As a person who has used Macs since December of 1984, I found the "One more thing" event to be one of the most exciting Mac events since the original Mac introduced itself to the world on January 24, 1984. Let's take a look at the announcements made on November 10, 2020, and what they mean to Mac users.
I recently showed you how to use a used Mac mini as a media server for your home. Today, I continue the theme of recycling and reusing older Mac minis by turning one into a Linux server.
Old Macs never die, they just get reused. An old MacBook becomes a school laptop for one of the kids. The old 21.5-inch iMac becomes a FaceTime "videophone" for Grandma. Macs have good longevity and older units are usable for a variety of purposes other than day-to-day work. Read along to see how we were able to transform a 2014 Mac mini into a home media server.
After ripping apart the previous 2020 iMac about a month ago, we couldn't wait to get our hands on this bad boy. And in it. And under and through. It's a similar 27-inch machine but features Apple's much-new-and-touted "nano-textured glass"...
I just photographed the Nano-texture display on top of an iMac with ordinary glass. The glass is really dark, absorbing light like velvet. It’s darker than its own shadow. Unlike previous matte screens, this does not have a frosty look that washes out dark tone, mutes highlights, or softens the image.
HyperCard was a powerful, yet extremely easy to use tool for creating “stacks” — essentially flat-file databases that used hyperlinks as a way of navigating a stack of “cards”. You have to understand that at the time HyperCard was first released in 1987, there was no World Wide Web, so the concept of hyperlinks was completely new. HyperCard not only got a lot of Mac fans started in programming, but it also inspired some of the tools that we take for granted today.
The Newton MessagePad series was truly a product line that was ahead of its time. It was the most highly anticipated product of the early 1990s, offering many smartphone features — without the phone, of course — in a portable package. The devices had a controversial life and never really achieved the mass popularity hoped for by the man who shepherded the Newton MessagePad through its development — John Sculley.
There's no doubt about it. As we noted in an earlier post, Apple's new 27-inch iMac 5K for 2020 is a beast of a machine. With 10-core availability, all Solid State Drives, True Tone Retina display with a nano-texture glass option, faster GPU, T2 chip security, and up to 128 GB of RAM, you may finally be ready to make the leap into a new machine. It's completely understandable. But before you do, do yourself a favor and consider the one thing that is still user-upgradable after your purchase: the memory.
Recently, I showed readers of The Rocket Yard how to become power users of the macOS Stickies app. Now that you have your graduate degree in Stickies, it's time to move onto something even better – becoming a macOS Calculator...
