Over 1,000 iMac aquariums sold: Fish screensavers are still in style

In fond memory of those aquarium screensavers, people have been building aquariums inside old Macs for years. However, you usually have to assemble them yourself. Nebraska resident Jake Harms, on the other hand, sells his creations to people around the globe.

"As far as I know I'm the only weirdo in the world building iMacAquariums for sale," he says on his website. In addition to turning old G3s into fish tanks, Harms repurposes the domelike bases of iMac G4s into lamps and the disc tray covers from eMacs into desk clocks.

He's built over 1,000 aquariums from old iMac G3 computers, according to a story on Omaha.com.

To make an "iMacAquarium," Harms basically guts an old G3 and inserts a custom-made 3.5-gallon acrylic box inside that holds the water and fish. (It's still important to choose a fish that will thrive in a tank this size.) He equips the box with a filter and runs rope lights around it, then places it all back inside the Mac and puts the outer casing back on. He then buffs the outer shell to get it nice and shiny. The result is a home for fish that would make a great gift for any techie.

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Apple Paves The Way For “Retina” 4K iMac

Although 4K Monitors are starting to become affordable, OS X hasn’t up until now supported them with the same sophistication it does a Retina Display. Even under Mavericks, the only readable resolution was 3840 x 2160, with no support for OS X’s Retina scaling options.

According to Anand Lal Shimpi of Anandtech, though, this has all changed, with the latest developer build of OS X 10.9.3 supporting the full range of Retina scaling modes for 4K monitors, allowing you to use those extra pixels to make things crisper instead of just smaller.

That’s good news… and probably a hint that whenever Apple releases the Retina iMac, it’ll boast a 3840 x 2160 display, and not the crazy 5120 x 2880 pixel display that would be called for if Apple just doubled the resolution of the 27-inch, as it has with other Retina Macs.

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Apple’s Mac sales spiked 19 percent last quarter thanks to iMac, MacBook Air

If Apple’s latest earnings report is any indication, Mac is a big part of Cupertino’s business, and business is good.

Apple reported this week that it finished up its first quarter 2014 by raking in $57.6 billion, with $13.072 billion of that counted as profit. During the same time frame a year ago, Apple pulled in $54.5 billion in revenue, with $13.078 in profit. Though revenue increased, profit actually decreased ever so slightly. Nevertheless, the numbers are quite impressive.

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Apple Is Probably Going to Run a Sequel to its "1984" Ad Today

30 years ago. The Los Angeles Raiders are slaughtering the Washington Redskins at halftime. You decide it's time for a refill on your Crystal Light. You're headed to the kitchen when something stops you in your tracks—a chick with a Brigitte Nielsen haircut and a hammer, running towards you.

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Opinion: The new Mac Pro makes the iMac the power user's desktop

As the lucky guy who got to review the 2013 Mac Pro, I’ve spent quite a bit of time with it over the past week. You can read that review for my formal evaluation of Apple’s new flagship workstation, but one thing that struck me while testing the Mac Pro is that in addition to radically changing Apple’s professional desktop line, it also illustrates the changing face of “power-user” computing for Mac users.

It wasn’t very long ago that the performance gap between consumer-level processors, such as those used in the iMac and MacBook lines, and the higher-end processors used by the Mac Pro line was vast. Affordable hard drives couldn’t yet provide the massive storage capacities we see today. And the performance of integrated GPUs (and even some consumer-level discrete GPUs) was relatively poor. As a result, if you wanted a really powerful computer, or one with a lot of storage, or one that could handle the latest games, you looked to the Mac Pro line—even if you never planned to work with video, perform 3-D rendering, or do scientific modeling. The Mac Pro, despite its name, was as much a computer for power users (including many performance-hungry home users) as it was for people doing “real” 

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Apple's 2nd generation Mac Pro: The first hands-on reviews

FORTUNE -- The first wave of Mac Pro stories arrived in June and covered what writers could glean about Apple's (AAPL) new high-end workstation from photo handouts and a spec sheet. The second wave arrived this week, with the first hands-on reviews. They're still pretty sketchy. For the full story, we're going to have to wait for the video pros -- and pro software optimized for the new specs.

Molly Wood, New York Times: Futuristic Mac Pro Has Power to Spare. "The design is obviously an indulgence. The Mac Pro is a charcoal gray cylinder that stands about 10 inches high and reflects back a distorted, slightly menacing view of the world. The outer layer of the tube is removable, displaying the Pro's innards in a pleasing industrial array. A cutout at the top of the cylinder creates a lip that acts as a handle, and a visual effect sadly reminiscent of either a trash can or an ashtray."

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Apple's new Mac Pro a better value than the sum of its parts

The first indication that Apple's sleek, cylindrical Mac Pro is meant for professionals — other than its name — is its high cost. AppleInsider assembled a comparable Windows-based system to see just how much value Apple squeezed into its new desktop.

For the purposes of this exercise, we used current prices at a large, nationwide internet retailer well respected by do-it-yourself PC builders. We targeted the new Mac Pro's most tricked-out arrangement, a $9,599 configuration:

• 2.7GHz 12-core Intel Xeon E5 with 30MB of L3 cache


• 64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC


• 1TB PCIe-based flash storage


• Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

To house the machine, we chose one of the highest-rated ATX-compatible cases available, Lian Li's stalwart PC-7B for $89.99. Lian Li's minimalist brushed aluminum towers have been staples of the build-it-yourself community for years and are about as close as the PC aftermarket gets to Apple's design aesthetic.

The PC-7B is a barebones chassis and does not come bundled with a power supply, so we added Corsair's CMPSU-650TX 650-watt CrossFire-ready unit for another $89.99. The 650TX provides enough juice to run both of the power-hungry GPUs as well as Intel's latest and greatest. 

Driving the displays in our hypothetical rig are two AMD FirePro W9000 GPUs at $3,399.99 each. They match the Mac Pro's cards on spec with 6GB of GDDR5 memory and 264Gbps memory bandwidth, though it is difficult to say exactly how well they mimic Apple's heavily customized units.

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Best apps for your new Mac

This year we've picked out some of the very best apps, games, books, and downloads for your new devices. Dig into our top selections for Android apps, Android games, iPhone apps, iPad apps, iOS games, Windows Phone apps, Kindle books, console games, and the very best for your Mac and PC.

Whether you're among the chosen to get a new computer for the holidays or are burdened with the responsibility of playing family tech support, we've got you covered with an essential pack of Mac apps, utilities, tools, and time-wasters. Grab another moose-shaped mug of eggnog and start downloading.

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