In 2006 or so, Dan Warne published his list of the top 30 mistakes made by new Mac users. We want to revisit them.
Search Results for: operating system
The iPhone 5 might be two years old now, but this is Low End Mac. I take a look at the hardware and how it handles iOS 8.
Apple released OS X 10.10 Yosemite yesterday, and I take a look at their latest offering.
It’s been almost two years since the Mac mini was last updated, and while a 1.4 GHz Core i5 CPU may not sound very powerful, the new US$499 price tag is sure to get your attention. Also, iFixit has a confirmed that the Late 2014 Mac mini ships with memory soldered to the logic board, so RAM […]
Do you have a passion for Apple equipment? Do you like older kit? Would you like to write for a long running Mac website?
I have an 8 GB iPhone 4S, and the only way I was able to install iOS 8 without using iTunes was by wiping it back to its original state. No matter how many apps and files I removed, I could not create enough free space for the iOS 8 installer otherwise. Apple brags about […]
iOS 8 has one steep requirement for those who want to upgrade to it directly on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. You need 5.6 GB of free space to load and run the installer – even though the core iOS 8 installation is under 1 GB. That can be a real problem with 8 GB iDevices.
I purchased a badly abused 17” Aluminum PowerBook G4 in the summer of 2012. It had a badly smashed lower case assembly, missing Enter key, a nonfunctional LCD, a bum battery, and not very many screws holding her together. I’ve always liked the design of the 17” PowerBook and felt the Aluminum PowerBooks have the best […]
Low-end Mac and iOS users have a love-hate relationship with Apple. We love new hardware and new operating systems and new features. We hate old hardware and operating systems being left behind.
When Apple introduced the Power Mac G5 in June 2003, it made a big deal of the G5 being a 64-bit CPU. It even mentioned that on the box. But what does that mean to Mac users?
Someone in our Facebook group asked an interesting question: “Anyone know the maximum size flash drive that can be used in OS 9.2 on a 300 MHz iBook G3?”
We’re going to give you a different take on tech news. No rumors. No press releases. No news based on a third-hand report. We’re going to give you real tech news with a low-end twist.
After a recommendation from a friend, I took a look at Xubuntu 14.04 – the latest LTS version.
I spent a couple of weeks in sunny Italy in May – lucky me! Before going, I probably spent as much time trying to figure out what gear to take as I did researching hotels and the like.
In what appears to be a step backward, Apple has added a new, lower cost, entry-level 21″ iMac as the least expensive model added to the Late 2013 line. The new model uses an ultra-low-power 1.4 GHz dual-core Intel i5 CPU with Turbo Boost to 2.7 GHz – the rated clock speed of the previous entry-level […]
Apple’s first generation of Intel-based Macs (not counting the pro-oriented 2006 Mac Pro and Xservv), is build around Intel’s first generation Core technology. Except for the seriously underpowered Core Solo Mac mini, they all use the Core Duo CPU and are thus unable to run the OS X 10.7 Lion installer – or anything newer. In fact, Apple won’t […]
Mobile phones and smartphones might have progressed rapidly over the years, but are we just a slave to having the newest must-have feature? Could you break free?
It’s my birthday, and I realized I’ve been using Macs for half my life. I was 28 years old when I first used a Mac Plus way back in 1986, along with PageMaker 1.0 and the original LaserWriter printer. And 28 years later, I know a lot more about Macs – and myself.
Two machines and one operating system – which one performs better? I test them out with surprising results.
With the Motorola 680×0 architecture running out of steam and Motorola’s 88000 making haste slowly, Apple had to look a bit further afield for its next processor architecture. Here’s how IBM’s RISC project became the heart of the Mac.
John Sculley, who had once been hailed as Apple’s savior for huge sales increases and good PR (like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs rolled in one) had presided over the splintering of the product line and a sharp decline in market share. The same trends continued after Sculley was forced out, and the […]
2005.11.15 From the day of his appointment as Apple CEO in February 1996, Gil Amelio presided over an ailing company. After the near-disastrous reign of Michael Spindler, Amelio promised to change the corporate ethos of Apple.
Put simply, you can’t. With the introduction of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in August 2009, Apple removed all support for PowerPC Macs from its operating system. You cannot run OS X 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, or 10.10 on G5 Macs or anything earlier. They will only run on Intel x86 hardware.
With another “well duh” headline, Cult of Mac told us yesterday, Survey Finds Battery Life Is Most Important for iPhone Owners. Didn’t the fact that we use 3.5″ and 4″ smartphones while the Android world has gone bigger kind of make that obvious?
In my previous Low End Mac article, I wrote that I was planning a trip for later this spring. I wrote about options for take-along tech gadgets: digital cameras (small is good), mobile phones (get a local SIM at your destination), tablets (bigger than a mobile phone, less capable than a laptop, but good enough for […]
Adobe Photoshop™ was, for a time, the killer app for the Macintosh. During the mid-90s, publishing and graphic design had supplanted consumers as the most important market to target, at least in the eyes of former Apple CEOs Gil Amelio and Michael Spindler.
The first Apple proposal to move the Macintosh to Intel hardware did not begin with Mac OS X. It began in 1985, shortly after Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple. The project was quickly nixed by Apple’s management, but it would be revived several years later in a joint effort by Novell and Apple to port the […]
Steve Jobs’ career at Apple was unique. His unconventional leadership helped create Apple’s two most important products of the 70s and 80s: the Apple II and the Macintosh. Unfortunately for Jobs, the CEO he had recruited, John Sculley, was not happy with the risks Jobs was willing to take. After a short power struggle that […]
Personal computer history doesn’t begin with IBM or Microsoft, although Microsoft was an early participant in the fledgling PC industry.
As Mac OS X was starting out in 2001, Jonathan Ploudre looked back at BeOS, which Apple had considered as a potential replacement for the Classic Mac OS when it gave up on its Copland project. BeOS had much to commend itself, including a whole different kind of system architecture that made even older Macs […]
Hard drive capacity is limited not only by how densely bits can be packed on a magnetic platter, but also by the number of sectors and tracks and drive surfaces in the drive itself and the number the computer’s operating system is designed to handle.
WordPress is a great, powerful, extensible content management system (CMS), but it can take a while to really figure things out. Tags fall into that category.
This years WWDC should see an announcement regarding the next version of Mac OS X, but will you be able to run it?
Second Class Macs are Apple’s somewhat compromised hardware designs. For the most part, they’re not really bad – simply designs that didn’t meet their full potential. When it was introduced on February 28, 2006, the Core Solo Mac mini was the smallest desktop computer on the market – and the second-least expensive Macintosh Apple had […]
Moving to a new OS can be a steep learning curve, and you may have to leave behind your beloved Windows apps. What if you could run Windows apps without using Windows? Step up ReactOS.