Every four years, we get a February 29th. What’s the story behind that? And how long has this been going on?
Category Archives: Low End Mac
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- Taking Back the Market - Tim Nash on how Apple can retake its markets.
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- Zis Mac - Alan Zisman on Macs, iOS, and other tech.
Prior to 1986, the best Mac had 512 KB of memory with no expansion path, a 400 KB floppy drive, and no standard way of connecting a fast hard drive. The Mac Plus, introduced on January 16, 1986, changed all that.
The PowerPC platform had a long life at Apple. The first Power Macs arrived on March 14, 1994 – the Power Mac 6100, 7100, and 8100 running the PowerPC 601 CPU at speeds of 60, 66, and 80 MHz respectively. The ultimate Power Mac was the G5 Quad, which had two 2.5 GHz dual-core CPUs […]
Apple shook up the Mac world when it announced in June 2005 that it would switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs within a year. A lot of longtime Mac users felt betrayed. And when Apple introduced the first Intel Macs at the January 2006 Macworld Expo, we were shocked at how soon Apple had begun […]
With Apple on an annual development cycle for Mac OS X, it’s interesting to see what patterns develop between the official launch of one version and the launch of the next version. Today we look at Yosemite’s first year.
The PC market has declined about 10% this year, yet Apple sold more Macs than ever in its 4th fiscal quarter (July-Sept. 2015). iPhone sales didn’t set a record – that usually happens in the holiday quarter – but they are up over the same quarter in 2014.
iOS 9 has better battery management than any previous version, sometimes adding hours to the life of an iPhone’s battery. Unfortunately, the current version of the Facebook app can more than offset the extra battery life iOS 9 give you.
Over time, the distribution of Mac OS versions among Mac users changes as new versions of the OS are released, old Macs are retired, and new models arrive that only support the most recent version. Today we’re looking at six years worth of data.
A while back, I picked up a used 8 GB iPhone 4S as a backup or emergency phone – and also to see how (im)practical an 8 GB iPhone is these days. And on Wednesday afternoon, I installed iOS 9, which almost went without a hitch.
I’ve had my Mid 2007 Mac mini for several years, upgrading RAM from 1 GB to 3 GB and the hard drive from a pedestrian 5400 rpm 80 GB to a 7200 rpm 320 GB WD Scorpio Black – and now to a 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD. How fast is it now?
We came home from vacation three weeks ago, and my Mid 2007 Mac mini began giving me problems almost from the moment I powered it up. The 320 GB 7200 rpm internal hard drive was having issues, and after looking at prices, I decided that SSD could be the way to go.
Eight years ago, the iPhone had a 412 MHz single-core processor, a touch screen but no keyboard, no third-party apps, and it was probably the last new smartphone model to ship without 3G networking. Yet it sold like hotcakes even with no discounts available.
Since returning from vacation earlier this month, my 2007 Mac mini began to have problems and then died. More precisely, it would no longer boot from the OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard partition on its internal 320 GB Seagate hard drive, which I’ve used for years. It would display a blue screen and continually try […]
By 9:30 last night, buyers were lined up at Holland (MI) High School in hopes of buying one or more iMacs, MacBooks, or iPads. There were so many that they began the sale this morning at 7:00 AM, and within an hour everything was gone.
The big talk among Mac fans in western Michigan this past week has been the sell-off of older Apple gear by the Holland Public Schools scheduled for Thursday, August 13, 2015 starting at 9:00 AM. There are some real deals there! [Update: All items have been sold.]
Hard drives die. Sometimes early, within warranty. Sometimes after years and years of use. Sometimes with a little warning. Sometimes with no warning at all. And all you can do is be prepared.
The big news this morning was that Firefox was suddenly blocking all Flash content by default. Flash is frequently used for streaming video, ads, and interactive media on the Web, where it is heavily used for video games on Android devices. (Flash is not supported on Apple’s iOS.)
Where is the “low end” in Low End Mac? It’s a question we’ve addressed many times over our 18 year history, and it was a topic of conversation in our Facebook group this past week. Exactly what do we mean when we apply the label low end?
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard marked an endpoint in the evolution of traditional OS X. After this, Apple introduced OS X 10.7 Lion, which moved the Mac in the same direction as iOS – a whole new direction for desktop Macs. Also, for those using software written in the PowerPC era, Snow Leopard gives us […]
My wife had been wanting an iPad, so now and again I’d scan Craigslist for local deals. This past winter I found a pretty good price on the original iPad that I could just afford with the cash I’d been setting aside. It even had a case and dock cable, although no power adapter.
On May 16, 2006, Apple introduced the consumer MacBook, the 13.3″ replacement for the old 12″ and 14″ iBooks. The first MacBooks had a wider 1280 x 800 display (vs. 1024 x 768 for G4 iBooks) and used Intel’s Core Duo processors. The biggest differences between the consumer MacBook and the MacBook Pro are the […]
Apple made some interesting choices when it designed the new 12″ MacBook, which is the thinnest, lightest Retina Display Mac notebook ever. But its US$1,299 price is higher than the new 13″ MacBook Air, 13″ MacBook Pro, and new 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Where’s the best value?
As technology marches forward, old tech gets left behind. Some of us have been using Macs since the 1980s and have experienced a lot of it, but the 1998 introduction of the iMac probably takes the cake for offending the most – and the 12″ MacBook may take second place.
I don’t know how I ever got along before Dropbox, which lets me sync files on any of my Macs running OS X 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard, and 10.9 Mavericks.
The announcement that Dropbox will drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 clients in May has sent shockwaves through the low-end community. Many of us depend on Dropbox to sync files with our older Macs and newer kit.
I was disappointed to receive an email from Dropbox on Tuesday telling me that Dropbox will be dropping support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard on May 18, 2015. They recommend I upgrade to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Low End Mac has been through some difficult times since we moved from static HTML pages to WordPress. Site traffic declined by 88% from our peak of 17.1 million pages in 2007, but it is turning around.
In 2006 or so, Dan Warne published his list of the top 30 mistakes made by new Mac users. We want to revisit them.
If you follow Low End Mac on Facebook, you’ve probably seen a link to an article from Redmond Pi claiming that upgrading from iOS 8.1 to iOS 8.1.1 may free up to 500 MB of space on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. As the owner of an 8 GB iPhone 4S, I had to test […]
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.
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.
As widely rumored in recent months, Apple unveiled the iPhone 6 this week – and in the two sizes expected. The smaller model, with a 4.7″ display, is called the iPhone 6. The larger one, with a phablet-sized 5.5″ screen is the iPhone 6 Plus.
If you’ve been on Facebook this weekend, chances are you’ve seen a link to a Cult of Mac article entitled See How Mac Magically Decluttered Our Desks Over Past 35 Years. And if you saw it, you probably clicked on it and saw the animation showing how that took place.
Road Apples. That’s our category for the worst products Apple ever made. Products such as the Apple III and the Performa 5200 that just had to many compromises or reliability issues for us to ever recommend using them. We think it’s fitting to name them after horse droppings.
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?
