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
Well, to be more specific, "modern internet/web". Most of the applications that ran on a Windows XP computers still run on a Windows XP computer without hiccups, unless they do a lot of network connectivity for the functionality.
And no one can even give a concrete answer why root certificates need expiration dates. It's just because reasons.
IMO the whole PKI thing is a terrible idea to begin with. It would make much more sense to tie the trust in TLS to DNS somehow, since the certificates themselves depend on domains anyway. Then you would only have a single root of trust, and that would be your DNS provider (or the root servers). And nothing will expire ever again.
Root certificates need expiration dates for the same reason that LetsEncrypt certs need an expiration date: risk of cert compromise and forgery increases over time.
Over a long enough timeline, there will be vulns discovered in so much of the software that guards the CA certs in RAM
> risk of cert compromise and forgery increases over time.
And what if the certificate is compromised before it expires? Right, there's a revocation mechanism for that. So why expire them then if they can be revoked anyway IF they get compromised?
The reason why domain TLS certificates expire is that domains can change owners. It makes sense that it should not be possible for someone to buy a domain for one year, get a non-expiring TLS certificate issued for it, and then have the ability to MitM its traffic if it ever gets bought by someone else later.
Domain certificates are sent as part of the connection handshake, so them expiring is unnoticeable for the end users. However, root certificates rely on the OS getting updates forever, which is unsustainable. Some systems lack the ability to install user-provided root CAs altogether, and some (Android) do allow it but treat them as second-class.
Because the most dangerous secret is one that has been compromised and you don’t know it. This sets a time limit for their usefulness. Sometimes the stories about terrible default choices that are insecure sink in and architects choose a better path.
Also, details about the certs and the standards for them change over time. This makes it easier for the browser venders (via the CA forum) to force cert providers to update over time.
The instant we bound encrypted connections with identity we failed. And decades later we're still living with the mistake.
I'm completely serious when we need to abandon the ID verification part of certificates. That's an entirely separate problem from encryption protocol. An encryption protocol needs absolutely no expiration date, it's useful until it's broken, and no one can predict that. Identity should be verified in a separate path.
Do certificate revocation lists need to keep including certificates that have long since expired? I don't see why root certificates need to expire as long as the certificates signed by those roots all have reasonable expiration windows, unless someone is doing something strange about trusting formerly-valid certificates, or not checking root certificates against revocation lists.
Of course they do, they have to. But it's okay for things that are sent to you over the network to expire. It's not okay for things built into your potentially abandoned OS to expire.
> 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?
Apple moved it there in macOS Sequoia, from Utilities, because they were worried it would be confused with the Passwords app. Apple reminds you that you're actually looking for the Passwords app at every turn:
Tip: You can find all your passwords, passkeys, and verification codes in the Passwords app on your Mac.
However, while Spotlight works well when you know what you are looking for, it can still be useful to navigate the filesystem, and it's too bad that Apple hides tools in relatively obscure locations rather than somewhere like /Applications/Utilities.
> 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?
can look for macos downloader scripts in github. I noticed the readme here shares some URLs though I'm not sure if they still work https://github.com/Comp-Labs/Download-macOS
If you have High Sierra on USB, it installs just fine. You need a High Sierra machine to make the USB stick, but once you have one, its simple to reinstall.
> 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 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.
For me it's the difference between "this is a computer" vs "this is a computer trying to be a cell phone". I think that's what everything from the last 15yr is trying to be--a phone. And not everything is a phone. On a computer we have a keyboard and a mouse, which are much, much more precise tools than vague gestures on a touchscreen.
EDIT: I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is basically everything that's wrong with the computer(-adjacent) industry. We can appreciate the problem statement by asking "why would anyone want to make a computer be a phone?" The answer is a terminal case of a particularly defensive form of groupthink. It goes something like this:
(1) "everyone is talking about the iPhone"
(2) "i need to feel relevant, ergo i must make phone noises too"
then they rub these two neurons together, and since it's the only two they got it isn't hard for them, and this process repeats a few generations and like a nuclear chain reaction soon enough the entire industry is trying to make everything be a fucking phone.
It shouldn't be like that.
EDIT2: As a species we don't play these games with other tools. Cars--some super early attempts had weird shit like tillers for steering but we quickly outgrew that idea and settled on the steering wheel, levers for the other hand, and pedals
for the feet. Same with airplanes and tracked vehicles (bulldozers, tanks, etc). Same with machine tools. This stupid game people are playing with computer interfaces these days is fundamentally inhuman.
It's so obvious now that you wrote it, but it never occurred to me as such. New desktops, be it macOS, Gnome, Win.. they all look like damn phones and not computers.
If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers. When/if you later learn to use a desktop, it being like a smartphone makes it familiar.
Sucks for us geezers that learned things the other way around though!
People seem to forget that "smartphones" (in the post-iPhone sense) are barely old enough to drive. The first iPhone came out in 2007, android doesn't drop till the following year, and the first iPad doesn't come out till 2010.
If you were a kid with a video-playing smartphone before about 2012, your parents were pretty damn well off, and likely early adopters too
I don't think that helps support the argument, though. Despite using a stylus-driven touchscreen, the Palm Pilot UI had a lot more in common with the desktop UIs of the 90s than with today's smartphone UIs or even today's smartphone-tainted desktop UIs.
Palm pilots had ui/ux more closely resembling today’s smart phones than you think. The swiping keyboards, for example, more closely resemble the script used for fast typing on a palm pilot. The ui was meant for touch, not for precision. At least the games didn’t have ads back then.
Today's swiping keyboards are nothing like the original Graffiti or Graffiti 2. Those used shapes/gestures derived from the actual letter shapes, while the swiping gestures supported by the on-screen keyboards of today rely on gestures derived from the QWERTY layout of the on-screen keyboard. Because both were simplifications of the completely different input methods they were emulating: pen vs keyboard.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Palm Pilot UI (all the parts that were actually on the screen instead of below it in the dedicated writing area) looks thoroughly 90s: the basic buttons, drop-down boxes, tabs and dialog box layouts, scrollbars that aren't trying to hide from you. The main UI elements missing from the Palm Pilot that were present in eg. 90s Mac OS or Windows are the free form desktop layout (instead of the smartphone-like app launcher grid), and the persistent on-screen menu bar or taskbar.
The Palm Pilot UI was unquestionably designed around the assumption of higher precision than today's touch-oriented UIs. The stylus was not considered optional. The lack of capacitive touch sensing for gesture recognition meant the UI was much more reliant on precise button taps where today's smartphones would use swipes and other gestures for stuff like scrolling or "back".
Um. Swiping is almost exactly like the gesture letter shapes, except now they are word shapes. Swiping “shape” is always the same gesture on the keyboard, you can learn these gestures and type really fast.
To your second paragraph: of course it looks “throughly 90’s”. It was the 90’s. Did an LLM tell you to say this? I have no idea what scroll bars have to do with anything. I can tell you they were a pain to use. That hasn’t changed.
To your third paragraph: the stylus wasn’t optional. They didn’t just “lack” capacitive screens. It didn’t exist yet at scale. This was what Apple brought to the market. You couldn’t really have them if you wanted them. That being said, I used these interfaces while walking, riding in a car, and sitting still. I never had trouble tapping the right thing because the buttons were huge in the UI.
You do bring up a good point about there not really being swipe gestures to go “back”. I don’t use them today, so I’m not as familiar with that type of behavior other than to say it is really annoying when done by accident, usually while picking up the device.
>If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers
Circa 2004, when 25 year olds would probably be migrated out of diapers, smartphones were palm treos and Sony Ericsson K700s. I don't think they would be great distractions for kids, there certainly wouldn't be any endless Spiderman/Elsa YouTube to lock them in.
More like ~18 and under. The post-2007 zoomers and nearly all alphites are ipad kids, but that drops off dramatically as you get to the older zoomer segment and millennials.
Regarding your second edit, there was 100 years of automobile development (or more, depending on how far back you consider things to be in the lineage of a car, vs the predecessors of them) before the first car had a steering wheel. It's just ahistorical to say we quickly outgrew the tiller. We're less than 100 years from the first emergence of digital computers and screens, let alone putting those two together and needing an interface on them.
I think your broader point is accurate, but computers aren't old enough yet to really compare the evolution of their interfaces to other technologies.
Once we settled on the steering wheel, though, we didn't keep trying to make tillers work. That's what I was trying to get at--in other examples of human-machine interfaces we generally don't regress once we've figured it out. But with computers that's exactly what we're doing.
Yeah but we can take lessons from that 100 years of car experience of how humans interact with objects and apply a lot of it to computers. Its not like we are starting from scratch like we were 200 years ago.
They weren't starting from scratch 200 years ago either. Tillers were standard in boats for thousands of years, it was a perfectly reasonable way to steer a vehicle.
Likewise, at first a purely textual interface was a perfectly reasonable way to interact with a computer terminal, but the addition of mice changed the game, as did higher resolution displays and widespread adoption of touchscreens. We're 80 years into screens, 60 years into computer mice, and 20 years into touchscreens. Clearly lots of interface changes are just to keep the designers at a company busy, but it's also silly to be confident that we've nailed UX/UI standards.
what would you say makes a UI look as if it's for a computer (genuine)? aside from purely(!) cosmetic things, like the skin on the windows 11 taskbar vs. 10. i think to windows <= xp, or tiling window managers (bar hyprland, probably) as the two most popular evolutions of mouse- vs. keyboard-based UIs (plan 9 probably fits well under the former, too). i guess i'd prefer if macos looked like dwm, but i wonder what else would need to change for the friction i feel with it to disappear.
Font rendering with the same hinting as the system you grew up with. Whitespace in the same proportions.
Can't learn an evolution of the UI paradigm if you subconsciously feel your eyes are working wrong.
Hence, the person afraid of the computer changing who was described upthread.
(I was entirely surrounded by such cases when learning computing. So it was a moral and emotional battle at every step besides the sheer figuring things out - on dated, semi-functional miracles of engineering.
Now consider how, them people somewhere who "keep changing da computah", it's their job. It's us, in fact. And we're more knowledgeable, better organized, and make more than the average user. Plus chances are we're an entirely different part of the globe now where we follow an entirely different culture from our consumers, so things with the baseline mutual comprehensibility are so-so at best.
And... that's always been the case? And it's what's been giving our computerphobe friends all the right to be afraid. What reason does a FAANG dev even have, to care about your Grandma's eyesight, user experience, or sanity? Or yours? They gotz plenty to care about already, as exhibited by all the thoughtful comments poured into this site.)
These massive ""finger-friendly"" buttons don't make any sense on a traditional desktop with a mouse, but it makes a ton of sense when you realize the designers were likely designing for mobile and/or touchscreen integration at the same time.
A system which embraces the abilities of the mouse and keyboard without pandering to the limitations of the touchscreen. To wit, you have the ability, with a 3 button mouse + scroll wheel, to trivially select any nearby point in 3-space and label it with any one of 3 colors. More if you also allow your other hand to operate a keyboard. I dare you to attempt this with a touchscreen. I doubledare you motherfucker. Say what again.
I've settled on XFCE. It just works. You have to turn too many knobs to make it work on weird DPI / screen sizes, but other than that, it's fine.
Recently, I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
I kind of feel like the start menu + task bar were a mistake now.
It is nice having the bluetooth + network icon somewhere accessible, but maybe <ctrl>-space should just pop up a thing that lets you type program names + also temporarily hide all windows over 10% of the screen or something? That'd solve the problem of trying to find program manager to run a second program. Also, the windows in windows approach of program manager wasn't great. Still, it's better than most things out there these days. The icons are so... clean.
XFCE is also my go to. But I have moved on from caring too much about desktop environments as long as they don't get in the way. I went through a phase of trying pure openbox and all kinds of things and settled on XFCE. It doesn't do everything like I want but that's fine. I mostly open a terminal, a browser, thunderbird, some programming environment and a latex editor these days.
In my opinion, the versions of Mac OS with the Platinum theme (8, 8.5, 9) have aged quite gracefully. It's clearly not modern, but it also doesn't feel particularly old or kludgy or anything, and it's quite clean relative to modern desktops.
Same as Windows 3.1, and Windows 95, up to 2000. After some point computers began to be optimized for a non-technical person and here we go... Ads, auto-updates, pop-ups, bright colors, all this fucking desktop circus.
The older OS's with their simple interfaces and clear buttons were easier for non-technical people as well. I'm not certain who they're really optimising for now, exactly... shareholders?
Otherizing your users like this IS THE PROBLEM. Every technologist was once a "nontechnical person" (for whatever definition of that useless term you like) who learned and grew and thereby became "technical". The very minute you start thinking of your users in these terms you have lost the entire fucking game.
I broadly agree with your point, but I think the causal root of the problem is this industry arrogantly treats it's users as, to quote Mark Zuckerberg, "dumb fucks." We didn't always do this. It used to be better.
Not sure I understand you - what game, market capture? There are environments that remain more or less sane (e.g., FreeBSD, Xfce, etc) that don't play this game, if I got you right. I guess treating users so helps capture more of the market share, but it looks like there's only so much dumbfuckery one can inject into the environment until the curve begins to drop and dumb fucks themselves begin to run.
Philips just screwed up my TV. They've updated the firmware (of course, it was automated) to make home screen more of a dumb fucking experience with everything animated and self-playing movies jumping out at you for no reason, and so on... But the interface is now completely unusable - literally can't even launch YouTube. No amount of resetting helps. They also hid all the previous firmwares and I can't even roll back from a USB stick. I am a dumb fuck when it comes to TVs. And I will most likely be considering another brand next time.
I don't know how being empathetic to users correlates with market dominance, but I'd like to believe that doing sociopathic things like putting ads in the start menu or what you've described with your TV firmware would have a negative impact on adoption. At least that's how it should work in a sane market? But the market can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent.
I think Apple struck a good balance for a while--and to some extent still does--at least in the OS X era of treating users with a bit of respect. Not trying to make an interface for "power users" or "nontechnical users" but instead just making one for "computer users".
It used to be that we made tools for people, and endeavored to make them well. Now we make tools that treat people (their attention in particular) as a cash crop to be harvested. Everything is about "engagement" and the like. I prefer using tools that had effort spent on making them useful, not effort spent on "monetizing" the user.
I think the thing tech nerds do of trying to distinguish between "technical" and "non-technical" users is extremely arrogant, and in a way adjacent to the downright sociopathy of "monetizing" a user base. If you care about making something good, don't start down that road. That's the game--making good tools that help people do good work.
>I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
Maybe for older people who used it back then and have nostalgia for it, but I think at 35 even I'm too young to find that UI appealing for daily driving when linux has WMs/DEs targeted for minimalism, efficiency and productivity but in a modern way.
There are people who believe that KDE 3 was the perfect desktop. They forked it when KDE 4 was released (initial KDE 4 releases were really rough), called it the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). I actually really like modern Gnome but every once in a while I try out TDE and it does give me a nice cozy feeling, like looking at old album photos.
I have a friend who refuses to use anything other than CDE and still manages to compile and run it on modern Linux distros.
I have an older computer running Ubuntu with Unity 7 DE, I think it looks beautiful. It’s a computer that barely connects to the internet and I use for playing with electronics. I think that was the most intuitive DE on Linux.
Installed and activated Windows 7 yesterday on the laptop I was preparing to sell. Surprised to learn something my brain offloaded long time ago. We had Apple Glass in 2008 on Windows!
My PC is unfortunately on Windows 11, but I recently purchased StartAllBack which lets you replace the start menu with a Windows 7-era sensible one, and you can even change the Start icon and various chrome in the OS (the task bar, file explorer, etc) to revert back to Windows 7 style. Maybe I'm just nostalgic but it's made Windows 11 so much better.
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.
That is, until you try to use windows 11. And it gives you bing results instead of the option in control panel you want, even though you spelled it exactly.
It’s like you didn’t read the rest of my comment. However I can’t confirm. I wack that windows key on my keyboard and start typing all the time and can’t remember it ever opening the wrong thing.
I'd prefer Windows 2000, myself. Relatively light weight, no bling or junk in the UI. Windows XP was okay, but the default UI looked like a toy. I know you can turn it off, but most people didn't. We won't mention Vista...
i don't have a w11 supported machine, but when I see the OS in videos or screenshots, I always thought it looks surprisingly pleasant and fresh, compared to 10. Really miss Vista though, that one was amazing visually.
You probably do, I thought I didn’t but if you just disable the warning about TPM 2.0 with a simple command it lets you install it just fine. Had no problems for years now.
In terms of functionality, 8.1 isn't bad but I can't stand the flat square theme that could've dropped straight out of the DOS era. It's so ugly.
I understand why Aero didn't continue on in its Vista/7 form, but Metro swung way too far in the other direction. The Fluent look used by Windows 11 is a nice middleground that I wish 8, 8.1, and 10 could've adopted instead. Too bad the rest of 11 sucks.
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.
Things stopping to function perfectly because operating environment has changed drastically over a significant period of time is pretty much the polar opposite of planned obsolescence.
Even devices that don't suffer from planned obsolescence can and do become obsolete.
That’s not planned obsolescence. Your home network migrated to a new key exchange protocol that didn’t exist in 2011. That’s on you our your router manufacturer.
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.
If a device only supports 2.4Ghz, wouldn't it only see the 2.4 option? Just having a network available that the device's radios can't even see shouldn't break anything. (I'm personally leaning towards WPA3 being the problem)
> 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 . . ."
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 mean, I agree, and that is one of the reasons I left the Windows ecosystem. My partner has Windows on her work laptop and ... oof.
But still...
> I assume if you ship your new computer somewhere without Internet, you simply cannot use it?!
This is true of new Macs too, for the MDM enrollment check. The OOTB installer will not complete without internet access. Back in the days of Monterey you could "black hole" those DNS records, but not any more. No functional access to at least half-a-dozen Apple services and you cannot complete OS installation.
The road is bit longer when you decide to use Open Core Legacy Patcher.
I managed to install Sonoma or Sequoia on my 2011 mbp but it was barely usable - nearly every Apple application was broken due to lack of Metal support. So I've pick Manjaro and while every now and then Wifi stops working, it's bit more capable but nothing crazy tho since it's nearly 15 yo machine.
> and for whatever reason 2.4ghz only devices cant find the SSID unless you if there is a name conflict on the 5ghz frequency
Huh? Is this true? It doesn’t make intuitive sense to me—if the device doesn’t have a 5ghz radio I would expect it to be physically impossible for the 5ghz network to interfere.
It's called Band Steering and it messes up older devices. Its truely an L direction that the wifi industry has gone, its a reaction to overcrowding of the 2.4Ghz spectrum by automatically moving capable devices to the 5Ghz SSID
so happens that its not backwards compatible very well to 2.4Ghz only devices. Not because of the frequency itself but because of the band steering implementation from the router
I've had this issue too on older devices, until I made the SSIDs different by suffixing 2ghz and 5ghz to each one. I think I've had it happen both on an older Android and older MacBook but it was a while ago, could be misremembering.
I think enough of us were running dual-band networks sharing the same SSID back in the day that doing so now cannot be the entire reason for things not working.
> Huh? Is this true? It doesn’t make intuitive sense to me—if the device doesn’t have a 5ghz radio I would expect it to be physically impossible for the 5ghz network to interfere.
It's not an issue with the device itself, it's an issue with the device setup process.
For whatever reason, I assume it's easier in some common device platform, a lot of IoT devices do not use the SSID for discovering WiFi APs. Instead they connect directly to the BSSID (read: WiFi MAC) of the specific radio on the AP. These devices always rely on a phone app for setup, and the phone app has you select the WiFi network by the SSID name, but passes the BSSID to the device over Bluetooth.
When your phone is connected to the 5 GHz (or now 6 GHz) radio as would be normal for a modern device in a combined network, the BSSID it sees is invisible to the 2.4-only IoT device and thus it doesn't work unless you force your phone to only see the 2.4 GHz radio.
The problem also comes up if you have a larger network with multiple access points, set up a device, and then move it (or if your phone just happens to be hanging on to a more distant AP that the IoT device's puny antenna can't see).
It's been a stupid problem from the beginning, it'd be trivial to solve permanently in software if these device vendors would get their heads out of their collective asses, and yet the "you have to disable 5GHz" nonsense persists for the same reason as software vendors still insist on admin privileges for everything, any/any firewall rules, etc.
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 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.
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.
What issues did you have? I have a 2016 (catalina) and a 2017 MBP (ventura) and they connect to my ubiquiti AP (5G / WPA3) at least. Haven’t tried others in a long time. I do have completely separate 2.4 and 5 GHz SSIDs so that may be related.
I did have issues with these machines running Linux due to driver support (broadcom BCM43xx) but USB to ethernet worked fine.
A cheap linksys that has 2.4 and 5 separated is elusive to my 2011 iPad (and so are my AirPods Pro making the other wise beautiful screen on the iPad useless for watching movies at the gym) and the MacBook Pro won’t connect to school WiFi making it useless as a hand-down to my nephew.
No one at school knows anything technical about the WiFi as it’s supplied by a 3rd party.
I had to reinstall MacOS Lion manually recently, as Macs do not have a BIOS and require a MacOS environment to begin installing Windows. I was installing Windows on legacy Macs, because it gives me 30+ years of software and performs well, unlike MacOS (5 years software if lucky, unusably slow performance on older hardware). I intentionally did it all the hard way offline from a Windows host, so that I could replicate it without depending on someone else's flakey servers (which incidentally refused to serve me OS installer images)
I detest crummy Unix-style online stub installers and package managers, because the original downloads are always down when you need them, and it's much harder than it should be to force offline replicable reinstallation.
To my recollection on the machines that shipped with Lion (circa 2011) you’ll want to set up a protective MBR with the appropriate drive dimensions on the GPT, to get it to install windows like with boot camp.
To my recollection on machines with discrete GPUs this is what triggers the appropriate hardware configuration (BIOS boot, disabling the internal GPU and switching the MUX to only route via the AMD card)
Thank you very much for that! That might explain why one of the macbooks I installed Windows on seemed to have laggy screensavers, whereas the others (Air) seemed to work just fine.
I installed the MacOS Lion installer from a memory stick to the internal SSD (partition 1), Mac OS Lion itself to partition 2 (minimal size) and Win7 to partition 3 via Bootcamp, and it works well, aside from laggy screensavers on one of them, and losing around 10GB to the Mac Lion installer partition 1 (I don't know if there's a way to force it to install MacOS to 1x partition, rather than 2x, while fully offline)
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.
i no longer use luxurious wood, linen, and metal textures. these did serve a purpose at the time, though. skeumorphic design was a guidepost for a far less digital-literate user.
One of the early DAWs (long forgot the name of it) had an interface that recreated the look of a flatbed with animated reels. It ran on an old monochrome green/black monitor. I saw this in the mid-90s and was already used to seeing a waveform in timelines, so this thing really felt ancient. Apparently, the makers felt sound editors would be unable to grasp a new interface???
Interesting thing though, in some pretty extensive testing I've found that two versions of the same plugin[1] get very different opinions on sound quality depending on whether or not I use the skeupmorphic interface or a "flat" one drawn with normal toolkit graphics (I don't have a screenshot but think in terms of Ableton's vector graphics knobs).
Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.
If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?
Funny! Users see knobs and think that it sounds better!
Like @walrah says, knobs don't obviously fit mouse movements. I could imagine a touch screen version that makes sense. Sliders match more closely. Little up/down arrows are too small. Utilizing the scroll wheel could make sense.
Finally, a digital number would be easier to read at a glance.
Still, I like analog knobs (sliders are ok). I bought a little Arturia keyboard with ten knobs. Which I haven't figured out how to assign...
I remember researching X11 Input Extensions, when KNOB was a device category. Used those on a VAX.
> Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.
I mean, you know that objectively there is no difference, so to me this would seem like a good filter for what part of your userbase isn't worth listening to their opinions on sound quality. Sort of like "audiophiles" who insist that their $4000 gold plated power cables make things sound better. If you're just trying to shamelessly sell them something you dive in full force, if you actually care about making an objectively better product you give their opinion the lack of respect it deserves.
> If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?
Sliders. Spinners. Anything that can be cleanly interacted with using the inputs available on a computer. Knobs are wonderful in the real world. Virtual knobs I'm operating with a mouse or touch input (screen or pad) suck.
I love all the knobs on my eurorack gear but I hate having to interact with the virtual knobs on the emulated forms of them in VCV Rack. Especially if they don't have clear markers on them indicating position. I own multiple MIDI controllers that are more or less just a bank of knobs specifically to make these things usable.
When I got into developing audio plugins a while ago (wow, what, 20 years ago) the library I used had rotary knobs that needed a rotary mouse motion to control them, although it had the nice feature that if you clicked on the knob the further you dragged away the slower the knob moved.
Since then I've switched to a library where even with rotary knobs you drag up and down to adjust them, which seems easier for most folk.
The advantage that rotary knob widgets have is that they are compact and you can see instantly what the value is set to.
I wouldn't even consider a spinner. They're utterly contentless.
> 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.
It was one of the worst laptops I have ever owned. The screen died right after the warranty expired. It would take multiple reboot to get the HDMI to properly register so I could use it as a desktop ... to the point I said fuck it and just tossed it.
There's gotta be a bit more subtlety going on here. DHCP leases include a lifetime:
$ ip address show dev br0 | grep -m 1 valid_lft
valid_lft 69133sec preferred_lft 69133sec
It's possible that older versions of macOS persisted the lease details across reboots and reused unexpired leases on subsequent network reconnections.
I am also fairly sure that I have never personally seen any evidence of any OS doing this, including macOS, including when it was still called Mac OS X. I suspect macOS simply brings up its networking stack earlier in the boot process, so the network connection is more likely to be ready and waiting by the time the desktop loads.
Using the same lease is better but still could cause IP conflict if the lease was revoked and reused (though I guess that’s much rarer)
that said I do agree with you that the behaviour was probably not as described or at least not present in current systems because it would wreak havoc on public wifi etc
I’ve never dhcp being any sort of bottleneck so I hope their just doing the regular dhcp thing
If they implemented it well, they could have just sent an arp and check if it was already taken.
Then again, I haven't ever been limited by the speed of DHCP servers... Windows is just dog-slow for a lot of things, so yeah, macos just "feels better" generally. I doubt it was related to just this IP thing.
> 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?
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 early packages could really mess up Windows - especially on non-English versions. Later on there were some really good ones around like XPize or Vize for XP and Vista respectively.
Theming Windows was something I always appreciated but that ended by the time I've got 7. Instead I've opted for making workflow bit more smoother with some additional programs like Launchpad and small GKrellM-like sidebar.
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.
Peak UI / UX was some years ago, exactly when depends on any given persons particular preference.
What we have now is akin to a Sheperd tone[1], where the design has to get intentionally worse so that corps. can then go on to boast about how the new design in following years is better than ever, but on the whole no real progress is made.
1. A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
> 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.
> people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.
What backslash? Only backslash I remember is when flat design was introduced. The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.
> The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.
You're just proving my point. Notice how all of these were posted after Zune/Metro/Windows Phone/8/whatever it's called flat design craziness started.
Just look at this quote from Gruber's blog post:
...these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design. They’re unnecessary in print...
No shit, guess what also wasn't needed in print: Buttons to be pressed and radioboxes to be selected. The whole fad just built on "old design is old and designers need to be employed".
Apple had an internal clash over which design direction they should go after the release of Windows 8 but every user rightfully hated Windows 8 flat design. The resonance to skeuomorphism was very positive back then.
I don't know when Windows 8 was released, but by 2012-2013, skeuomorphic design had become very unpopular, tacky even. See the links I included in response to sibling comment.
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.
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.
Most useful apps refuse to run? I have an iPad Pro from 2016 and it runs everything I throw at it. Perhaps the air’s weaker hardware was always destined to struggle as time moves on. That being said I also have an iPad from 2011 which I can still use as a Spotify machine.
But true, they don’t have the flexibility of a laptop. They are however the longest lasting tablets I’m aware of.
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.
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.
iPad 3rd gen can be downgraded to iOS 8 (which runs slightly better than iOS 9), and dual-booting to iOS 6 is also doable (and actually can run more apps than later versions thanks to the 3rd party mods).
There's a community around /r/LegacyJailbreak dedicated to running old iOS devices.
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".
As I recall, the PPC machines (like the Power Mac G5) never had EFI of any kind, and the early Intel Macs (including the Mac Pro) all had 32-but EFI even after the processors went 64-bit. I don't recall any of those Macs ever being switched from 32-bit EFI to 64-bit (U)EFI with a firmware update, or vice versa. It was a bit of a pain point because Linux was not initially ready to run a 64-bit kernel on top of 32-bit EFI, but that got resolved on the Linux side and I don't recall anything about Apple's firmware updates making that harder.
I must be mixing up my details, but I did think it was one of the first gen cheese graters.
I did have it booting Linux before upstream officially supported it. I remember using patches from infradead
You may very well be correct, Maybe it wasn't EFI, however they absolutely did ship an update that broke my existing installs, until upstream linux shipped an update, so your memory aligns more than mine does.
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.
Sure, but I get my OS upgrades from the System Settings app now, what was stopping me from doing that in the early 2010s?
And yes, the Mac App Store was brand new, what better way to boost engagement than to move a fairly standard and typical function into it even though it was unrelated? Sounds like a good way to trick people into using your new thing. Like a boost, to engagement, one could say.
The blocker was that they were still charging money for new OS versions at that time. System Preferences didn't have a payment processing system, the App Store did.
There's some wires getting crossed here. Sure, minor maintenance releases were delivered this way, but up until 10.7 the only way to upgrade to a new 10.x release (major) was the DVD purchased from Apple*. I have all my purchased boxed OS X releases from 10.0 through 10.6 still sitting on the shelf.
Major OS upgrades weren't free until the release of 10.9. 10.7 was first version you could buy as a download through the App Store.
* 10.1 was an odd release, in that re-sellers got given a limited amount of free upgrade DVDs to hand out, but did eventually retail for 20 bucks IIRC. Regardless, DVD was still the only option.
"Use a web browser for older versions" was not working for me the other day, though I now cannot remember if it was when I was dealing with a Safari version with old/unusable SSL. I was able to load the webpage, though, so SSL was working there, and therefore something was different about the download links than the page itself.
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?
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.
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.
It's not just the transparency (and distracting highlights and slow animations and inexpressive icons), but also the floating controls and other elements that make it harder to discern what is content and what is UI chrome/controls, not to mention the associated layout bugs.
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.
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!
That sounds like a pretty good way of organizing honestly. As long as you can remember where things are more-or-less within the individual screens, if you have a lot of apps installed and you have some that are only occasionally used, scrolling until you get to the color is a pretty easy way to narrow down where your target. I have some apps installed that I rarely use that I'd be more likely to remember what the icon looks like than the name of the app to search for it by text.
I heard that The Simpsons were made yellow because it stands out the most when quickly flipping through channels.
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.
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.
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.
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"...
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
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.
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.
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 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 have a 2008 Mac Pro that was my daily driver for video and audio production for 16 years before I had to give up on it. The only real reason I had to give up on it was that I couldn't upgrade the software and all the certs were expiring. I was using it for a network music server as well, until Apple broke iTunes home sharing functionality. It's sitting in the hall in my basement. The hardware still functions perfectly. It had four hard drives in it, and I've got all that stuff on a Synology now. It remains the most reliable computer I have ever owned. It literally only was ever off when there was a power outage. I might wind up installing Linux on it for my kids but we already have several little i5 NUCs that are far faster and quieter and easier on our electric bill, so I'm not sure there's much point to that.
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 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 have a collection of Macs from the 2000s, including the iBook G4 and the iMac G4. The iBook G4 still connects to wi-fi, and I've seen this update prompt on my iMac G4 (which is connected to Wi-Fi using a mini wireless access point).
I use my iMac G4 to play songs on iTunes, I keep my music library on a server with Samba installed and I mount the volume with the files. I love the Cover Flow design from older iTunes. I can also push songs to my iPod this way.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
I was messing around with an iBook G4 a year ago or so, and yeah things work "fine". You need to update the certs but otherwise it just works. I mostly used it to sync an old iPod nano since it's the only mac I have and I refuse to use windows, but browsing the internet "worked" on websites that aren't too demanding. I got 4chan to work fine, and youtube loaded but the playback was terrible.
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
Well, to be more specific, "modern internet/web". Most of the applications that ran on a Windows XP computers still run on a Windows XP computer without hiccups, unless they do a lot of network connectivity for the functionality.
And no one can even give a concrete answer why root certificates need expiration dates. It's just because reasons.
IMO the whole PKI thing is a terrible idea to begin with. It would make much more sense to tie the trust in TLS to DNS somehow, since the certificates themselves depend on domains anyway. Then you would only have a single root of trust, and that would be your DNS provider (or the root servers). And nothing will expire ever again.
Root certificates need expiration dates for the same reason that LetsEncrypt certs need an expiration date: risk of cert compromise and forgery increases over time.
Over a long enough timeline, there will be vulns discovered in so much of the software that guards the CA certs in RAM
> risk of cert compromise and forgery increases over time.
And what if the certificate is compromised before it expires? Right, there's a revocation mechanism for that. So why expire them then if they can be revoked anyway IF they get compromised?
The reason why domain TLS certificates expire is that domains can change owners. It makes sense that it should not be possible for someone to buy a domain for one year, get a non-expiring TLS certificate issued for it, and then have the ability to MitM its traffic if it ever gets bought by someone else later.
Domain certificates are sent as part of the connection handshake, so them expiring is unnoticeable for the end users. However, root certificates rely on the OS getting updates forever, which is unsustainable. Some systems lack the ability to install user-provided root CAs altogether, and some (Android) do allow it but treat them as second-class.
Because the most dangerous secret is one that has been compromised and you don’t know it. This sets a time limit for their usefulness. Sometimes the stories about terrible default choices that are insecure sink in and architects choose a better path.
Also, details about the certs and the standards for them change over time. This makes it easier for the browser venders (via the CA forum) to force cert providers to update over time.
You're talking about it like they change by the force of nature, not because humans change them.
The revocation mechanism is basically just a list of revoked certificates. Without expiration dates, those lists will grow infinitely.
The instant we bound encrypted connections with identity we failed. And decades later we're still living with the mistake.
I'm completely serious when we need to abandon the ID verification part of certificates. That's an entirely separate problem from encryption protocol. An encryption protocol needs absolutely no expiration date, it's useful until it's broken, and no one can predict that. Identity should be verified in a separate path.
Certificates need expiration dates to be able to garbage collect certificate revocation lists.
Do certificate revocation lists need to keep including certificates that have long since expired? I don't see why root certificates need to expire as long as the certificates signed by those roots all have reasonable expiration windows, unless someone is doing something strange about trusting formerly-valid certificates, or not checking root certificates against revocation lists.
Right, because DNS entries never expire.
Of course they do, they have to. But it's okay for things that are sent to you over the network to expire. It's not okay for things built into your potentially abandoned OS to expire.
> Of course they do, they have to.
Why do they have to?
(This will also tell you why certs in your OS need to expire.)
Because domains change owners.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074127
More specifically: because they cannot be revoked, they need to expire. Same with root certs.
> 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?
Apple moved it there in macOS Sequoia, from Utilities, because they were worried it would be confused with the Passwords app. Apple reminds you that you're actually looking for the Passwords app at every turn:
https://support.apple.com/guide/keychain-access/what-is-keyc...command-space... type "keychain access"
command+shift+g
Then
s<tab>/l<tab>/cores<tab>/a<tab>
Simple!
However, while Spotlight works well when you know what you are looking for, it can still be useful to navigate the filesystem, and it's too bad that Apple hides tools in relatively obscure locations rather than somewhere like /Applications/Utilities.
> 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?
can look for macos downloader scripts in github. I noticed the readme here shares some URLs though I'm not sure if they still work https://github.com/Comp-Labs/Download-macOS
https://github.com/chris1111/Download_Install_macOS could also be another option.
I know I used one of the macos downloaders from github before, I just forget which one though.
Thanks!
If you have High Sierra on USB, it installs just fine. You need a High Sierra machine to make the USB stick, but once you have one, its simple to reinstall.
> 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 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.
GNOME 2/MATE isn't quite to my taste for my personal use, but it is cozy in a way that post-3.0 versions aren't.
For me it's the difference between "this is a computer" vs "this is a computer trying to be a cell phone". I think that's what everything from the last 15yr is trying to be--a phone. And not everything is a phone. On a computer we have a keyboard and a mouse, which are much, much more precise tools than vague gestures on a touchscreen.
EDIT: I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is basically everything that's wrong with the computer(-adjacent) industry. We can appreciate the problem statement by asking "why would anyone want to make a computer be a phone?" The answer is a terminal case of a particularly defensive form of groupthink. It goes something like this:
(1) "everyone is talking about the iPhone" (2) "i need to feel relevant, ergo i must make phone noises too"
then they rub these two neurons together, and since it's the only two they got it isn't hard for them, and this process repeats a few generations and like a nuclear chain reaction soon enough the entire industry is trying to make everything be a fucking phone.
It shouldn't be like that.
EDIT2: As a species we don't play these games with other tools. Cars--some super early attempts had weird shit like tillers for steering but we quickly outgrew that idea and settled on the steering wheel, levers for the other hand, and pedals for the feet. Same with airplanes and tracked vehicles (bulldozers, tanks, etc). Same with machine tools. This stupid game people are playing with computer interfaces these days is fundamentally inhuman.
It's so obvious now that you wrote it, but it never occurred to me as such. New desktops, be it macOS, Gnome, Win.. they all look like damn phones and not computers.
If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers. When/if you later learn to use a desktop, it being like a smartphone makes it familiar.
Sucks for us geezers that learned things the other way around though!
> If you're under 25ish
People seem to forget that "smartphones" (in the post-iPhone sense) are barely old enough to drive. The first iPhone came out in 2007, android doesn't drop till the following year, and the first iPad doesn't come out till 2010.
If you were a kid with a video-playing smartphone before about 2012, your parents were pretty damn well off, and likely early adopters too
Smart devices have been around a lot longer than that. I was using a palm pilot in the 90s as a teen.
I don't think that helps support the argument, though. Despite using a stylus-driven touchscreen, the Palm Pilot UI had a lot more in common with the desktop UIs of the 90s than with today's smartphone UIs or even today's smartphone-tainted desktop UIs.
Palm pilots had ui/ux more closely resembling today’s smart phones than you think. The swiping keyboards, for example, more closely resemble the script used for fast typing on a palm pilot. The ui was meant for touch, not for precision. At least the games didn’t have ads back then.
Today's swiping keyboards are nothing like the original Graffiti or Graffiti 2. Those used shapes/gestures derived from the actual letter shapes, while the swiping gestures supported by the on-screen keyboards of today rely on gestures derived from the QWERTY layout of the on-screen keyboard. Because both were simplifications of the completely different input methods they were emulating: pen vs keyboard.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Palm Pilot UI (all the parts that were actually on the screen instead of below it in the dedicated writing area) looks thoroughly 90s: the basic buttons, drop-down boxes, tabs and dialog box layouts, scrollbars that aren't trying to hide from you. The main UI elements missing from the Palm Pilot that were present in eg. 90s Mac OS or Windows are the free form desktop layout (instead of the smartphone-like app launcher grid), and the persistent on-screen menu bar or taskbar.
The Palm Pilot UI was unquestionably designed around the assumption of higher precision than today's touch-oriented UIs. The stylus was not considered optional. The lack of capacitive touch sensing for gesture recognition meant the UI was much more reliant on precise button taps where today's smartphones would use swipes and other gestures for stuff like scrolling or "back".
Um. Swiping is almost exactly like the gesture letter shapes, except now they are word shapes. Swiping “shape” is always the same gesture on the keyboard, you can learn these gestures and type really fast.
To your second paragraph: of course it looks “throughly 90’s”. It was the 90’s. Did an LLM tell you to say this? I have no idea what scroll bars have to do with anything. I can tell you they were a pain to use. That hasn’t changed.
To your third paragraph: the stylus wasn’t optional. They didn’t just “lack” capacitive screens. It didn’t exist yet at scale. This was what Apple brought to the market. You couldn’t really have them if you wanted them. That being said, I used these interfaces while walking, riding in a car, and sitting still. I never had trouble tapping the right thing because the buttons were huge in the UI.
You do bring up a good point about there not really being swipe gestures to go “back”. I don’t use them today, so I’m not as familiar with that type of behavior other than to say it is really annoying when done by accident, usually while picking up the device.
>If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers
Circa 2004, when 25 year olds would probably be migrated out of diapers, smartphones were palm treos and Sony Ericsson K700s. I don't think they would be great distractions for kids, there certainly wouldn't be any endless Spiderman/Elsa YouTube to lock them in.
More like ~18 and under. The post-2007 zoomers and nearly all alphites are ipad kids, but that drops off dramatically as you get to the older zoomer segment and millennials.
At least, in my anecdotal experience.
Regarding your second edit, there was 100 years of automobile development (or more, depending on how far back you consider things to be in the lineage of a car, vs the predecessors of them) before the first car had a steering wheel. It's just ahistorical to say we quickly outgrew the tiller. We're less than 100 years from the first emergence of digital computers and screens, let alone putting those two together and needing an interface on them.
I think your broader point is accurate, but computers aren't old enough yet to really compare the evolution of their interfaces to other technologies.
Once we settled on the steering wheel, though, we didn't keep trying to make tillers work. That's what I was trying to get at--in other examples of human-machine interfaces we generally don't regress once we've figured it out. But with computers that's exactly what we're doing.
Yeah but we can take lessons from that 100 years of car experience of how humans interact with objects and apply a lot of it to computers. Its not like we are starting from scratch like we were 200 years ago.
They weren't starting from scratch 200 years ago either. Tillers were standard in boats for thousands of years, it was a perfectly reasonable way to steer a vehicle.
Likewise, at first a purely textual interface was a perfectly reasonable way to interact with a computer terminal, but the addition of mice changed the game, as did higher resolution displays and widespread adoption of touchscreens. We're 80 years into screens, 60 years into computer mice, and 20 years into touchscreens. Clearly lots of interface changes are just to keep the designers at a company busy, but it's also silly to be confident that we've nailed UX/UI standards.
what would you say makes a UI look as if it's for a computer (genuine)? aside from purely(!) cosmetic things, like the skin on the windows 11 taskbar vs. 10. i think to windows <= xp, or tiling window managers (bar hyprland, probably) as the two most popular evolutions of mouse- vs. keyboard-based UIs (plan 9 probably fits well under the former, too). i guess i'd prefer if macos looked like dwm, but i wonder what else would need to change for the friction i feel with it to disappear.
Font rendering with the same hinting as the system you grew up with. Whitespace in the same proportions.
Can't learn an evolution of the UI paradigm if you subconsciously feel your eyes are working wrong.
Hence, the person afraid of the computer changing who was described upthread.
(I was entirely surrounded by such cases when learning computing. So it was a moral and emotional battle at every step besides the sheer figuring things out - on dated, semi-functional miracles of engineering.
Now consider how, them people somewhere who "keep changing da computah", it's their job. It's us, in fact. And we're more knowledgeable, better organized, and make more than the average user. Plus chances are we're an entirely different part of the globe now where we follow an entirely different culture from our consumers, so things with the baseline mutual comprehensibility are so-so at best.
And... that's always been the case? And it's what's been giving our computerphobe friends all the right to be afraid. What reason does a FAANG dev even have, to care about your Grandma's eyesight, user experience, or sanity? Or yours? They gotz plenty to care about already, as exhibited by all the thoughtful comments poured into this site.)
Information/control density.
These massive ""finger-friendly"" buttons don't make any sense on a traditional desktop with a mouse, but it makes a ton of sense when you realize the designers were likely designing for mobile and/or touchscreen integration at the same time.
Your Honour, the prosecution submits "Windows 10 Redesigned Control Panel" into evidence as exhibit 'A'.
A system which embraces the abilities of the mouse and keyboard without pandering to the limitations of the touchscreen. To wit, you have the ability, with a 3 button mouse + scroll wheel, to trivially select any nearby point in 3-space and label it with any one of 3 colors. More if you also allow your other hand to operate a keyboard. I dare you to attempt this with a touchscreen. I doubledare you motherfucker. Say what again.
I've settled on XFCE. It just works. You have to turn too many knobs to make it work on weird DPI / screen sizes, but other than that, it's fine.
Recently, I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
I kind of feel like the start menu + task bar were a mistake now.
It is nice having the bluetooth + network icon somewhere accessible, but maybe <ctrl>-space should just pop up a thing that lets you type program names + also temporarily hide all windows over 10% of the screen or something? That'd solve the problem of trying to find program manager to run a second program. Also, the windows in windows approach of program manager wasn't great. Still, it's better than most things out there these days. The icons are so... clean.
XFCE is also my go to. But I have moved on from caring too much about desktop environments as long as they don't get in the way. I went through a phase of trying pure openbox and all kinds of things and settled on XFCE. It doesn't do everything like I want but that's fine. I mostly open a terminal, a browser, thunderbird, some programming environment and a latex editor these days.
In my opinion, the versions of Mac OS with the Platinum theme (8, 8.5, 9) have aged quite gracefully. It's clearly not modern, but it also doesn't feel particularly old or kludgy or anything, and it's quite clean relative to modern desktops.
Same as Windows 3.1, and Windows 95, up to 2000. After some point computers began to be optimized for a non-technical person and here we go... Ads, auto-updates, pop-ups, bright colors, all this fucking desktop circus.
The older OS's with their simple interfaces and clear buttons were easier for non-technical people as well. I'm not certain who they're really optimising for now, exactly... shareholders?
Large teams of designers that need to justify their existence by changing things
Nah, that's a cop out answer. Can't blame everything on shareholders when all the major Linux DEs do the same.
> a non-technical person
Otherizing your users like this IS THE PROBLEM. Every technologist was once a "nontechnical person" (for whatever definition of that useless term you like) who learned and grew and thereby became "technical". The very minute you start thinking of your users in these terms you have lost the entire fucking game.
I broadly agree with your point, but I think the causal root of the problem is this industry arrogantly treats it's users as, to quote Mark Zuckerberg, "dumb fucks." We didn't always do this. It used to be better.
Not sure I understand you - what game, market capture? There are environments that remain more or less sane (e.g., FreeBSD, Xfce, etc) that don't play this game, if I got you right. I guess treating users so helps capture more of the market share, but it looks like there's only so much dumbfuckery one can inject into the environment until the curve begins to drop and dumb fucks themselves begin to run.
Philips just screwed up my TV. They've updated the firmware (of course, it was automated) to make home screen more of a dumb fucking experience with everything animated and self-playing movies jumping out at you for no reason, and so on... But the interface is now completely unusable - literally can't even launch YouTube. No amount of resetting helps. They also hid all the previous firmwares and I can't even roll back from a USB stick. I am a dumb fuck when it comes to TVs. And I will most likely be considering another brand next time.
I don't know how being empathetic to users correlates with market dominance, but I'd like to believe that doing sociopathic things like putting ads in the start menu or what you've described with your TV firmware would have a negative impact on adoption. At least that's how it should work in a sane market? But the market can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent.
I think Apple struck a good balance for a while--and to some extent still does--at least in the OS X era of treating users with a bit of respect. Not trying to make an interface for "power users" or "nontechnical users" but instead just making one for "computer users".
It used to be that we made tools for people, and endeavored to make them well. Now we make tools that treat people (their attention in particular) as a cash crop to be harvested. Everything is about "engagement" and the like. I prefer using tools that had effort spent on making them useful, not effort spent on "monetizing" the user.
I think the thing tech nerds do of trying to distinguish between "technical" and "non-technical" users is extremely arrogant, and in a way adjacent to the downright sociopathy of "monetizing" a user base. If you care about making something good, don't start down that road. That's the game--making good tools that help people do good work.
>I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
Maybe for older people who used it back then and have nostalgia for it, but I think at 35 even I'm too young to find that UI appealing for daily driving when linux has WMs/DEs targeted for minimalism, efficiency and productivity but in a modern way.
There are people who believe that KDE 3 was the perfect desktop. They forked it when KDE 4 was released (initial KDE 4 releases were really rough), called it the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). I actually really like modern Gnome but every once in a while I try out TDE and it does give me a nice cozy feeling, like looking at old album photos.
I have a friend who refuses to use anything other than CDE and still manages to compile and run it on modern Linux distros.
I have an older computer running Ubuntu with Unity 7 DE, I think it looks beautiful. It’s a computer that barely connects to the internet and I use for playing with electronics. I think that was the most intuitive DE on Linux.
Installed and activated Windows 7 yesterday on the laptop I was preparing to sell. Surprised to learn something my brain offloaded long time ago. We had Apple Glass in 2008 on Windows!
My PC is unfortunately on Windows 11, but I recently purchased StartAllBack which lets you replace the start menu with a Windows 7-era sensible one, and you can even change the Start icon and various chrome in the OS (the task bar, file explorer, etc) to revert back to Windows 7 style. Maybe I'm just nostalgic but it's made Windows 11 so much better.
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.
That is, until you try to use windows 11. And it gives you bing results instead of the option in control panel you want, even though you spelled it exactly.
I've never had this happen to me and I've daily driven Windows 11 for some years now. Can you give an example?
It’s like you didn’t read the rest of my comment. However I can’t confirm. I wack that windows key on my keyboard and start typing all the time and can’t remember it ever opening the wrong thing.
I'd prefer Windows 2000, myself. Relatively light weight, no bling or junk in the UI. Windows XP was okay, but the default UI looked like a toy. I know you can turn it off, but most people didn't. We won't mention Vista...
i don't have a w11 supported machine, but when I see the OS in videos or screenshots, I always thought it looks surprisingly pleasant and fresh, compared to 10. Really miss Vista though, that one was amazing visually.
You probably do, I thought I didn’t but if you just disable the warning about TPM 2.0 with a simple command it lets you install it just fine. Had no problems for years now.
Have you ever used Windows 8.1? With a classic start button app the UI layout is the good Windows 7 one with the "modern" Windows appearance.
In terms of functionality, 8.1 isn't bad but I can't stand the flat square theme that could've dropped straight out of the DOS era. It's so ugly.
I understand why Aero didn't continue on in its Vista/7 form, but Metro swung way too far in the other direction. The Fluent look used by Windows 11 is a nice middleground that I wish 8, 8.1, and 10 could've adopted instead. Too bad the rest of 11 sucks.
Of course, it was fine. I was real glad they removed the full screen start menu at the time. I still prefer the look of 11.
>but windows 7 looks extremely dated to me now.
This is a highly subjective thing.
This can be a relevant reminder at times, but based on their phrasing, I think they’re aware:
> Personally I prefer […] looks extremely dated to me now.
Compare to the GP comment, for instance, where this may still be the case but is less clear from phrasing:
> They're just so much more pleasant
Indeed, I tried to not repeat their mistake of sounding like you’re speaking in objective terms.
That’s my point. They were stating it like it was objective, so I countered with my subjective opinion.
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.
Things stopping to function perfectly because operating environment has changed drastically over a significant period of time is pretty much the polar opposite of planned obsolescence.
Even devices that don't suffer from planned obsolescence can and do become obsolete.
That’s not planned obsolescence. Your home network migrated to a new key exchange protocol that didn’t exist in 2011. That’s on you our your router manufacturer.
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.
I assume that's what
- Fall back to old IOT SSID with ancient protocols
meant 2.4G and not WPA3.
Probably this- my IOT network forces 2.4GHz, whereas my WPA2 and WPA3 networks both use 2.4 and 5GHz on the same SSID.
If a device only supports 2.4Ghz, wouldn't it only see the 2.4 option? Just having a network available that the device's radios can't even see shouldn't break anything. (I'm personally leaning towards WPA3 being the problem)
> 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
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.
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 mean, I agree, and that is one of the reasons I left the Windows ecosystem. My partner has Windows on her work laptop and ... oof.
But still...
> I assume if you ship your new computer somewhere without Internet, you simply cannot use it?!
This is true of new Macs too, for the MDM enrollment check. The OOTB installer will not complete without internet access. Back in the days of Monterey you could "black hole" those DNS records, but not any more. No functional access to at least half-a-dozen Apple services and you cannot complete OS installation.
The road is bit longer when you decide to use Open Core Legacy Patcher.
I managed to install Sonoma or Sequoia on my 2011 mbp but it was barely usable - nearly every Apple application was broken due to lack of Metal support. So I've pick Manjaro and while every now and then Wifi stops working, it's bit more capable but nothing crazy tho since it's nearly 15 yo machine.
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.
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
> and for whatever reason 2.4ghz only devices cant find the SSID unless you if there is a name conflict on the 5ghz frequency
Huh? Is this true? It doesn’t make intuitive sense to me—if the device doesn’t have a 5ghz radio I would expect it to be physically impossible for the 5ghz network to interfere.
It's called Band Steering and it messes up older devices. Its truely an L direction that the wifi industry has gone, its a reaction to overcrowding of the 2.4Ghz spectrum by automatically moving capable devices to the 5Ghz SSID
so happens that its not backwards compatible very well to 2.4Ghz only devices. Not because of the frequency itself but because of the band steering implementation from the router
Can you explain? Is the router not actually sending out the 2.4Ghz network, or sending it at too low power?
its complex, I've read about why it messes them up, but I'd have to recommend looking up a primary source with the knowledge of the protocol name now
I've had this issue too on older devices, until I made the SSIDs different by suffixing 2ghz and 5ghz to each one. I think I've had it happen both on an older Android and older MacBook but it was a while ago, could be misremembering.
I think enough of us were running dual-band networks sharing the same SSID back in the day that doing so now cannot be the entire reason for things not working.
"band steering" implementation from the router side is the issue
> Huh? Is this true? It doesn’t make intuitive sense to me—if the device doesn’t have a 5ghz radio I would expect it to be physically impossible for the 5ghz network to interfere.
It's not an issue with the device itself, it's an issue with the device setup process.
For whatever reason, I assume it's easier in some common device platform, a lot of IoT devices do not use the SSID for discovering WiFi APs. Instead they connect directly to the BSSID (read: WiFi MAC) of the specific radio on the AP. These devices always rely on a phone app for setup, and the phone app has you select the WiFi network by the SSID name, but passes the BSSID to the device over Bluetooth.
When your phone is connected to the 5 GHz (or now 6 GHz) radio as would be normal for a modern device in a combined network, the BSSID it sees is invisible to the 2.4-only IoT device and thus it doesn't work unless you force your phone to only see the 2.4 GHz radio.
The problem also comes up if you have a larger network with multiple access points, set up a device, and then move it (or if your phone just happens to be hanging on to a more distant AP that the IoT device's puny antenna can't see).
It's been a stupid problem from the beginning, it'd be trivial to solve permanently in software if these device vendors would get their heads out of their collective asses, and yet the "you have to disable 5GHz" nonsense persists for the same reason as software vendors still insist on admin privileges for everything, any/any firewall rules, etc.
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.
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.
Temporarily disable dual-band wifi and go to 2.4. Temporarly open the network with no WPA - should be good to go
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.
I have an old iPad and a not that old MacBook Pro maybe 2017?) which both are almost useless as they cannot connect to many WiFi routers.
Any work arounds?
What issues did you have? I have a 2016 (catalina) and a 2017 MBP (ventura) and they connect to my ubiquiti AP (5G / WPA3) at least. Haven’t tried others in a long time. I do have completely separate 2.4 and 5 GHz SSIDs so that may be related.
I did have issues with these machines running Linux due to driver support (broadcom BCM43xx) but USB to ethernet worked fine.
A cheap linksys that has 2.4 and 5 separated is elusive to my 2011 iPad (and so are my AirPods Pro making the other wise beautiful screen on the iPad useless for watching movies at the gym) and the MacBook Pro won’t connect to school WiFi making it useless as a hand-down to my nephew.
No one at school knows anything technical about the WiFi as it’s supplied by a 3rd party.
Both are running latest available software.
That era of macOS had a kind of clarity and restraint that’s hard to describe
I had to reinstall MacOS Lion manually recently, as Macs do not have a BIOS and require a MacOS environment to begin installing Windows. I was installing Windows on legacy Macs, because it gives me 30+ years of software and performs well, unlike MacOS (5 years software if lucky, unusably slow performance on older hardware). I intentionally did it all the hard way offline from a Windows host, so that I could replicate it without depending on someone else's flakey servers (which incidentally refused to serve me OS installer images)
I detest crummy Unix-style online stub installers and package managers, because the original downloads are always down when you need them, and it's much harder than it should be to force offline replicable reinstallation.
To my recollection on the machines that shipped with Lion (circa 2011) you’ll want to set up a protective MBR with the appropriate drive dimensions on the GPT, to get it to install windows like with boot camp.
To my recollection on machines with discrete GPUs this is what triggers the appropriate hardware configuration (BIOS boot, disabling the internal GPU and switching the MUX to only route via the AMD card)
But I do recall getting the internal GPU working with this trick https://github.com/0xbb/apple_set_os.efi
Thank you very much for that! That might explain why one of the macbooks I installed Windows on seemed to have laggy screensavers, whereas the others (Air) seemed to work just fine.
I installed the MacOS Lion installer from a memory stick to the internal SSD (partition 1), Mac OS Lion itself to partition 2 (minimal size) and Win7 to partition 3 via Bootcamp, and it works well, aside from laggy screensavers on one of them, and losing around 10GB to the Mac Lion installer partition 1 (I don't know if there's a way to force it to install MacOS to 1x partition, rather than 2x, while fully offline)
It was designed to hydrate the soul.
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.
Exactly!
i no longer use luxurious wood, linen, and metal textures. these did serve a purpose at the time, though. skeumorphic design was a guidepost for a far less digital-literate user.
One of the early DAWs (long forgot the name of it) had an interface that recreated the look of a flatbed with animated reels. It ran on an old monochrome green/black monitor. I saw this in the mid-90s and was already used to seeing a waveform in timelines, so this thing really felt ancient. Apparently, the makers felt sound editors would be unable to grasp a new interface???
Isn't it a thing for DAW developers to strive for a real-world-looking interface? What I hate is knob re-creations!
Interesting thing though, in some pretty extensive testing I've found that two versions of the same plugin[1] get very different opinions on sound quality depending on whether or not I use the skeupmorphic interface or a "flat" one drawn with normal toolkit graphics (I don't have a screenshot but think in terms of Ableton's vector graphics knobs).
Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.
If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?
[1] https://gjcp.net/plugins/peacock/
Funny! Users see knobs and think that it sounds better!
Like @walrah says, knobs don't obviously fit mouse movements. I could imagine a touch screen version that makes sense. Sliders match more closely. Little up/down arrows are too small. Utilizing the scroll wheel could make sense.
Finally, a digital number would be easier to read at a glance.
Still, I like analog knobs (sliders are ok). I bought a little Arturia keyboard with ten knobs. Which I haven't figured out how to assign...
I remember researching X11 Input Extensions, when KNOB was a device category. Used those on a VAX.
> Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.
I mean, you know that objectively there is no difference, so to me this would seem like a good filter for what part of your userbase isn't worth listening to their opinions on sound quality. Sort of like "audiophiles" who insist that their $4000 gold plated power cables make things sound better. If you're just trying to shamelessly sell them something you dive in full force, if you actually care about making an objectively better product you give their opinion the lack of respect it deserves.
> If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?
Sliders. Spinners. Anything that can be cleanly interacted with using the inputs available on a computer. Knobs are wonderful in the real world. Virtual knobs I'm operating with a mouse or touch input (screen or pad) suck.
I love all the knobs on my eurorack gear but I hate having to interact with the virtual knobs on the emulated forms of them in VCV Rack. Especially if they don't have clear markers on them indicating position. I own multiple MIDI controllers that are more or less just a bank of knobs specifically to make these things usable.
When I got into developing audio plugins a while ago (wow, what, 20 years ago) the library I used had rotary knobs that needed a rotary mouse motion to control them, although it had the nice feature that if you clicked on the knob the further you dragged away the slower the knob moved.
Since then I've switched to a library where even with rotary knobs you drag up and down to adjust them, which seems easier for most folk.
The advantage that rotary knob widgets have is that they are compact and you can see instantly what the value is set to.
I wouldn't even consider a spinner. They're utterly contentless.
This didn't look real. It looks like what we'd consider a TUI today
don't knobs also serve a practical purpose since otherwise you'd have a ton of horizontal sliders, which would quickly crowd the interface?
Spinner controls have been around ~forever in GUIs.
They take up about the same space in a UI as a virtual knob, but they clearly display the current setting and are much easier to interact with.
> 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.
My first laptop was G3 Apple laptop.
It was one of the worst laptops I have ever owned. The screen died right after the warranty expired. It would take multiple reboot to get the HDMI to properly register so I could use it as a desktop ... to the point I said fuck it and just tossed it.
Dell XPS 13 was the 2nd worst.
HDMI in 1997–2003?
Sorry, VGA. And yes the G3 laptop was used to create my first software based solution since it could handle Unix / Linux coding.
By the way the person that down voted my comment highlights the rejection of reality that others lived through.
why is this a good thing? This sucks, it would randomly cause IP conflict in some cases
There's gotta be a bit more subtlety going on here. DHCP leases include a lifetime:
It's possible that older versions of macOS persisted the lease details across reboots and reused unexpired leases on subsequent network reconnections.I am also fairly sure that I have never personally seen any evidence of any OS doing this, including macOS, including when it was still called Mac OS X. I suspect macOS simply brings up its networking stack earlier in the boot process, so the network connection is more likely to be ready and waiting by the time the desktop loads.
Using the same lease is better but still could cause IP conflict if the lease was revoked and reused (though I guess that’s much rarer)
that said I do agree with you that the behaviour was probably not as described or at least not present in current systems because it would wreak havoc on public wifi etc
I’ve never dhcp being any sort of bottleneck so I hope their just doing the regular dhcp thing
If they implemented it well, they could have just sent an arp and check if it was already taken.
Then again, I haven't ever been limited by the speed of DHCP servers... Windows is just dog-slow for a lot of things, so yeah, macos just "feels better" generally. I doubt it was related to just this IP thing.
Users would assign it to 'just that network is flakey'.. not 'my hardware is not behaving properly' because it works elsewhere.
I do observe this at work sometimes, on Linux I have no issues with wifi/network, but Apple users are complaining.
> 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.
"Why isn't there a successful company building and maintaining a suite of common alternative desktop applications?"
Sure there are but in other domains than "office".
For example CAD has few incumbent companies with their portfolios - Autodesk, Trimble, Nemetchek, Bentley. (etc)
For design - Adobe, Affinity (well it's all Canva now), then legion of smaller offerings like Clip Studio Paint.
CAD is the only domain in which I have domain knowledge but I would be surprised if there are no others.
> Apple's visual OS design was never that far ahead of the curve
That tends to happen when you're the one defining the curve.
> 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
The early packages could really mess up Windows - especially on non-English versions. Later on there were some really good ones around like XPize or Vize for XP and Vista respectively.
Theming Windows was something I always appreciated but that ended by the time I've got 7. Instead I've opted for making workflow bit more smoother with some additional programs like Launchpad and small GKrellM-like sidebar.
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.
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.
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.
Peak UI / UX was some years ago, exactly when depends on any given persons particular preference.
What we have now is akin to a Sheperd tone[1], where the design has to get intentionally worse so that corps. can then go on to boast about how the new design in following years is better than ever, but on the whole no real progress is made.
1. A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
> 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.
> people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.
What backslash? Only backslash I remember is when flat design was introduced. The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.
> What backslash?
https://www.macrumors.com/2012/09/11/apples-designers-clashi...
https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/10/skueomorphism-red-headed-s...
https://gizmodo.com/apples-podcasts-app-no-longer-has-horrib...
https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/22/3680320/skeuomorphic-des...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/death-to-textures-io...
https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367270/yves-behar-apple-...
https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/09/skeuomorphism-isnt-ioss-bi...
https://daringfireball.net/2013/01/the_trend_against_skeuomo...
Edit: FYI: you typoed 'backlash' twice
> The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.
You're just proving my point. Notice how all of these were posted after Zune/Metro/Windows Phone/8/whatever it's called flat design craziness started.
Just look at this quote from Gruber's blog post:
...these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design. They’re unnecessary in print...
No shit, guess what also wasn't needed in print: Buttons to be pressed and radioboxes to be selected. The whole fad just built on "old design is old and designers need to be employed".
Apple had an internal clash over which design direction they should go after the release of Windows 8 but every user rightfully hated Windows 8 flat design. The resonance to skeuomorphism was very positive back then.
I don't know when Windows 8 was released, but by 2012-2013, skeuomorphic design had become very unpopular, tacky even. See the links I included in response to sibling comment.
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.
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?”
>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.
> 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...
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.
Because your opinion is in the minority
Please no, that Lucida font is unreadable and ugly. Let’s not talk about the childish “aqua” design.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883
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.
Most useful apps refuse to run? I have an iPad Pro from 2016 and it runs everything I throw at it. Perhaps the air’s weaker hardware was always destined to struggle as time moves on. That being said I also have an iPad from 2011 which I can still use as a Spotify machine.
But true, they don’t have the flexibility of a laptop. They are however the longest lasting tablets I’m aware of.
note: they jumped from 18 to 26 to align to the year.
I can't believe Apple hasn't pushed an update to their 9-year-old device in 11 years!
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?
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.
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
iPad 3rd gen can be downgraded to iOS 8 (which runs slightly better than iOS 9), and dual-booting to iOS 6 is also doable (and actually can run more apps than later versions thanks to the 3rd party mods).
There's a community around /r/LegacyJailbreak dedicated to running old iOS devices.
Thanks, I will look into that.
You can jailbreak it and attempt to bypass app restrictions (e.g. with 3dappversionspoofer). Ymmv. https://ios.cfw.guide describes how to jailbreak.
Why can’t you still use it?
You just won’t be able to download new apps as they bump their minimum.
Wait for a trade in special and take advantage of it. Or use it for safari only.
Use it as a control center for your home automation.
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
I don't think there is? I'm holding onto them in the hope that there's a good solution in the future.
> 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".
As I recall, the PPC machines (like the Power Mac G5) never had EFI of any kind, and the early Intel Macs (including the Mac Pro) all had 32-but EFI even after the processors went 64-bit. I don't recall any of those Macs ever being switched from 32-bit EFI to 64-bit (U)EFI with a firmware update, or vice versa. It was a bit of a pain point because Linux was not initially ready to run a 64-bit kernel on top of 32-bit EFI, but that got resolved on the Linux side and I don't recall anything about Apple's firmware updates making that harder.
I must be mixing up my details, but I did think it was one of the first gen cheese graters.
I did have it booting Linux before upstream officially supported it. I remember using patches from infradead
You may very well be correct, Maybe it wasn't EFI, however they absolutely did ship an update that broke my existing installs, until upstream linux shipped an update, so your memory aligns more than mine does.
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.
Sure, but I get my OS upgrades from the System Settings app now, what was stopping me from doing that in the early 2010s?
And yes, the Mac App Store was brand new, what better way to boost engagement than to move a fairly standard and typical function into it even though it was unrelated? Sounds like a good way to trick people into using your new thing. Like a boost, to engagement, one could say.
The blocker was that they were still charging money for new OS versions at that time. System Preferences didn't have a payment processing system, the App Store did.
OTA updates were delivered through System Preferences for many years before the App Store, not on DVDs.
There's some wires getting crossed here. Sure, minor maintenance releases were delivered this way, but up until 10.7 the only way to upgrade to a new 10.x release (major) was the DVD purchased from Apple*. I have all my purchased boxed OS X releases from 10.0 through 10.6 still sitting on the shelf.
Major OS upgrades weren't free until the release of 10.9. 10.7 was first version you could buy as a download through the App Store.
* 10.1 was an odd release, in that re-sellers got given a limited amount of free upgrade DVDs to hand out, but did eventually retail for 20 bucks IIRC. Regardless, DVD was still the only option.
It's been out of the App store and in settings for a long time now.
I am aware, thank you.
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!
And it's funny how at the same time they're still hosting...
Apple IIGS OS System 6.0.1 https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...
The whole 19 floppy images of MacOS 7.5.3 https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...
(whoever inside of Apple is responsible for for keeping these links alive, thank you for your dedication!)
Is there a way to browse this thing?
Apple stopped showing browsable index files many years ago but someone scraped the wayback machine for URLs and I re-scanned it for more dead links and put up a list of links a while back https://mirrors.kalleboo.com/apples-download.info.apple.com-...
This is incredibly helpful! Thanks!
It'd be really nice if there were a place with authoritative original sha/md5 sums for the various ISOs, DMGs etc that are floating around.
Huh? They're all linked from https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662
"Use a web browser for older versions" was not working for me the other day, though I now cannot remember if it was when I was dealing with a Safari version with old/unusable SSL. I was able to load the webpage, though, so SSL was working there, and therefore something was different about the download links than the page itself.
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
Not being connected to the App Store is a feature, not a bug.
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
That's just for the 2019 re-release, right?
It's 2026, roughly 4.5 years after the release of the remastered version Diablo II: Resurrected.
Fresh meat!
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.
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.
It's not just the transparency (and distracting highlights and slow animations and inexpressive icons), but also the floating controls and other elements that make it harder to discern what is content and what is UI chrome/controls, not to mention the associated layout bugs.
Turning transparency off significantly improves the look and responsiveness imo.
That's what I did on my phone, yeah. Desktop version still feels all sorts of bad despite that.
Sounds like an improvement. Maybe in the next version, they can make this improvement the default.
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.
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!
That sounds like a pretty good way of organizing honestly. As long as you can remember where things are more-or-less within the individual screens, if you have a lot of apps installed and you have some that are only occasionally used, scrolling until you get to the color is a pretty easy way to narrow down where your target. I have some apps installed that I rarely use that I'd be more likely to remember what the icon looks like than the name of the app to search for it by text.
I heard that The Simpsons were made yellow because it stands out the most when quickly flipping through channels.
My apps are mostly arranged by install date. You just learn where everything is :) You stop using street signs after enough drives home.
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.
I had beta enabled so maybe they were experimenting with making it the default.
I did do the customize thing to get it back, I just don't know why anyone would actually want that to begin with.
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 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.
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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.
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"...
The way he said "Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence" makes me really tilted tho
The oldest iBook G4 is from October 2003, not even 23 years old.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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 have a 2008 Mac Pro that was my daily driver for video and audio production for 16 years before I had to give up on it. The only real reason I had to give up on it was that I couldn't upgrade the software and all the certs were expiring. I was using it for a network music server as well, until Apple broke iTunes home sharing functionality. It's sitting in the hall in my basement. The hardware still functions perfectly. It had four hard drives in it, and I've got all that stuff on a Synology now. It remains the most reliable computer I have ever owned. It literally only was ever off when there was a power outage. I might wind up installing Linux on it for my kids but we already have several little i5 NUCs that are far faster and quieter and easier on our electric bill, so I'm not sure there's much point to that.
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.
Reading this from an $1300 iPad Pro that can’t even web browse without lagging.
Apple’s CPU throttling is a real thing
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 have a collection of Macs from the 2000s, including the iBook G4 and the iMac G4. The iBook G4 still connects to wi-fi, and I've seen this update prompt on my iMac G4 (which is connected to Wi-Fi using a mini wireless access point).
I use my iMac G4 to play songs on iTunes, I keep my music library on a server with Samba installed and I mount the volume with the files. I love the Cover Flow design from older iTunes. I can also push songs to my iPod this way.
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.
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.
IIRC, the Soundblaster 16 driver received a bug fix recently.
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.
Windows 2000 can do the same
Catalog.update.microsoft.com
The analogy here is charging a dead battery from 0V to 4v. Your old battery is still dead. Your OS is still insecure. What's the story here?
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
“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/
Dapper Drake? Man that takes me WAY back.
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.
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.
I regularly use a 2012 MacBook Air 11". It’s stuck with Catalina, but works fine (I use it to run Zoom meetings).
It says as much about how conservative and stable Wi-Fi standards have been as it does about Apple
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…
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.
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 have one of those too (2011 server version I think) and it runs Debian well.
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.
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.
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
Things stopped being this fun. Now it's all about symmetry and simplicity. More robot world less human world
But only if you run Tiger or newer :)
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.
>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.
I was messing around with an iBook G4 a year ago or so, and yeah things work "fine". You need to update the certs but otherwise it just works. I mostly used it to sync an old iPod nano since it's the only mac I have and I refuse to use windows, but browsing the internet "worked" on websites that aren't too demanding. I got 4chan to work fine, and youtube loaded but the playback was terrible.
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.