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Tom asked: “I found a couple apps I like: YouTube & Google Maps. With Google Maps, there’s new capabilities where you can zoom in and change the angle, it might be Google Earth. But when I get close, the buildings tend to crumble up and bridges fall flat on the roads and stuff. I saw an a cable news network that when they do the same thing on their computers, the buildings look nice and solid. I’m pretty sure they have a more powerful computer than me. I have a 9 year old iMac.”
Tom, there are two ways to use Google Earth on your Mac: You can install it as a standalone program, or you can view it on your browser.
We suspect that your problem is that you’re trying to view the map on your browser without the Google Earth plugin, in which case you’d just be accessing the regular, flat Google Maps.
If you go to earth.google.com and click on “web” you should be able to download and use the plugin. Your computer is not new, but they don’t really require all that much for the plugin to work, so you’ll probably be able to. Just install the plugin and zoom into a city that is 3D enabled (not all cities are), and you should be good to go.
If you’ve managed to keep your computer up to date and you’re running the latest 10.11.6 El Capitan version of Mac OS X, then you should be fine.
If you prefer, you can download the program from the same site and just open it when you want to explore the world. If you do, make sure you check the “3D buildings” checkbox, otherwise you’ll only get the flat map.
And since your iMac is 9 years old, you may find out that you’re going to have issues with running older versions of Mac OS X and Safari. If you’ve managed to keep your computer up to date and you’re running the latest 10.11.6 El Capitan version of Mac OS X, then you should be fine. But if you, like many other owners of old Macs, decided to hop off the upgrade train at some point, you might find that the software needed for this to all work properly isn’t on your computer, or won’t install because of old system software.
Good luck!