I reinstalled MacOS on a 2011 MacBook Air and it was actually shockingly hard. Thankfully, my machine booted and worked fine, so I didn't need to create a bootable USB stick. From memory:
- Network recovery boot cannot connect to your wifi because reasons. It'll see the SSID, but won't even prompt for password. It's totally unclear why nothing is working.
- Fall back to old IOT SSID with ancient protocols
- You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember.
- I can't remember how, but somehow you can install Lion
- Launch beautiful Mac desktop. App store won't work because the certs are too old, or something. Safari won't work, because the supported SSL protocols are too old.
- Use a modern Mac to download a DMG installer for a slightly newer OS
- Copy it to a USB stick
- Find a USB stick big enough to hold it, try again
- Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it
- Now you have a more modern OS that can actually connect to websites
- Also teh app store works, so you can upgrade to High Sierra using the app store.
But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
>You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember.
This one’s a doozy because i hit it last month.
The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.
I had an elderly relative (who disabled updates because they were scared of the computer changing) really upset everything was broken. Gmail app gave obscure can’t connect messages, almost all websites failed to load. When i went there of course the os wouldn’t update as well. We use https for everything now.
The keychain system is so hidden from users it was hard to even get to for myself. Took a usb key of a set of certificate updates. Harder than you think because when you look in keychain you’re not sure of which certificate is used for which and it’s a pain to find what you need. In the end a transfer from a healthy mac worked enough to get a manually downloaded os update running and from there it was fine.
What a doozy though! If you know of people with old macs that stopped working at the start of this year this is why
> The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.
I wish I knew this last week while trying to restore a 2010 21" iMac.
Apart from this, I encountered another annoyance mid-way; the official download urls for Sierra and High Sierra were nowhere to be found. I somewhat remember being able to download the official dmg/disk image from some official repository, probably some App store public url?
> The keychain system is so hidden from users it was hard to even get to for myself.
These days, keychain access is under /System/Library/Core Services/Applications/Keychain Access.app. That's not intuitive, but, once you know it's there, it's not hard to navigate to it. Was it different under older versions?
> Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
I get the same feeling when doing a fresh install+boot of both OS X 10.9 Mavericks and Windows 7. They're just so much more pleasant than what we have now.
It'd be nice if modern desktop operating systems took a lesson or two from their past selves.
I feel the average HN user though might be a bad representation of the general population. Personally I prefer the aesthetic of windows 11 over 7, it’s about the ONLY thing I prefer about windows 11, but windows 7 looks extremely dated to me now.
I feel the same way about Unix desktops. The newer stuff just.. looks gross? And it's difficult to use. I'm very thankful for Mate, especially the Alt+F2 behavior, but also the simple menu layout vs some horrible combination of search and popups.
> But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
". . . that new user interface builds on Apple's Legacy and carries it into the next century and we call that new user interface Aqua because it's liquid. One of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it . . ."
Apple’s EFI embeds an older version of wpa supplicant, possibly you are trying to connect to a network with a newer encryption standard like WPA3. I don’t that’s too unreasonable for a 15 year old computer
Thanks for the explanation! Makes sense. Unreasonable? To me, no. Makes complete sense given the age. BUT it doesn't support, IMO, "Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence". Yes, tech nerds can do tech nerd things to make it work...that's not a "plan".
I apologize if that came off harsh. I feel like your comment had a different angle/context than where I took it. Apologies if so.
Microsoft hate is easy to come by on HN (I get it), so I don't like seeing a Apple's coincidental victories magnified in one of the few areas Microsoft does well as a feature.
I can't remember now -- I have a WPA3 network, and I also have a WPA2 network, and an IOT network. I agree it would be reasonable for WPA3 to not work, but I'm pretty sure I was trying WPA2. Regardless, it's something I ran into.
I had to do a fresh install on a 2015 iMac. Same problems with the SSL certificates. I found it rather shocking that a 10 year old computer cannot be booted anymore, and as far as I understand it it's mostly because apple chooses to serve certificates with poor backwards compatibility on a domain that is used for updates, which is just lazy.
My best guess is the macbook is freaking out over the combined 2.4 + 5ghz network. It used to be standard to have these with two different SSIDs. Or you have WPA3 required, though I'd think you'd experience issues with many devices doing that.
I started as a desktop Linux user in 1994 and I can guarantee you it would have been more work for me to install Kubuntu for the first time :)
Regardless, this one is going on eBay, so it's probably best for it to be running the latest Apple OS. Whether the $60-or-whatever I get for it is worth the hassle is another story.
I just tried to put Monterey on a 2021 MBP and holy hell.
USB installer. "Not supported OS, you can quit, or install in reduced security mode". Reduced security is fine for me.
"Installation of Reduced Security failed." Cool.
"Get the IPSW and do a DFU install". Nah, you can't do that. "Drag the IPSW onto the target Mac where it says DFU in Apple Configurator". Nope. No error, just nope.
Dig dig dig. "You might need to do this from an older computer. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura". Hey look, I have one!
Alright, install Apple Configurator.
"Nope. You need Sequoia to install Configurator."
Jesus wept. This is an OS that is 4 years old, on a 5 year old laptop. Apple, "It just works".
Find an old version of Configurator from some guy on Reddit that zipped one up.
Helped an aqaintance set up a new computer with pre installed Windows 11 a while ago. As in Windows was already on there. How hard could it be?
Just getting past the mandatory online account ID took us half an hour, and only worked because she was diligent in writing down her password for Skype 10 years ago which somehow (I realize why but it's insane) now is her Microsoft account and involved in logging in to Windows. Then we stared at a non-interactive initial update screen for another half an hour before it offered the option to postpone updates. I assume if you ship your new computer somewhere without Internet, you simply cannot use it?! And of course all the dumb dark patterns, as if designed by a scumbag pick-up artist.
Then I had to deal with Windows file sharing to copy stuff from the old PC which was exactly as intuitive as it was in LAN parties around 2000 (used mostly the same UI, as well); but at least unlike the new quick share features worked eventually.
Don't get me started on how we got her old printer to work. It's still a miracle to me and involved multiple reinstalls of multiple drivers and finally digging through to a Windows 2000 era dialog listing various printer interfaces and manually selecting the right one that at some point popped up. I was all but convinced she'd need to buy a new one.
I'd be more impressed if this wasn't the same Apple that's unable to keep Screen Time compatible across the latest minor iOS versions.
Downloading updates seems fairly trivial. Host the file, maintain compatibility for the request/response from the OS, which might not have changed much over time, and whilst API versioning is annoying it isn't super difficult for a small API.
The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?
I spent hours each month looking for a way to bring back Aqua on Mac or Linux through theming or alternative DE but nothing comes close to the real thing.
If one day I have enough money I’ll just start work on a new DE to faithfully recreate Aqua. One can dream.
Recreating Aqua is the easy part. Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another. Apple's visual OS design was never that far ahead of the curve, but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.
This is also why most "windows style" themes fall flat: you can copy the window decorations, button backgrounds, and icons, but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.
At this point "operating systems" in a commercial sense are so large that only relatively new entries can afford to rebuild their stock applications to fit the current UI theme (ChromeOS comes pretty close but you'd need to appreciate Google's design to enjoy that). macOS, Windows, and even Linux to some extent all have decades of old software to support so they can't redesign their core GUI stack without breaking everything.
In the days that an internet browser wasn't considered a core part of the operating system, there just weren't as many places to get the design wrong or off-template without Q&A noticing.
> Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another.
This is (maybe tangentially) something I don't understand about the software market today; how come only Microsoft and Apple seem to be in the market for building a suite of native deskop applications, while other companies make one-off applications? Why isn't there a successful company building and maintaining a suite of common alternative desktop applications?
> they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.
Browsing the web on non-Apple platforms was annoying for a few years, with web designers aping the skeuomorphic design-language of whatever the then-current MacOS X release was. Besides cargo-culting, there was no justifiable reason for brushed aluminum or linen web page backgrounds, though I'm sure it looked really great on the designers Apple computer. If you, dear reader, did this when you were younger, I hope you have grown as a person and a designer.
> [...] unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.
> but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel
This attention to detail and "one integrated system" leads me to my favorite MacOS story:
- Windows and Linux machines would always DHCP for IP addresses
- MacOS would see if you had connected to the network before and just reuse the old IP you had under the assumption that is was probably still valid
- This worked most of the time and if you turned on a Mac and Windows laptop at the same time, the Mac would have a working IP first
As someone pointed out, this was probably one of the reasons why MacOS users would often say it just "felt better" than Windows. The fact that Mac owned both hardware AND software and treated it as a holistic system led to an overall better user experience.
The UI was so attractive it was back then even "ported" into KDE, not mention the countless OSX-themed visual styles for XP and Dock-like applications (later Launchpads arrived as well). There were even theming packages which were patching everything from icons to bitmaps in Windows somewhere before Vista arrival.
Aqua "era" ended with 10.10 when Apple decided to join flatness craze.
The early flatness craze, Yosemite, still looked better than the current Liquid Glass appearance. The Yosemite app icons in particular looked even more refined than Mavericks, and much more sophisticated than Tahoe.
The flat area and now liquid glass are all post-Jobs creations. Apple needs a true product person back in charge with taste to get this ship back into a better place.
Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
Literally word for word quote some of the thing I have been saying for years. Even the same quote on Craig Federighi and Jony Ive. Would have been better if there was another quote about Jony Ive fall out with Apple User Interface Head in 2015 and destroyed everything great about Apple Store. And again the Microsoft Video about Windows Metro and removing as much Chrome. ( There are still plenty of people on HN who will defend Windows 8 being peak UI and Metro was a right design choice )
And the quote about bringing order to Chaos. Along with Scott Forstall Video basically saying they destroyed everything Steve left behind.
With Jony Ive gone and most of the exec on their way out, may be it is time to think about bringing back Scott Forstall.
a) We can evaluate UIs on ('more') objective metrics too, like clarity, accessibility, etc. I think that, on most objective measures, the older UI would 'win' too.
b) Subjective doesn't mean 'useless'. If 99% of people prefer one thing over another, even for subjective reasons, it's probably a good idea.
Right, the key point being it is almost impossible to reuse iPhone or iPad hardware once the updates stop coming, even though the hardware is absolutely amazing. A 2017 iPad Air is still awesome hardware if you could jam an optimized version of Android/Linux onto it.
If you don't need it to be an Air, I bought an 8th gen iPad on eBay last year for about $80 and it will let you install iOS 26, although with the 32GB model you can't fit many apps on it.
If you manage to install decent apps in time, you can use these as e-readers or video players. But batteries will eventually fail and all what you'll have will be a fancy fragile chopping board.
I was gifted with iPad 1, Air 1 - first won't charge for 6 years now and data I didn't synchronize are gone, second one needs a serious "warm-up" before charging and while Apple released 12.5.8 in the end of January, it won't get any new apps.
I have a 3rd generation iPad from 2012 [1]. The battery is still very decent after 14 years. It has a retina display and a remarkably good speaker, so I use it for e-books / audiobooks, podcasts, music (on device) and sometimes playing around with synth apps (nano studio).
The bad stuff:
- iOS update with the parallax effect (iOS 7, I think) came soon after this iPad was released and made the device feel extremely sluggish (even with effects disabled). I was very pissed (downgrade not possible). It's on iOS 9 now, still as slow. The apps I still use work ok, but switching between them is a terrible experience.
- Can't update iOS any further. Can't install any new apps. Certificates expired, so can't use any webbrowser anymore (no https) and a few months ago even podcasts stopped downloading (books and music I upload via cable).
Notice how the good stuff is all hardware, while the bad stuff is all software.
You can still browse the internet. Safari still works. I have ancient 1st gen iPad Air and I use it for that; you can still watch YouTube (from the web), it still works fine. Anything that has a web app mostly works.
How is that so? The App Store has allowed you to download the last compatible version since iOS 6?
But I hate when people malos this comparison to a laptop, in the first 20 years of the personal computer you weren’t using 10 year old computers because the pace of change was so fast.
Your iPad Air has 2GB of RAM and has an A9 processor that is 7x slower in single core performance than the latest iPad Air. The latest iPad Airs come with 8GB of RAM.
My iPad Air from 2020 barely runs iOS 26 with 3GB RAM.
For comparison, I had a Dell Laptop in 2008 that had 8GB RAM and was my Plex server until 2018. Even today in 2026 low end laptops come with 8GB of RAM.
Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software, which is arguably what is important about the hardware.
PPC software is gone, 32 bit apps are gone, x86 apps are next, virtualizing or emulating platforms on iOS devices seems to be eternally damned, and what that looks like on Mac after Rosetta 2's quasi-retirement could only be inferior.
In an alternative universe you could connect an eGPU to a Mac or iPad and simply enjoy being the best platform for practically all software that ever existed. Run anything but the most intensive games directly on an AVP or iPad or MacBook Air or even an iPhone.
> Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software.
Apple delivered EFI 32 bit(ppc, 32) firmware updates to their 64 bit mac pro range, make booting/installing alternative operating systems much more difficult only shortly after the new intel range came out.
I had a few of these running Linux at the time and made the mistake of booting one into OSX to see if an update would fix an networking corner case, not an easy roll back.
You may wish to prefix your statement with "apple software".
Kinda funny how this is true but there's a line of Mac OSes that can't connect to the App Store anymore so you can't upgrade the OS without manually downloading it off of an Apple help page.
It's not the end of the world, but I've had to help more than one person walk through this process cuz they're like "I can't update the OS????"
I was a Mac admin when they pushed the change to move Updates into the Mac App Store and I hated it then. It didn't even make sense from an ill-advised "must match iOS" way, since OS updates happened in Settings.app on that platform. Just bone-headed "this will boost eNgAgEmEnT" BS.
I never got the impression that it was any kind of attempt to match iOS or "boost engagement". It's simply that the Mac App Store was brand new, and it was time to phase out DVDs as the primary distribution mechanism.
They did sell USB flash drives with 10.7, but it didn't make sense for that to be the primary distribution method.
FWIW iBook G3 is circa 2003-2006 so only 20-23 years old. Not 27.
Way to make me feel older than I already do lol.
We used these in when I was in high school, they'd wheel in a cart full of them into the classroom, and had a Wireless B Airport on the cart they'd plug in to the Ethernet on the wall.
Well it fits into the news this month:
UT2004 got its latest patch, Diablo 2 got a new expansion. Why not connect a 2003 iBook to download the latest updates?
This one is a fancy G4 instead of the normal G3. I still have the husk of my Ti PowerBook G4 which is the "macbook pro" analog of the era. It was a fantastic machine, I got about 12 solid years of use from it before it finally died. Weirdly, the failure mode that ultimately killed it was something causing some kind of memory (and thereby disk) corruption that increased in severity over a period of about a year eventually rendering it to the junk heap. I went through a couple disks and RAM modules before deciding whatever was going on was beyond my abilities.
I credit various Linux and *BSD PPC ports for making at least a third of that lifetime possible.
I'm hopeful that the more recent M{1,2,3,...} machines might be similarly long-lived.
Both Apple and Microsoft had interface guidelines documentation for years and while Cupertino was able to kept their software pretty much unified visually through the years, Redmond was and still is less consistent in applying such rules [1].
In period between Vista and 7 there was a really dedicated community (Aero and later Windows Taskforce) who tried to give Microsoft hints where polish the Windows environment only to see their efforts being largely disposed with Metro introduction.
Apple had to pursue the literal new shiny thing because their AI endeavors backfired - it's all a distraction which also didn't work as they expected. In the all of critical comments I liked one that replied to me here on HN, where user compared Liquid Glass to pouring a corn syrup over the interface.
Operating systems for mainstream users are mostly complete so companies have to focus on visual aspects of their products much more. This is obviously nothing new but watching that WWDC25 I was really amused how these people were disconnected from real world, how marketing side has dominated usability of Apple products. For me that was the actual reality distortion field in use.
Bulky, rounded interface become popular shortly after flat style become dominant in our digital life. Liquid Glass is really close to Gnome's Adwaita, Microsoft also tends to follow similar style. I can't bring the source but it was pointed out that rounded interface and graphics overall are giving some level of comfort, a sense of "safety" unlike than anything sharp and "spiky". This seems to be related to the bouba-kiki [2] effect.
It's a giant "fuck you" to accessibility in general. It reminds me of the first designer I ever worked with, who designed for pretty screenshots and put zero thought into the actual interaction.
E.g. the pervasive use of transparency means that you have text overlayed on text all over the place, so just literally can't read things.
I like the look and esthetics but there are some places where the design doesn't fit well. For instance, I've had to change my phone's background to accommodate for the theme and that should definitely be the other way around. Some screens also were just buggy in general, even screens as simple as the voicemail screen.
Turning off transparency helps a lot for accessibility but if that's necessary then it should've been the default. Whatever they're doing with uniform app icons is working out worse than Google's implementation in my opinion, though.
The rollout of Liquid Glass has been rather unfortunate, full of missed or ignored flaws that seem obvious, full of bugs and design flaws, and for a design that seems most at home in their failed VR headset rather than 2d phones, laptops, and desktops. At least their controls are still somewhat usable and it hasn't turned into a full Windows 8 moment for them.
I think it's a great example of how Apple has become just as terrible and uncaring as the massive companies, which can only lead to more resentment from the Apple purists who joined the brand back in their underdog days.
The default clear setting on the iPhone was pretty stupid. It made my icons monochrome. I have GMail, Apple Mail, and Proton Mail installed on my phone, all of which use an envelope as their logo. Previously this had never confused me because they're different colors, and I have one of those new-fangled "Color Screens" on my iPhone that the kids use.
Then they made all the icons a weird hipster monochrome thing, and I kept opening the wrong mail client by accident, because I couldn't quickly differentiate the three different envelops.
I don't know who the hell told the Apple designers that people don't like having color in their icons, but I think that person might need a reality check.
On the iPhone, the performance is much worse and my battery life is easily a less than 2/3 of what it was before Liquid Glass. This is on top of Apple forcing the OS updates in ways they haven't before.
It does not feel good that you can pay $2000 for a device and then see Apple unilaterally make it worse shortly later.
I haven't read any books in years because of how shitty iBooks became.
I used to read a lot, on my iPad, iPhone, Mac.. until a few years ago when iBooks (right about when it became called just "Books" I think) started rabidly deleting your downloaded books, even if I have 10s of GBs of free storage on device, and keeps having to redownload the books every week or so, so it's useless when I want to use it the most: away from home where there's no internet so no other entertainment, on flights, or long drives..
Just like Apple's other eternal shitshow Siri, you know it won't work when you need it so you never try again.
I was gonna say. I do have an ibook G3 from 1999, but it can't use modern Wi-Fi (though if it's running the right OS, it could maybe update--i think I've done updates as far back as 10.3?) the AirPort card can talk to 802.11b over WEP - i have an old router set up with a MAC whitelist specifically so the ibook can get online still
I have a G4 Cube running OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and "Ten-Four Fox" happily. But when it is on the Wifi, every ten seconds it logs an unknown (Bonjour) ping which fills up the log overnight.
Last time I cracked out my blueberry clamshell iBook, it worked fine, though for what it's worth, I was using Linux, and it seems the main limitation for these connections are the SSL certs.
Whenever I think about it, I think that getting my old Mac up and running is easier than getting ANY modern PC up and running lol.
I'm 27 and the UI looks so modern for something from the year after I was born - Windows 98 was at the same time but the MacOS interface has changed a lot less than Windows has.
> Windows 98 was at the same time but the MacOS interface has changed a lot less than Windows has.
That's only because Windows had to dial things back a lot after Windows Vista. Incidentally, Vista UI was also glass-inspired. Hmm.
Windows 8 "Metro" interface was different in its own way too, I suspect if Microsoft's mobile efforts had been more successful[1], Metro's design influences would have a much bigger sway over today's Windows desktop.
1. i.e. had they became the number 2 or 3 phone OS, and sold tablets with volumes comparable to the iPad. Touchscreen-isms would have inevitably crept back to the desktop OS.
I have a ipad second generation, it cant be used anymore because the activation server endpoint is gone. wish there was a way to use it as a secondary monitor if not for anything else.
all older intel macs which could not be updated to macos 26 have been installed with ubuntu. I have one more old m1 macbook air, which has a broken screen, and mac security does not allow me to login with a external monitor. that would become ubuntu when I get more time to install
Do you have any uses for stuff like iPad mini 2 Retina? I have that in mint condition (I treat the hardware as tools, but not as a hammer). It didn’t get updates for long time and every website of course breaks, so it even doesn’t work as notes reader…
I just had a problem installing iMovie on a MacOS 14 - 11-year old MBP13, perfectly functional otherwise (my 10-year old kid uses it), the original iMovie that used to work earlier, just stopped launching (maybe I need to change some xattrs for it?), and the new iMovie from the App Store can't be installed on such an old OS (why not show the older version there, like iOS AppStore does on older OSes?)...
I had a similar hunt for iMovie to extract video off of MiniDV which required some FireWire to thunderbolt cables. In any event I did find the install on archive.org. May have what you want.
I'm still using a 2010 Macbook Pro with a 1TB SSD for Logic Pro and Mainstage. Does it struggle? Yes. Does it work? Yes. It's still amazing technology that makes my keyboards and guitars sound bananas. To be fair, I just muck around with it, but it still has more than what I'll ever need or be able to discover.
>Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive.
That's not how things work. If you're using a USB adapter then Linux isn't failing to detect the drive, the adapter is failing to detect the drive. Also I'm pretty sure Linux still supports IDE, not that it matters in this case.
If anything my guess here would be the master/slave/cable select jumper.
Like, last I looked the Linux kernel still had MFM/RLL support, although I'm not sure that's going to get included even as a module in a modern distro.
My evening hobby this week is getting my old Rock Band Wii instruments working on Linux. Got inspired by seeing a Linux 7 headline that the CRKD guitar is supported.
There's a whole kernel module that exposes all the Wiimote accessories (inc. plastic instruments) as gamepads. It's still shipping in SteamOS today.
im quite fond of apple hardware aesthetics as well as the aqua look from this period especially the first imac g3 and ibook , just a nice warm fuzzy feelings from childhood from when things were a lot more simple.
Well the reddit post is massively misleading (no ibook is currently supported, that one isn't 27 years old, and 27 year old ones can't connect to modern Wi-Fi) but i do appreciate that my PowerBook G4 can get on Wi-Fi and download software regardless
Source: I own one of these iBooks and it most certainly can NOT connect to modern Wi-Fi, not out of the box. IIRC it cannot do WPA2, or required an update to do so, which was not available in the Tiger install media, so a chicken-or-egg scenario. Definitely will fail on a mixed WPA2/WPA3 network.
Assume it can connect to Wi-Fi, the TLS libraries are ancient and nothing will work. Including authenticating to iTunes, etc. Samba is ancient and will not connect to shares running SMB2 or newer. It also ignores than OS X versions newer than Tiger have broken App Stores and other things.
Wait till everyone finds out Apple served software updates in those days over plain HTTP which is why it "works"...
It's r/MacOS. The title is disingenuous at best, the comments are all fans upvoting each other for repeating opinions of the hive mind, and this being reddit a good chunk of them are probably bot rings trying to gain karma for resale value without getting caught.
Apple does keep the update servers for their ancient hardware running, though, which is better than their main rivals.
Yeah, I keep an G4 PowerBook around to watch DVDs on and run PowerPC Mac abandonware... it can surprisingly do a lot. IRC, Hotline, BBS, Gopher, etc. A YouTube channel called "Squeezing The Apple" has a lot of videos showing the use you can get out of an old PowerPC Mac.
When you max out the RAM (around 2GB) and put in a solid state IDE hard disk they can be useful. I occasionally use mine as a distraction free writing tool.
Other than abandonware (old games for example), they can't do anything a modern Mac couldn't do, so I wouldn't go nuts finding and buying one of these but if you have one laying around, and have the parts you need for an upgrade these old Macs can be fun.
I still run a MacMini (2012) with Catalina, and it just got a security update. Long back, the drive got an SSD upgrade, with max-out RAM. It still serves as a Media Server. Unfortunately, I don’t want to find out or fix, but my other Macs running Tahoe are unable to access the drives there directly, and a few other issues. I used to just mount it on my local drive like a file server. I had attached two drives, one as an offline Apple Photos copy and another for Dropbox. Both seem to have stopped working the way I want.
But hey, it still works. Survived a bad fall while cleaning up, duck-taped as the screws are not screwing.
How on earth do you hook up an iBook to a WPA3 network? Even in WPA2 compatibility mode you'll barely be able to see the SSID?
I suppose it's cool of Apple to not take down their old update servers, although I hope they do keep an eye on the use of HTTP or vulnerable ciphers for that purpose and segment the old hosting off from their more secure modern hosting.
Last summer I powered up my first 2007 Macbook Pro that hadn't been powered for like 15 years. I was stunned to see it restore everything - the web pages I had opened at the time etc.
Wow. You could look at Apple GUI without having to retch. Being reminded of those times feels like an act of rebellion now. I'm sure Apple wouldn't want us to make the comparison because it makes it obvious what a fucking catastrophe Tahoe is.
I reinstalled MacOS on a 2011 MacBook Air and it was actually shockingly hard. Thankfully, my machine booted and worked fine, so I didn't need to create a bootable USB stick. From memory:
But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
>You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember.
This one’s a doozy because i hit it last month.
The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.
I had an elderly relative (who disabled updates because they were scared of the computer changing) really upset everything was broken. Gmail app gave obscure can’t connect messages, almost all websites failed to load. When i went there of course the os wouldn’t update as well. We use https for everything now.
The keychain system is so hidden from users it was hard to even get to for myself. Took a usb key of a set of certificate updates. Harder than you think because when you look in keychain you’re not sure of which certificate is used for which and it’s a pain to find what you need. In the end a transfer from a healthy mac worked enough to get a manually downloaded os update running and from there it was fine.
What a doozy though! If you know of people with old macs that stopped working at the start of this year this is why
How modern computing quietly depends on this constantly-maintained layer of trust infrastructure
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> The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.
I wish I knew this last week while trying to restore a 2010 21" iMac.
Apart from this, I encountered another annoyance mid-way; the official download urls for Sierra and High Sierra were nowhere to be found. I somewhat remember being able to download the official dmg/disk image from some official repository, probably some App store public url?
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> The keychain system is so hidden from users it was hard to even get to for myself.
These days, keychain access is under /System/Library/Core Services/Applications/Keychain Access.app. That's not intuitive, but, once you know it's there, it's not hard to navigate to it. Was it different under older versions?
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> Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
I get the same feeling when doing a fresh install+boot of both OS X 10.9 Mavericks and Windows 7. They're just so much more pleasant than what we have now.
It'd be nice if modern desktop operating systems took a lesson or two from their past selves.
I feel the average HN user though might be a bad representation of the general population. Personally I prefer the aesthetic of windows 11 over 7, it’s about the ONLY thing I prefer about windows 11, but windows 7 looks extremely dated to me now.
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I feel the same way about Unix desktops. The newer stuff just.. looks gross? And it's difficult to use. I'm very thankful for Mate, especially the Alt+F2 behavior, but also the simple menu layout vs some horrible combination of search and popups.
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> But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
". . . that new user interface builds on Apple's Legacy and carries it into the next century and we call that new user interface Aqua because it's liquid. One of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it . . ."
Steve Job, Macworld San Francisco 2000: https://youtu.be/Ko4V3G4NqII?t=405
OpenCore and MIST are two great tools for fans of obsolete Macs. https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist
Yes .. in case its not obvious, you can use MIST to get all the old MacOS installers for offline use ..
Apple’s EFI embeds an older version of wpa supplicant, possibly you are trying to connect to a network with a newer encryption standard like WPA3. I don’t that’s too unreasonable for a 15 year old computer
Thanks for the explanation! Makes sense. Unreasonable? To me, no. Makes complete sense given the age. BUT it doesn't support, IMO, "Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence". Yes, tech nerds can do tech nerd things to make it work...that's not a "plan".
I apologize if that came off harsh. I feel like your comment had a different angle/context than where I took it. Apologies if so.
Microsoft hate is easy to come by on HN (I get it), so I don't like seeing a Apple's coincidental victories magnified in one of the few areas Microsoft does well as a feature.
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I can't remember now -- I have a WPA3 network, and I also have a WPA2 network, and an IOT network. I agree it would be reasonable for WPA3 to not work, but I'm pretty sure I was trying WPA2. Regardless, it's something I ran into.
Downgrading network to 2.4G is probably all they needed.
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I did this and considered it the easy way of installing an OS on a Mac circa 2011 vs. DVD then messing around updating that ...
> Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it
Apple has a whole page on making a bootable USB, it can save you a step: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101578
If the bootable USB even works. Monterey won't, or any out of support OS.
I had to do a fresh install on a 2015 iMac. Same problems with the SSL certificates. I found it rather shocking that a 10 year old computer cannot be booted anymore, and as far as I understand it it's mostly because apple chooses to serve certificates with poor backwards compatibility on a domain that is used for updates, which is just lazy.
That era of macOS had a kind of clarity and restraint that’s hard to describe
I bought one of those old Apple brand USB Ethernet adapters for pennies on eBay which can help to have on hand in situations like this.
Temporarily disable dual-band wifi and go to 2.4. Temporarly open the network with no WPA - should be good to go
My best guess is the macbook is freaking out over the combined 2.4 + 5ghz network. It used to be standard to have these with two different SSIDs. Or you have WPA3 required, though I'd think you'd experience issues with many devices doing that.
My first thought was incompatible version of 802.11[a-z] as well.
It was designed to hydrate the soul.
Yeah LOTS of devices are iced out of wifi because wifi devices started combining the 2.4ghz and 5ghz SSIDs to the same name
and for whatever reason 2.4ghz only devices cant find the SSID unless you if there is a name conflict on the 5ghz frequency
its also less likely that you have access to the router now to change the SSID
Or you can do things the easy way and install a Kubuntu 25.10 and have all good modern amenities without a fight.
I started as a desktop Linux user in 1994 and I can guarantee you it would have been more work for me to install Kubuntu for the first time :)
Regardless, this one is going on eBay, so it's probably best for it to be running the latest Apple OS. Whether the $60-or-whatever I get for it is worth the hassle is another story.
LOL, yes.
I just tried to put Monterey on a 2021 MBP and holy hell.
USB installer. "Not supported OS, you can quit, or install in reduced security mode". Reduced security is fine for me.
"Installation of Reduced Security failed." Cool.
"Get the IPSW and do a DFU install". Nah, you can't do that. "Drag the IPSW onto the target Mac where it says DFU in Apple Configurator". Nope. No error, just nope.
Dig dig dig. "You might need to do this from an older computer. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura". Hey look, I have one!
Alright, install Apple Configurator.
"Nope. You need Sequoia to install Configurator."
Jesus wept. This is an OS that is 4 years old, on a 5 year old laptop. Apple, "It just works".
Find an old version of Configurator from some guy on Reddit that zipped one up.
Now we can do an IPSW install.
Good luck, mortals.
Helped an aqaintance set up a new computer with pre installed Windows 11 a while ago. As in Windows was already on there. How hard could it be?
Just getting past the mandatory online account ID took us half an hour, and only worked because she was diligent in writing down her password for Skype 10 years ago which somehow (I realize why but it's insane) now is her Microsoft account and involved in logging in to Windows. Then we stared at a non-interactive initial update screen for another half an hour before it offered the option to postpone updates. I assume if you ship your new computer somewhere without Internet, you simply cannot use it?! And of course all the dumb dark patterns, as if designed by a scumbag pick-up artist.
Then I had to deal with Windows file sharing to copy stuff from the old PC which was exactly as intuitive as it was in LAN parties around 2000 (used mostly the same UI, as well); but at least unlike the new quick share features worked eventually.
Don't get me started on how we got her old printer to work. It's still a miracle to me and involved multiple reinstalls of multiple drivers and finally digging through to a Windows 2000 era dialog listing various printer interfaces and manually selecting the right one that at some point popped up. I was all but convinced she'd need to buy a new one.
I'd be more impressed if this wasn't the same Apple that's unable to keep Screen Time compatible across the latest minor iOS versions.
Downloading updates seems fairly trivial. Host the file, maintain compatibility for the request/response from the OS, which might not have changed much over time, and whilst API versioning is annoying it isn't super difficult for a small API.
The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?
I spent hours each month looking for a way to bring back Aqua on Mac or Linux through theming or alternative DE but nothing comes close to the real thing.
If one day I have enough money I’ll just start work on a new DE to faithfully recreate Aqua. One can dream.
Recreating Aqua is the easy part. Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another. Apple's visual OS design was never that far ahead of the curve, but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.
This is also why most "windows style" themes fall flat: you can copy the window decorations, button backgrounds, and icons, but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.
At this point "operating systems" in a commercial sense are so large that only relatively new entries can afford to rebuild their stock applications to fit the current UI theme (ChromeOS comes pretty close but you'd need to appreciate Google's design to enjoy that). macOS, Windows, and even Linux to some extent all have decades of old software to support so they can't redesign their core GUI stack without breaking everything.
In the days that an internet browser wasn't considered a core part of the operating system, there just weren't as many places to get the design wrong or off-template without Q&A noticing.
> Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another.
This is (maybe tangentially) something I don't understand about the software market today; how come only Microsoft and Apple seem to be in the market for building a suite of native deskop applications, while other companies make one-off applications? Why isn't there a successful company building and maintaining a suite of common alternative desktop applications?
I can make some guesses of course.
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> they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.
Browsing the web on non-Apple platforms was annoying for a few years, with web designers aping the skeuomorphic design-language of whatever the then-current MacOS X release was. Besides cargo-culting, there was no justifiable reason for brushed aluminum or linen web page backgrounds, though I'm sure it looked really great on the designers Apple computer. If you, dear reader, did this when you were younger, I hope you have grown as a person and a designer.
> [...] unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.
Exactly!
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> but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel
This attention to detail and "one integrated system" leads me to my favorite MacOS story:
- Windows and Linux machines would always DHCP for IP addresses
- MacOS would see if you had connected to the network before and just reuse the old IP you had under the assumption that is was probably still valid
- This worked most of the time and if you turned on a Mac and Windows laptop at the same time, the Mac would have a working IP first
As someone pointed out, this was probably one of the reasons why MacOS users would often say it just "felt better" than Windows. The fact that Mac owned both hardware AND software and treated it as a holistic system led to an overall better user experience.
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> but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.
Actually worse than not looking like Windows, at that.
The UI was so attractive it was back then even "ported" into KDE, not mention the countless OSX-themed visual styles for XP and Dock-like applications (later Launchpads arrived as well). There were even theming packages which were patching everything from icons to bitmaps in Windows somewhere before Vista arrival.
Aqua "era" ended with 10.10 when Apple decided to join flatness craze.
The early flatness craze, Yosemite, still looked better than the current Liquid Glass appearance. The Yosemite app icons in particular looked even more refined than Mavericks, and much more sophisticated than Tahoe.
I remember installing flyakite to get things looking good on Windows, and then growing tired of it all and just buying windowblinds and desktop x
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Oh yeah I remember that. I use to hang around the customize.org forums a lot in 2003 trying out a lot of the visual styles for XP and winamp themes.
Modern UI trends seem to optimize for neutrality and content-first minimalism, which is nice in theory but often ends up feeling generic
“Content-first minimalism”
I disagree. Unless the ‘content’ is “corners are sooo round, and isn’t this glass-like distortion just so neat?”
https://youtu.be/ejPqAJ0dHwY
I saw this video recently, it's crazy how apple lost the tactility of its button.
The flat area and now liquid glass are all post-Jobs creations. Apple needs a true product person back in charge with taste to get this ship back into a better place.
Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
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Huge Huge Thank You for posting this video.
Literally word for word quote some of the thing I have been saying for years. Even the same quote on Craig Federighi and Jony Ive. Would have been better if there was another quote about Jony Ive fall out with Apple User Interface Head in 2015 and destroyed everything great about Apple Store. And again the Microsoft Video about Windows Metro and removing as much Chrome. ( There are still plenty of people on HN who will defend Windows 8 being peak UI and Metro was a right design choice )
And the quote about bringing order to Chaos. Along with Scott Forstall Video basically saying they destroyed everything Steve left behind.
With Jony Ive gone and most of the exec on their way out, may be it is time to think about bringing back Scott Forstall.
>The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?
Because "good looking UI" is a completely subjective metric.
True, but:
a) We can evaluate UIs on ('more') objective metrics too, like clarity, accessibility, etc. I think that, on most objective measures, the older UI would 'win' too.
b) Subjective doesn't mean 'useless'. If 99% of people prefer one thing over another, even for subjective reasons, it's probably a good idea.
Because your opinion is in the minority
There used to be a really nice Aqua theme for Gtk back in the day, but like everything else it's gone out of fashion and succumbed to bitrot.
I don't even know where you'd find a copy of it any more, even if it could be ported to modern toolkit libraries.
I wish freshmeat.net was still on the go, that was full of things like that.
> The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?
From the perspective of a Macintosh System 6 appreciator, OSX is kind of fussy with gratuitous details.
https://aaron.cc/opening-screenshots-from-a-vintage-macintos...
Yeah that's great and all but my 2nd gen iPad Air from 2017 doesn't get updates past iPadOS 15 (current version: 26).
As a result most useful apps flatly refuse to run on it, and my iPad is now a paperweight which yearns for the landfill.
Meanwhile the laptop I bought in 2011 is still going strong, now on Windows 10 (or whatever Linux distro I'd care to throw on it).
Right, the key point being it is almost impossible to reuse iPhone or iPad hardware once the updates stop coming, even though the hardware is absolutely amazing. A 2017 iPad Air is still awesome hardware if you could jam an optimized version of Android/Linux onto it.
If you don't need it to be an Air, I bought an 8th gen iPad on eBay last year for about $80 and it will let you install iOS 26, although with the 32GB model you can't fit many apps on it.
I'm in a similar boat and am wondering... Is there much that can be done with these iPads beside turn them into e-waste?
If you manage to install decent apps in time, you can use these as e-readers or video players. But batteries will eventually fail and all what you'll have will be a fancy fragile chopping board.
I was gifted with iPad 1, Air 1 - first won't charge for 6 years now and data I didn't synchronize are gone, second one needs a serious "warm-up" before charging and while Apple released 12.5.8 in the end of January, it won't get any new apps.
I have a 3rd generation iPad from 2012 [1]. The battery is still very decent after 14 years. It has a retina display and a remarkably good speaker, so I use it for e-books / audiobooks, podcasts, music (on device) and sometimes playing around with synth apps (nano studio).
The bad stuff:
- iOS update with the parallax effect (iOS 7, I think) came soon after this iPad was released and made the device feel extremely sluggish (even with effects disabled). I was very pissed (downgrade not possible). It's on iOS 9 now, still as slow. The apps I still use work ok, but switching between them is a terrible experience.
- Can't update iOS any further. Can't install any new apps. Certificates expired, so can't use any webbrowser anymore (no https) and a few months ago even podcasts stopped downloading (books and music I upload via cable).
Notice how the good stuff is all hardware, while the bad stuff is all software.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/111992
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Why can’t you still use it?
You just won’t be able to download new apps as they bump their minimum.
maybe use as a e-reader or watch ripped media on it? if it's jailbreakable i am sure there's a lot of stuff to do too
Use it as a control center for your home automation.
You can still browse the internet. Safari still works. I have ancient 1st gen iPad Air and I use it for that; you can still watch YouTube (from the web), it still works fine. Anything that has a web app mostly works.
I don't think there is? I'm holding onto them in the hope that there's a good solution in the future.
Wait for a trade in special and take advantage of it. Or use it for safari only.
note: they jumped from 18 to 26 to align to the year.
How is that so? The App Store has allowed you to download the last compatible version since iOS 6?
But I hate when people malos this comparison to a laptop, in the first 20 years of the personal computer you weren’t using 10 year old computers because the pace of change was so fast.
Your iPad Air has 2GB of RAM and has an A9 processor that is 7x slower in single core performance than the latest iPad Air. The latest iPad Airs come with 8GB of RAM.
My iPad Air from 2020 barely runs iOS 26 with 3GB RAM.
For comparison, I had a Dell Laptop in 2008 that had 8GB RAM and was my Plex server until 2018. Even today in 2026 low end laptops come with 8GB of RAM.
> Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence.
OpenCore would like a word about that. It's nice to get official security patches, but Apple does make perfectly capable machines obsolete.
Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software, which is arguably what is important about the hardware.
PPC software is gone, 32 bit apps are gone, x86 apps are next, virtualizing or emulating platforms on iOS devices seems to be eternally damned, and what that looks like on Mac after Rosetta 2's quasi-retirement could only be inferior.
In an alternative universe you could connect an eGPU to a Mac or iPad and simply enjoy being the best platform for practically all software that ever existed. Run anything but the most intensive games directly on an AVP or iPad or MacBook Air or even an iPhone.
> Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software.
Apple delivered EFI 32 bit(ppc, 32) firmware updates to their 64 bit mac pro range, make booting/installing alternative operating systems much more difficult only shortly after the new intel range came out.
I had a few of these running Linux at the time and made the mistake of booting one into OSX to see if an update would fix an networking corner case, not an easy roll back.
You may wish to prefix your statement with "apple software".
Kinda funny how this is true but there's a line of Mac OSes that can't connect to the App Store anymore so you can't upgrade the OS without manually downloading it off of an Apple help page.
It's not the end of the world, but I've had to help more than one person walk through this process cuz they're like "I can't update the OS????"
Yeah, it creates this weird dead zone where the machine is perfectly capable of running the newer OS, but the built-in path to get there is broken
And it's hard to even find the download links, and a lot of them don't work.
And aren't even hosted by Apple!
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I was a Mac admin when they pushed the change to move Updates into the Mac App Store and I hated it then. It didn't even make sense from an ill-advised "must match iOS" way, since OS updates happened in Settings.app on that platform. Just bone-headed "this will boost eNgAgEmEnT" BS.
I never got the impression that it was any kind of attempt to match iOS or "boost engagement". It's simply that the Mac App Store was brand new, and it was time to phase out DVDs as the primary distribution mechanism.
They did sell USB flash drives with 10.7, but it didn't make sense for that to be the primary distribution method.
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It's been out of the App store and in settings for a long time now.
Not being connected to the App Store is a feature, not a bug.
FWIW iBook G3 is circa 2003-2006 so only 20-23 years old. Not 27.
Way to make me feel older than I already do lol.
We used these in when I was in high school, they'd wheel in a cart full of them into the classroom, and had a Wireless B Airport on the cart they'd plug in to the Ethernet on the wall.
Literally my first experience with WiFi
iBook G4, not G3, but yes.
The way he said "Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence" makes me really tilted tho
Well it fits into the news this month: UT2004 got its latest patch, Diablo 2 got a new expansion. Why not connect a 2003 iBook to download the latest updates?
Diablo 2 got a new expansion? What year is it?
Age of Empires is also continuing to receive new DLC. The 2000s will never die
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It's 2026, roughly 4.5 years after the release of the remastered version Diablo II: Resurrected.
Fresh meat!
I forgot the portable variant of the iMac was called the iBook. I thought this was about the book version of the Apple App Store.
This one is a fancy G4 instead of the normal G3. I still have the husk of my Ti PowerBook G4 which is the "macbook pro" analog of the era. It was a fantastic machine, I got about 12 solid years of use from it before it finally died. Weirdly, the failure mode that ultimately killed it was something causing some kind of memory (and thereby disk) corruption that increased in severity over a period of about a year eventually rendering it to the junk heap. I went through a couple disks and RAM modules before deciding whatever was going on was beyond my abilities.
I credit various Linux and *BSD PPC ports for making at least a third of that lifetime possible.
I'm hopeful that the more recent M{1,2,3,...} machines might be similarly long-lived.
[dead]
And the UI was so good back then compared to the liquid glass introduced recently
Both Apple and Microsoft had interface guidelines documentation for years and while Cupertino was able to kept their software pretty much unified visually through the years, Redmond was and still is less consistent in applying such rules [1]. In period between Vista and 7 there was a really dedicated community (Aero and later Windows Taskforce) who tried to give Microsoft hints where polish the Windows environment only to see their efforts being largely disposed with Metro introduction.
Apple had to pursue the literal new shiny thing because their AI endeavors backfired - it's all a distraction which also didn't work as they expected. In the all of critical comments I liked one that replied to me here on HN, where user compared Liquid Glass to pouring a corn syrup over the interface.
Operating systems for mainstream users are mostly complete so companies have to focus on visual aspects of their products much more. This is obviously nothing new but watching that WWDC25 I was really amused how these people were disconnected from real world, how marketing side has dominated usability of Apple products. For me that was the actual reality distortion field in use.
Bulky, rounded interface become popular shortly after flat style become dominant in our digital life. Liquid Glass is really close to Gnome's Adwaita, Microsoft also tends to follow similar style. I can't bring the source but it was pointed out that rounded interface and graphics overall are giving some level of comfort, a sense of "safety" unlike than anything sharp and "spiky". This seems to be related to the bouba-kiki [2] effect.
[1] - https://full.pr0gramm.com/2024/08/23/7c0cbd6101844c44.png [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect?useskin=vect...
I don't get the Liquid Glass hate, doesn't really impact me, but I can see it's really disliked by a lot of people!
It's a giant "fuck you" to accessibility in general. It reminds me of the first designer I ever worked with, who designed for pretty screenshots and put zero thought into the actual interaction.
E.g. the pervasive use of transparency means that you have text overlayed on text all over the place, so just literally can't read things.
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I like the look and esthetics but there are some places where the design doesn't fit well. For instance, I've had to change my phone's background to accommodate for the theme and that should definitely be the other way around. Some screens also were just buggy in general, even screens as simple as the voicemail screen.
Turning off transparency helps a lot for accessibility but if that's necessary then it should've been the default. Whatever they're doing with uniform app icons is working out worse than Google's implementation in my opinion, though.
The rollout of Liquid Glass has been rather unfortunate, full of missed or ignored flaws that seem obvious, full of bugs and design flaws, and for a design that seems most at home in their failed VR headset rather than 2d phones, laptops, and desktops. At least their controls are still somewhat usable and it hasn't turned into a full Windows 8 moment for them.
I think it's a great example of how Apple has become just as terrible and uncaring as the massive companies, which can only lead to more resentment from the Apple purists who joined the brand back in their underdog days.
The default clear setting on the iPhone was pretty stupid. It made my icons monochrome. I have GMail, Apple Mail, and Proton Mail installed on my phone, all of which use an envelope as their logo. Previously this had never confused me because they're different colors, and I have one of those new-fangled "Color Screens" on my iPhone that the kids use.
Then they made all the icons a weird hipster monochrome thing, and I kept opening the wrong mail client by accident, because I couldn't quickly differentiate the three different envelops.
I don't know who the hell told the Apple designers that people don't like having color in their icons, but I think that person might need a reality check.
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It's quite difficult to recall any redesign being liked on this site.
On the iPhone, the performance is much worse and my battery life is easily a less than 2/3 of what it was before Liquid Glass. This is on top of Apple forcing the OS updates in ways they haven't before.
It does not feel good that you can pay $2000 for a device and then see Apple unilaterally make it worse shortly later.
I haven't read any books in years because of how shitty iBooks became.
I used to read a lot, on my iPad, iPhone, Mac.. until a few years ago when iBooks (right about when it became called just "Books" I think) started rabidly deleting your downloaded books, even if I have 10s of GBs of free storage on device, and keeps having to redownload the books every week or so, so it's useless when I want to use it the most: away from home where there's no internet so no other entertainment, on flights, or long drives..
Just like Apple's other eternal shitshow Siri, you know it won't work when you need it so you never try again.
It says as much about how conservative and stable Wi-Fi standards have been as it does about Apple
The oldest iBook G4 is from October 2003, not even 23 years old.
Yep, in 2000 even the PowerBooks weren't G4 yet. And of course the consumer-grade iBooks line wouldn't get G4s until years after that.
I was gonna say. I do have an ibook G3 from 1999, but it can't use modern Wi-Fi (though if it's running the right OS, it could maybe update--i think I've done updates as far back as 10.3?) the AirPort card can talk to 802.11b over WEP - i have an old router set up with a MAC whitelist specifically so the ibook can get online still
Reading this from an $1300 iPad Pro that can’t even web browse without lagging.
Apple’s CPU throttling is a real thing
I have a G4 Cube running OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and "Ten-Four Fox" happily. But when it is on the Wifi, every ten seconds it logs an unknown (Bonjour) ping which fills up the log overnight.
Last time I cracked out my blueberry clamshell iBook, it worked fine, though for what it's worth, I was using Linux, and it seems the main limitation for these connections are the SSL certs.
Whenever I think about it, I think that getting my old Mac up and running is easier than getting ANY modern PC up and running lol.
I had an old MacMini I hadn't plugged in since 2014-ish and I tried to boot it this year and it refused to boot, and refused to update.
It now runs Ubuntu. Good little machine
I'm 27 and the UI looks so modern for something from the year after I was born - Windows 98 was at the same time but the MacOS interface has changed a lot less than Windows has.
> Windows 98 was at the same time but the MacOS interface has changed a lot less than Windows has.
That's only because Windows had to dial things back a lot after Windows Vista. Incidentally, Vista UI was also glass-inspired. Hmm.
Windows 8 "Metro" interface was different in its own way too, I suspect if Microsoft's mobile efforts had been more successful[1], Metro's design influences would have a much bigger sway over today's Windows desktop.
1. i.e. had they became the number 2 or 3 phone OS, and sold tablets with volumes comparable to the iPad. Touchscreen-isms would have inevitably crept back to the desktop OS.
Weirdly even the old System versions of Apple OSes don't look as dated as Windows 98 - probably because of the the document vs application paradigm.
MacOS basically looked this way up to the mid 2010s.
I have a ipad second generation, it cant be used anymore because the activation server endpoint is gone. wish there was a way to use it as a secondary monitor if not for anything else.
all older intel macs which could not be updated to macos 26 have been installed with ubuntu. I have one more old m1 macbook air, which has a broken screen, and mac security does not allow me to login with a external monitor. that would become ubuntu when I get more time to install
Do you have any uses for stuff like iPad mini 2 Retina? I have that in mint condition (I treat the hardware as tools, but not as a hammer). It didn’t get updates for long time and every website of course breaks, so it even doesn’t work as notes reader…
I just had a problem installing iMovie on a MacOS 14 - 11-year old MBP13, perfectly functional otherwise (my 10-year old kid uses it), the original iMovie that used to work earlier, just stopped launching (maybe I need to change some xattrs for it?), and the new iMovie from the App Store can't be installed on such an old OS (why not show the older version there, like iOS AppStore does on older OSes?)...
I had a similar hunt for iMovie to extract video off of MiniDV which required some FireWire to thunderbolt cables. In any event I did find the install on archive.org. May have what you want.
I'm still using a 2010 Macbook Pro with a 1TB SSD for Logic Pro and Mainstage. Does it struggle? Yes. Does it work? Yes. It's still amazing technology that makes my keyboards and guitars sound bananas. To be fair, I just muck around with it, but it still has more than what I'll ever need or be able to discover.
Things stopped being this fun. Now it's all about symmetry and simplicity. More robot world less human world
Many years ago (want to say ~2010-ish timeframe), I needed to get data off of an old Pentium machine at my mom's house.
My first thought was to just pop out the hard drive, put it in an USB HD enclosure and Linux would automagically detect everything.
Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive. My next thought was to see if it would boot and it did! (Windows 98 IIRC)
But then the next problem: how to get data off of the machine? It had an ethernet port but no wifi.
So I did the following:
- Plugged in an ethernet cable
- Opened the browser (IE 4!)
- Downloaded putty and the putty scp binary
- scp'ed the data from the box to a Linux box
- Success!
It really is wild how older technology can still work nowadays.
>Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive.
That's not how things work. If you're using a USB adapter then Linux isn't failing to detect the drive, the adapter is failing to detect the drive. Also I'm pretty sure Linux still supports IDE, not that it matters in this case.
If anything my guess here would be the master/slave/cable select jumper.
Like, last I looked the Linux kernel still had MFM/RLL support, although I'm not sure that's going to get included even as a module in a modern distro.
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My evening hobby this week is getting my old Rock Band Wii instruments working on Linux. Got inspired by seeing a Linux 7 headline that the CRKD guitar is supported.
There's a whole kernel module that exposes all the Wiimote accessories (inc. plastic instruments) as gamepads. It's still shipping in SteamOS today.
How are the certs not expired? Is this connecting over HTTP or some other mechanism?
Considering the age, HTTP is likely.
Look carefully at the screenshot. It’s definitely HTTP.
I regularly use a 2012 MacBook Air 11". It’s stuck with Catalina, but works fine (I use it to run Zoom meetings).
im quite fond of apple hardware aesthetics as well as the aqua look from this period especially the first imac g3 and ibook , just a nice warm fuzzy feelings from childhood from when things were a lot more simple.
Well the reddit post is massively misleading (no ibook is currently supported, that one isn't 27 years old, and 27 year old ones can't connect to modern Wi-Fi) but i do appreciate that my PowerBook G4 can get on Wi-Fi and download software regardless
Of course it's massively misleading, it's farming for updoots.
Further proving the (unpopular) point I made earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066456
Source: I own one of these iBooks and it most certainly can NOT connect to modern Wi-Fi, not out of the box. IIRC it cannot do WPA2, or required an update to do so, which was not available in the Tiger install media, so a chicken-or-egg scenario. Definitely will fail on a mixed WPA2/WPA3 network.
Assume it can connect to Wi-Fi, the TLS libraries are ancient and nothing will work. Including authenticating to iTunes, etc. Samba is ancient and will not connect to shares running SMB2 or newer. It also ignores than OS X versions newer than Tiger have broken App Stores and other things.
Wait till everyone finds out Apple served software updates in those days over plain HTTP which is why it "works"...
“Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence”
Is there something in the water?
It's r/MacOS. The title is disingenuous at best, the comments are all fans upvoting each other for repeating opinions of the hive mind, and this being reddit a good chunk of them are probably bot rings trying to gain karma for resale value without getting caught.
Apple does keep the update servers for their ancient hardware running, though, which is better than their main rivals.
You can still get Ubuntu 6.06 from https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/6.06.0/
There was a surreal video I watched where an Apple Macintosh connected to Google, it took a really long time.
The video I believe it was sitting on a floor
Yeah, I keep an G4 PowerBook around to watch DVDs on and run PowerPC Mac abandonware... it can surprisingly do a lot. IRC, Hotline, BBS, Gopher, etc. A YouTube channel called "Squeezing The Apple" has a lot of videos showing the use you can get out of an old PowerPC Mac.
Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@squeezingtheapple6990
When you max out the RAM (around 2GB) and put in a solid state IDE hard disk they can be useful. I occasionally use mine as a distraction free writing tool.
Other than abandonware (old games for example), they can't do anything a modern Mac couldn't do, so I wouldn't go nuts finding and buying one of these but if you have one laying around, and have the parts you need for an upgrade these old Macs can be fun.
But only if you run Tiger or newer :)
>Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence
That means it's easy for the consumer to replace parts like batteries, ram modules, GPUs, network cards and hard drives?
I still run a MacMini (2012) with Catalina, and it just got a security update. Long back, the drive got an SSD upgrade, with max-out RAM. It still serves as a Media Server. Unfortunately, I don’t want to find out or fix, but my other Macs running Tahoe are unable to access the drives there directly, and a few other issues. I used to just mount it on my local drive like a file server. I had attached two drives, one as an offline Apple Photos copy and another for Dropbox. Both seem to have stopped working the way I want.
But hey, it still works. Survived a bad fall while cleaning up, duck-taped as the screws are not screwing.
Amazing.
But last year’s iPhone cannot download a critical security iOS update for last year’s iOS 18.
Shoving the horribly broken iOS 26 down our throats is not a pleasant experience, Apple.
How on earth do you hook up an iBook to a WPA3 network? Even in WPA2 compatibility mode you'll barely be able to see the SSID?
I suppose it's cool of Apple to not take down their old update servers, although I hope they do keep an eye on the use of HTTP or vulnerable ciphers for that purpose and segment the old hosting off from their more secure modern hosting.
This post made me boot up my 2013 MacBook Air. 800ish cycles on the battery still at 81% life. A OS update was just released 17 days ago. Amazing.
Last summer I powered up my first 2007 Macbook Pro that hadn't been powered for like 15 years. I was stunned to see it restore everything - the web pages I had opened at the time etc.
And damn, Mac OS has changed so much graphically.
Wow. You could look at Apple GUI without having to retch. Being reminded of those times feels like an act of rebellion now. I'm sure Apple wouldn't want us to make the comparison because it makes it obvious what a fucking catastrophe Tahoe is.
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Yes, Apple never misses an opportunity to cripple any decently running hardware.