Low End Mac’s Compleat Guide to the 17″ MacBook Pro, Dan Bashur, 2014.02.16. The road to obsolescence: Intel Core Duo users will be left behind, Steve Watkins, The Practical Mac, 2010.01.19. Mac OS X 10.7 may well be the version that leaves behind those with 32-bit Core Solo and Core Duo Macs from 2006. The […]
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The road to obsolescence: Intel Core Duo users will be left behind, Steve Watkins, The Practical Mac, 2010.01.19. Mac OS X 10.7 may well be the version that leaves behind those with 32-bit Core Solo and Core Duo Macs from 2006. What’s the Best Version of OS X for My Mac?, Ian R Campbell, The […]
Best online Mac mini deals, updated regularly. Best Classic Mac OS Deals. Best online prices for System 6, 7.1, 7.5.x, Mac OS 7.6, 8.0, 8.1, 8.5, 9.0, 9.2.2, and other versions. Best Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Deals. Best online prices for Mac OS X 10.4. Best Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Deals. Best online […]
The road to obsolescence: Intel Core Duo users will be left behind, Steve Watkins, The Practical Mac, 2010.01.19. Mac OS X 10.7 may well be the version that leaves behind those with 32-bit Core Solo and Core Duo Macs from 2006. MacBook Pro value equation revisited, Dan Knight, Mac Musings, 2006.02.15. The MacBook Pro is […]
A quarter of a century ago today, Apple introduced a brand new operating system to the world as a successor to Mac OS 9, the press release for this is still up on Apple’s website to this day. It replaced the base code and entire underlying system which all Mac OS versions were previously based […]
Back from the Low End Mac Mailbag is another excellent piece from longtime reader and now contributor, Adam Goff. Enjoy Adam’s excellent take on how Mac OS 9 is still alive and kicking today – over 24 years later! Introduction – It’s the late 1990s/early 00s.. Macs (and their accessories) Become Fashion Trends In 2002 […]
From one configuration to another, 2 processor transitions apart. It’s been a month since the 24″ 2006 iMac in my possession has been modified, being turned into a sort of CustoMac. With an external display modified into the Mac itself, along with a newer graphics card, operating system, and all of the smaller components required […]
Fresh to the Low End Mac the mailbag from long time reader Adam Goff: “I recently made the personal decision to “un-OCLP” a few of my Intel based Macs and thus prompted a desire to create an easy to follow guide for those who need to create install media on their Mac computers running Mac […]
The first generation MacBook Air was the first ever Apple computer to ship with a Solid State Drive as a factory option for internal storage, in January 2008. Prices have come down dramatically over the years for SSD’s, making them a more viable option for faster, silent, and low power consumption operation. In the case […]
Between 2006 and 2011, many iMacs shipped with a removable internal graphics card known as an MXM GPU. MXM (Mobile PCI EXpress Module) is an interface pioneered by Nvidia around 2004, originally intended for laptops, which had gone through several iterations before slowly phasing out as a platform interface connection standard. As our Macs age, […]
The Mac Pro 5,1 has rode a heck of a wave thanks to a talented team of developers who have worked hard to keep these old machines running smoothly with OpenCore/OpenCore Legacy Patcher (and some other tools/patchers that were developed earlier such as the dosdude1 patchers) and has allowed the Mac Pro 5,1 (as well […]
It has been almost 10 years since I published my article Back to Mac OS 9, Because It’s All I Need on Low End Mac. Lots of things changed in my life since then – I got married, became a dad of three kids and I changed my job. But one thing remained in my […]
Hi Low End friends! Gather around! It’s time for another late night campfire story! Just like the camping trips you might enjoy with family and friends, and gathering around the fire, sometimes you need a late night snack and reach for a delicious Peanut Butter and Jelly out of the […]
It was 26 years ago that Apple first introduced the Power Macintosh Line of computers, the Power Macintosh 6100/60, 7100/66, and 8100/80. The first Power Macs were an important step towards faster performance, and on paper they offered an incredible boost in performance compared to any of the 68040 based machines. The most basic Power […]
Macs are known to be generally more secure than their PC counterparts and relatively free of virus and malware attacks. But with the rise in popularity of Apple computers in recent years — thanks first to the so-called iPod halo effect and the iPhone, which brought on the dawn of the iOS ecosystem — the […]
Apple, Inc. has always been at the forefront of some leading technologies and innovations. Two of its three alternate computing interfaces that were designed to assist the disabled — touch and voice control — which were ahead of their time when first deployed back in the late 1980s, are now mainstream interfaces for use by […]
Apple did a very nice thing when it introduced the Power Mac G5 in June 2003 – it introduced a line that would use the same upgrade options across the board. Well, until the dual-core models shipped in October 2005, which we will mostly ignore in this article.
Not everyone uses modern Macs. I spent a day with a friend who still runs 1997 and 1999 Macs 20 years on.
Life is too short to argue over operating systems. Does it really matter what you use as long as you are happy with it?
After a brief tinker with Linux again, I am back using macOS – and I couldn’t be happier.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
Certain Apple computers are harder to find than others. The Macintosh Portable, the 128K, the G4 Cube, TAM, etc. My find was just as rare, due to it only being available to the educational market. Some call it the Molar Mac.
The Growing Windows Threat: Jean Louis Gassée, now the head of product development at Apple, predicted that Apple would maintain its lead in the personal computing world indefinitely. He oversaw the introduction of the critically acclaimed Mac IIci and System 7 (and also several flops) and felt that no company would be able to wrest […]
Even with the fabulous press reception given to the Macintosh upon its release (see my previous article), it did not sell well. There were a number of reasons for that.
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
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 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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]