollars unless otherwise noted.
As a longtime Apple user – I cut my computing teeth on an Apple II+ circa 1979 – I get a kick out of reading articles about the 10 best or 10 worst Apple products of all time. The latest of these, Top 10 Worst Apple Products of All Time, appeared on the Australian PC […]
The October release of Microsoft’s Windows 7 brought a flurry of activity on the Mac2Windows front – new versions of both of the major virtualization programs for the Mac platform: VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. While both have offered relatively straightforward ways to run Windows and other PC operating systems on an Intel Mac with […]
It’s getting late, but it’s not too late for some last-minute gift shopping.
There are those clever Mac vs. PC advertisements that Apple runs, but let’s talk about the big differences between computers.
Mac OS X is a brilliant operating system. But what about the “Classic” Mac OS in the Age of Snow Leopard?
2009 – Apple is billing Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as its first fully 64-bit operating system, but this isn’t the first time the Mac OS has changed it bitness.
Apple has been promoting three key advantages of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that are hardware dependent: Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) OpenCL 64-bit operation
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was billed as primarily under-the-hood changes to OS X 10.5 Leopard, but it was much more significant than that. Snow Leopard was announced at the June 2008 Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) and released on August 28, 2009. For the first time since Mac OS 8.5 was released in October 1998, […]
Everyone knows about the federal Cash for Clunkers program that’s done wonders for auto dealers, but we were taken by surprise to receive a press release from Microsoft about its Cash for Clunker Computers rebate program. We knew that Microsoft was in a world of hurt with declines of 6% to 11% in operating income, […]
The June 2009 update of the MacBook Air (MBA) gets faster CPUs (1.86 GHz and 2.13 GHz) and lower prices ($1,499 and $1,799). It used the same Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics processor, which uses 256 MB of system memory, as its predecessor. The MacBook Air supports wireless NetBoot, and the Remote Disc software that comes […]
In 2005, I decided I needed a laptop computer. After using a Mac for a number of years, my first choice would have been an Apple laptop, but funds were tight, so I opted for a Windows machine. However, using Windows on a daily basis got the better of me, and I decided I had […]
Is it worth maxing the RAM in older computers? This has been a long-asked question, one I see on mailing groups regularly.
2009 – Brooke Crothers of CNET News states that the “PowerPC platform never lived up to the hype” and “the PowerPC platform had really failed long before 2005.” The evidence: the fact that Apple switched to Intel in 2006 and that some of the first-generation dual-processor G4 Power Macs ran hot. I beg to differ.
The Macintosh officially turns 25 on January 24, 2009, the anniversary of the day Apple announced the original Macintosh to its Board of Directors and to the world- the world of personal computing has never been the same.
The Macintosh officially turned 25 on January 24, 2009, the anniversary of the day Apple announced the original Macintosh to its Board of Directors and to the world – and the world of personal computing has never been the same.
2009 – I recently left the G3 market and stepped up to having only G4s, and last year I wrote about whether G3s are still viable in the workplace (see Getting the Most from Your G3 Mac), but what about the G4?
There is a lot of rumour and speculation about Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard at the moment. Let’s looks at the future of Apple and Microsoft OS offering.
The Macintosh officially turns 25 on January 24, 2009, the anniversary of Apple’s announcement of the original Macintosh.