The best thing about Macs is how long they can remain useful. I am typing this on an Early 2008 iMac. The 20″ model with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU. And it’s running macOS 10.11 El Capitan quite nicely since upgrading from the 3 GB this used iMac came with to its maximum, […]
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The first Mac with memory expansion and a hard drive bus was the Mac Plus, introduced way back in January 1986. It came with an impressive 1 MB of RAM, and memory could be expanded to a mind boggling 4 MB. The SCSI port on the back let you add up to 7 devices, including […]
If you want to create a Linux USB installer on your Mac, then check out Etcher.
Low End Mac began 20 years ago as a way to share my knowledge of the earliest useful Macs with other Mac users. At that point I considered the Mac Plus – the first Mac with SCSI for adding a hard drive and expandable memory – to be the oldest practical Mac. Interesting thing is, […]
The world certainly has changed since the late 1990s, when there were only two significant personal computing platforms – Windows with about 95% of the market, Mac at about 5%, and a tiny sliver of Linux users. Today we have mobile operating systems and another personal computing choice, Chrome OS. But what if you want […]
iOS is a great platform, but so is Android. What are the differences iPhone users need to think about when considering switching platforms.
A decade of iOS. I look at my favourite features.
If your device could run iOS 8, then it could also run iOS 9. But was it any different to its predecessor?
One of the biggest releases in iOS history, iOS 4 brought many new features, including FaceTime.
Now well established, Apple rolled out its third incarnation of its mobile operating system in 2009.
2008 saw Apple cement itself further in the mobile market with a new iPhone model and a new version of its mobile operating system. Hello, iPhone OS 2.
Marking ten years of the release of the original iPhone, Low End Mac are taking a look at the progression of the mobile operating system from Apple.
Keeping in contact with people has never been so instant, but with so many services available, it can be hard to remember who uses what method.
The Commodore Amiga began its life at Atari. Jay Miner, an engineer at the enormous video game company and the creator of the Atari 800 personal computer, wanted to create a console centered around a 16-bit processor and a floppy drive, which would make development for the new console very easy and inexpensive.
October 21, 2016 will go down as one of the biggest cyber-attacks in the history of the Internet – perhaps the biggest ever. We’re going to learn a lot from this one, and we need to be sure to take steps to avoid it happening again.
Apple and Samsung have had an interesting relationship over the years. On the one hand, Apple buys a lot of components from Samsung Electronics. On the other, Samsung is a leading competitor in the mobile market. Some might call them frenemies, others see it as a symbiotic relationship.
Believe it or not, word processing predated the personal computer revolution by over a decade. In 1964, IBM combined its Selectric typewriter (1961) with a magnetic tape drive in the IBM MT/ST, making it possible for the first time to edit text without having to retype everything.
The World Wide Web is a vast place, and not all of it is suitable for children. I take a look at the Supervised User option in ChromeOS, aimed at keeping them away from the nasties of the Net while on a ChromeBook.
With the October 2005 introduction of the 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 Quad, Apple had introduced the most powerful PowerPC Mac ever. Whatever was to replace it had to be a real powerhouse – and the first Mac Pro certainly was.
I take a look at Chrome OS and the 11” Samsung ChromeBook Series 3 XE303C12 from 2013.
There are three different business models in the PC, smartphone, and tablet industries. The most widely used model is for one company to make the operating system and license it to a host of hardware manufacturers. This has given us the Windows market where no matter how badly PC makers do, Microsoft remains profitable.
Getting an old (2002) 700 MHz iMac G4 with just 512 MB of memory up and running reminded me of what a nice – and still useful – operating system Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is, especially on that old Apple PowerPC hardware.
The Google Chrome story began when Google introduced its new Chrome browser in September 2008. Initially it was Windows only, for XP and later, and Chrome was only for Windows until 2009. It was finally released for Mac OS X and Linux in May 2010.
In recent weeks we’ve done an in-depth look at Mac floppy disk formats, published a 5-part series on Palm, launched a Facebook group for Newton users, looked at memory upgrade options for long-discontinued Macs, talked about the Mac Color Classic, and looked at some of the more obscure Mac clones from the mid-1990s. Earlier this […]
Earlier today in the Apple Macintosh Enthusiasts Facebook group, Charles Lott asked if an OS X Mac with a USB floppy drive could write disks that a Mac running System 7 could use. The short answer is, it depends.
On August 2, 2016, Firefox 48.0 was released. It is scheduled to be replaced by Firefox 49.0 on September 13, 2016. At that point, Mac users using OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.7 Lion, and 10.8 Mountain Lion will be left behind by the current versions of Firefox. It will be a sad day, as […]
Apple released the first Mac mini with a 64-bit CPU in August 2007, although the Mac OS that shipped with it was a 32-bit operating system, whether OS X 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard. It wasn’t until OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard arrived two years later – in August 2009 – that we had the […]
Palm had started as a software company that decided to make its own PDA because nobody else saw what Palm’s founders did. Palm dominated the PDA world and was one of the strongest players in the smartphone realm as well. So what went wrong?
Apple introduced the Mac mini in January 2005 as the smallest consumer computer on the planet. The original version ran a 1.25 GHz or 1.42 GHz G4 CPU on a 167 MHz bus and accepts a maximum 1 GB of system memory. It shipped with OS X 10.3 Panther and also supports 10.4 Tiger and […]
Handspring had been founded by several members of Palm Computing in June 1998 and was the second Palm OS licensee to ship product – and probably the most successful (see Part 3). In 2003, Palm Inc. merged with Handspring in a mutual agreement by both companies. This marks a new chapter in the story of […]
The Treo revolutionized the PDA market. Earlier attempts at wireless PDAs failed to make an impression on the market – the Motorola Marco and the Qualcomm pdQ were notable examples. They were much larger than their non-wireless counterparts, were expensive, and had only limited wireless functionality.
With the release of the first PalmPilots on March 10, 1996, Palm finally addressed issues it had been dealing with by making software for other people’s hardware since 1992 (see Part 1). For the first time, Palm had its own hardware and software, and the Palm brand became synonymous with PDA (Personal Digital Assistant).
Palm Computing was largely the creation and vision of one man, Jeff Hawkins. Palm first brought tablet computing to consumers in the form of PDAs (but was beaten by Apple and its scions). The later – and more momentous – goal was to bring consumers to PDAs through simple and very fast user interfaces. This […]
I’ve just finished wading through 6+ years worth of press releases from Gartner Group, digging out quarterly PC sales results from Holiday Quarter 2008 through 2nd Quarter 2016. Why? Because the global PC market is in decline, and I wanted to see how Mac sales compared to Windows sales.
For nearly as long as I’ve published Low End Mac, we’ve had the “Road Apples” category for Macs that we felt didn’t live up to their potential (here’s an archive link to the 1998 Road Apples index). Sometimes it was because of hardware architecture. Sometimes it was because of unnecessary memory ceilings. And much of […]