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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The thing killing me with Apple design now is not just the look of UIs but the UX of how they actually work. I swear they move buttons every year for no reason other to move them. Workflows randomly take an extra click that didn't before.
I'm not sure if the phone or the Mac OS changes are worse, maybe its a tie.
One pet peeve is on the iPhone messages app if you accidentally tap into the search bar they inserted at the bottom, it clears the list of messages (rather than waiting for you to type and start filtering based on context). First time it happened I thought sync failed and the phone didn't have a copy of any of my texts.
> Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
Apple went way too far with the skeuomorphism, and Ives & co. may have over-corrected. Speaking of running wild: I'd consider painstakingly reproducing the stitching on the seats in Job's jet in the icon for an Apple app (Notes, IIRC) to be going overboard. Apple was rightly mocked for taking skeuomorphism too far, and as a result making onscreen, virtual objects mimick real objects became outdated, and people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I was sitting by someone on the bus a while back, and they had all their apps arranged by predominant icon color. Black on one screen, blue on another, green on a other, red, orange, etc... I can't imagine what sort of havock this led to in their life!
Hold on your home screen to start editing, then edit in top left and then customize. Not sure why it would’ve defaulted to the tinted option though. Don’t think I had that happen.
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'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 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
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.
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.
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"...
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.
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 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.
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????"
They did sell USB flash drives with 10.7, but it didn't make sense for that to be the primary distribution method.
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.
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.
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!
I saw this video recently, it's crazy how apple lost the tactility of its button.
Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
I'm not sure if the phone or the Mac OS changes are worse, maybe its a tie.
One pet peeve is on the iPhone messages app if you accidentally tap into the search bar they inserted at the bottom, it clears the list of messages (rather than waiting for you to type and start filtering based on context). First time it happened I thought sync failed and the phone didn't have a copy of any of my texts.
Apple went way too far with the skeuomorphism, and Ives & co. may have over-corrected. Speaking of running wild: I'd consider painstakingly reproducing the stitching on the seats in Job's jet in the icon for an Apple app (Notes, IIRC) to be going overboard. Apple was rightly mocked for taking skeuomorphism too far, and as a result making onscreen, virtual objects mimick real objects became outdated, and people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.
OpenCore would like a word about that. It's nice to get official security patches, but Apple does make perfectly capable machines obsolete.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It does not feel good that you can pay $2000 for a device and then see Apple unilaterally make it worse shortly later.
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.
Is there something in the water?
Apple does keep the update servers for their ancient hardware running, though, which is better than their main rivals.
The video I believe it was sitting on a floor
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.
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"...
And damn, Mac OS has changed so much graphically.
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.