Mactracker

I was introduced to this little app way back in the early 2000's - i.e. before I was a Mac guy. At that point I thought it to be mildly interesting and completely useless. Why would I want and/or need to know how much a Macintosh IIx cost or what its startup chime was?

Well, I still don't really care about that particular information aside from its historic interest, but I find myself using Mactracker more and more for actual, practical reasons.

For example, when my old boss asked me to help find and install RAM into his eMac (not a typo), Mactracker had the answer. I use it to store information like serial numbers and warranty info about all of my machines, too. I've found it most useful, though, to identify a particular model of mac and specific information about it (not so much the startup chimes). Case in point: when going in with a friend to buy an external hard drive as a birthday present for another friend, we needed to consult Mactracker to find out what types of ports his machine had. As phenomenally awesome a present a brand spanking new HD is, it's value is diminished somewhat if you can't hook it up to your machine...

Oh, and there's one more thing. Mactracker is free. Yeah, free. So go get it if you haven't already.