Mac - page 58

If you’re looking to upgrade your Mac with a high-capacity solid-state drive (SSD), this 1-Terabyte Samsung EVO-Series SSD on Amazon is a great deal. Normally $849.99, it’s just $514.99 and free shipping.

We eat, sleep, and dream Mac apps here and that’s why Cult of Mac Deals is stoked to bring you another amazing offer that’s full of useful tools that will help you on a daily basis.

With this exclusive promo – dubbed The Mac Productivity Bundle 6.0 – you’ll get 10 of the hottest apps on the market for only $39.99!

Apple agreed this week to buy Israel-based PrimeSense for $350 million.

PrimeSense is best known for making the 3D motion-tracking technology inside Microsoft’s Kinect.

Does this mean Apple plans to make its own Kinect? Maybe. But I think Apple may be thinking about something far more interesting.

Now here’s one for the record books – a special one-of-a-kind Product (RED) Mac Pro, created jointly by Jony Ive and Marc Newson, sold at Sotheby’s on Saturday for $977,000! The upper six figure bid makes the (RED) Mac Pro the most expensive desktop computer ever built or sold.

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Sure, those old computational machines are making some collectors serious new money. But love of Apple doesn’t always translate into hard cash. Over the years, we’ve covered a lot of cool things you can do with your obsolete — but still near and dear! — Apple gear.

Here are some of our favorites.

Think you got enough Apple stuff? Cult of Mac’s resident vintage expert Adam Rosen has collected so many Apple products over the last three decades, he converted part of his house into a museum to showcase them all.

Assembling your own collection of Mac gear isn’t easy, but the Vintage Mac Museum in the Boston area has managed to get its hands on some really neat — and odd — items, like a cutaway Mac Plus, a rare black Mac and more Apple memorabilia than any sane person should own.

Here’s a look at an incredible assortment of Apple products at the Vintage Mac Museum. Plus, find out what Adam thinks you should keep or toss.

Old computers tend to lead sedentary lives. Parked in shelves and closets, maybe touched by the occasional dusting; the lucky ones still run old games from time to time. But sometimes one becomes a sensation.

The Twiggy Macintosh is a prototype Macintosh 128k that used a 5.25-inch disk drive. Long thought lost to history, two of these primordial Macinti were recently resurrected and returned to life in full working glory. Their rebirth brought about a rare reunion of the original Macintosh design team. And one of them recently repaid the effort by fetching about $40,000 at an auction.

They are — without a doubt — the oldest working Macs in the world.

Here is the story of their amazing journey.

On Saturday Cult of Mac reported that a working Apple 1 failed to sell at auction in Germany, a notable result in the growing market for vintage Apple collectibles. It turns out that result was premature: the Apple 1 did sell for €246,000 ($330,000), after bidding on the item had closed.

UPDATE: Cult of Mac has learned that the Apple 1 did sell after the auction closed. Read more here.
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Markets rise and markets fall – that’s true for stocks, real estate, tulips, etc. That’s also true with vintage computers – though even in a down market there’s still some money to be made.

At an auction in Germany held on Saturday November 16, a working Apple 1 – from the first batch of 50 units made – did not receive any bids. Nor did a restored Lisa 1, with dual Twiggy floppy disk drives. But a prototype Twiggy Mac, one of only two known working units, sold for €25,000 ($33,725), quite possibly the highest price ever paid for a vintage Macintosh.

No matter how computer-savvy you are, sometimes you just can’t avoid issues like a failing hard drive. For those emergency situations, Disk Drill Pro can be your savior. If you lose any data, you just have to click a button and it displays a list of files that can be potentially recovered. Save yourself a ton of time and heartache and get peace of mind with this app.

And right now you can save a ton of money as well by taking advantage of this limited time offer from Cult of Mac Deals. Pick up Disk Drill Pro 2.0 for only $29.99 – that’s 66% off the regular price!

Auctions for rare Apple equipment have attracted a lot of attention the past few years, with prices for the Apple 1 going as high as an astounding $671,000! Another Apple 1 is going up for auction in Germany next month on November 16, but in addition a very different rare Apple item will be on the same auction block. One of only two known working Twiggy Macs in the world is going up for sale.

Twiggy Macs were prototype versions of the original Macintosh and used a proprietary 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, instead of the 3.5-inch disk which ultimately shipped with the system in 1984. All Twiggy prototypes were ordered destroyed by Steve Jobs – and long thought lost – but the last couple of years have seen an eventful rediscovery of this piece of Macintosh history. Now one can be yours – if the price is right.

Hidden object games don’t usually catch my fancy, to be honest. I’ve never been a big fan of the mechanics, which typically require you to find objects to then reveal other objects, which can then be combined to become actual useful objects. I’ve also never been too taken by the typical romanticized story lines, either.

Big Fish’s new game, developed by India-based IronCode Games, Pahelika Secret Legends has found a way to convince me otherwise,t hough, and I find myself being drawn back to playing it often. There’s a fairly interesting story, and the puzzles are tough enough to provide a challenge without busting a brain.

If you’re like me and have been ambivalent about trying a game like this out, perhaps this is the one to start with.

Oh, woe are we!

Telltale’s follow up to hit adventure game The Walking Dead has been delayed for Mac, due to “an unforeseen issue with the Mac version of Episode 1,” whatever that means. The Wolf Among Us is an episode-based adaptation of Vetigo’s Fable, a graphic novel set in the real world with mythical fairy tale creatures like Snow White, Jack Frost, Pinocchio, and–of course–the Big Bad Wolf.

The game publisher updated its original blog post announcement of the October 11 release to say that it “is working on an update right now and expect to have the Mac build live on Steam and the Telltale website within the next few days.”

Evernote announced Monday the availability of Two-Step Verification for all its users, increasing security for everyone, instead of just the premium members.

In a blog post, Evernote’s Andrew Sinkov said that the software company values its users’ data security. The feature was introduced with a few other security measures last month, including Access History and Authorized Applications, but was only available for Evernote Premium and Evernote Business users.

These extra security features are now available to all Evernote users.

It was an impromptu family reunion whose RSVP list grew rapidly. In celebration of the recent rebirth of two prototype Twiggy Macs, many legends of Cupertino relived memories and reconnected with old friends in a private party held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Attendees, many of whom held Apple badge numbers in the single or double digits, included (among others) Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, Daniel Kottke, Chris Espinosa, Guy Kawasaki, Jerry Manock, Terry Oyama, Larry and Patti Kenyon, Rod Holt, Randy Wigginton and Wendell Sander. The soiree was arranged by longtime Apple employee Dan Kottke and Gabreal Franklin, former president of Encore systems and owner of one of the resurrected Twiggy Macs.

Apple’s venerable alumni laughed and reminisced with each other while playing with the rare prototype, commenting on early aspects of the design and who did what. “It’s got an hourglass cursor,” Andy Hertzfeld said. “I don’t remember that. Hey, I wrote that. It seems slow to me.”

It stands shorter than a Steve Jobs doll. It can be held in the palm of your hand. It runs System 6, and elicits squeals of delight from vintage Mac fans.

It is the Smallest Mac in the World.

Hot on the heels of the news of the world’s oldest working Macintosh comes a breakthrough of much more modest proportions. John Leake, co-host of the RetroMacCast, has created what may be the world’s smallest working Macintosh using a Raspberry Pi computer, PVC, some off-the shelf parts and a Mac emulator running under Linux. He calls it “Mini Mac.”

Why? As Leake writes on his blog, “this is one those ‘because I can’ projects with no practical use – my favorite kind!”

Lucky Frame’s fantastic iPad and Android game, Gentlemen!, is now available on the Mac App Store, bringing the delightful Victorian-themed dueling game to the big screen for the first time.

We reviewed the game favorably when it released on iPad, enjoying the frenetic gameplay and the whimsical art style. It’s still a go-to app when we’re looking for something to play with a friend on the same iPad.

Now that it’s on Mac, though, we can now go head to head with up to four friends via local multiplayer, flipping and leaping and, well, stabbing our buddies with glee.

Nearly three decades after Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh, a pair of incredibly rare Mac prototypes have been discovered and restored to working order.

The computers, known as Twiggy Macs because they used the same 5.25-inch Twiggy floppy disk drive found in Apple’s doomed Lisa, were tracked down and painstakingly brought back to life by Adam Goolevitch, a vintage Mac collector, and Gabreal Franklin, a former Apple software engineer.

“Throughout the past 15 years, I have heard stories of and researched the fabled ‘Twiggy Macintosh’ computer,” Goolevitch told Cult of Mac in an email. “It was a thing of myth and legend — like a unicorn.”

Locating these Macs was the first step, but getting them to work was the real challenge. Goolevitch and Franklin embarked on an all-out effort to resurrect these long-lost pieces of Macintosh history.

Now two Twiggy Macs have been returned to life in full working glory. They are — without a doubt — the oldest Macs in the world. With auction prices for Apple-1 computers nudging upward toward the half-million-dollar mark, these incredibly rare prototypes — which look a lot like something you might find at a garage sale — could prove priceless. Here is the story of their amazing resurrection.

Double Fine’s Brütal Legend is out on the Mac App Store, and to celebrate, the publisher has dropped the price to a mere ten bucks. Considering that this game still retails for $15-$20 online, at least, this is a great deal.

Did I mention it also has Jack Black, Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Lita Ford, and an extra-helping of metalhead charm and Double Fine humor? Well, it does. If you’ve got a spare ten to, well, spare, then you should head on over to the Mac App Store and get yourself a copy before the price goes back up.

We’re still finding some great new features and tricks in OS X Mavericks beta, and while it’s not a huge overhaul like the more populare iOS 7 update, Mavericks has plenty of great things going on under the hood. And some of it even on top of the hood.

Here are five more interesting tips and tricks about the latest iteration of Apple’s Mac operating system, OS X Mavericks beta.

If you like flight simulators, especially those of the more arcade variety, the Sky Gamblers series is a great place to start.

Originally published by Namco Bandai Games, the last couple of installments have come directly from California-based developer Atypical Games. Sky Gamblers: Cold War is, appropriately enough, set in the 1980s with all the weaponry and aircraft that implies. Your task will be to learn how to fly a Cold War-era fighter plane, head out on covert and not-so-covert ops, and blow stuff up. Sounds fun, right?

eWorld Is Where I Wanna Be

I remember when I got my first computer, ever, at the age of 24. It was a Macintosh Performa 638CD, and it came with this sweet little 14.4 baud modem that was my entree to the whole of the internet, which really wasn’t that popular back then.

I remember finding this cool little icon on the Mac with a little hand-drawn person on it, called eWorld. Hmm, I wondered. What the heck was eWorld?

Clicking through, I found an adorable little electronic village, all in that hand-drawn, gentle style. Oh, this must be like Compuserve, or Prodigy, right?

Well, yes and no. The softer, gentler world of eWorld was only for Macs, and it was my favorite place to go. Never mind that it was kind of empty; it was beautiful and I loved it.

Seriously, I’m kind of tired of playing the typical RPG in which I take on the role of the savior of the world. This kind of power fantasy, wish fulfillment story has its place, but boy would it be nice if we could see some different stories out there.

The developers behind Kickstarter project, Unrest, must have felt the same way, as their new online RPG is set in ancient India, for one thing (not a Tolkeinesque forest complete with Orcs and Elves), and will let you play as the ordinary folk struggling to maintain their freedom, safety, peace, and keep their children fed and happy.

World of Warcraft, this isn’t.

The famous Macintosh Picasso logo was developed for the introduction of the original 128k Mac back in 1984. A minimalist line drawing in the style of Pablo Picasso, this whimsical graphic implied the whole of a computer in a few simple strokes. It was an icon of what was inside the box, and became as famous as the computer it represented.

The logo was designed by Tom Hughes and John Casado, art directors on the Mac development team. Originally the logo was to be a different concept called The Macintosh Spirit by artist Jean-Michel Folon, but before the release Steve Jobs changed his mind and had it replaced by the simple and colorful drawing by Hughes and Casado. It’s been beloved ever since, and the graphic style has endured across decades.