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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.

>You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember.

This one’s a doozy because i hit it last month.

The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.

I had an elderly relative (who disabled updates because they were scared of the computer changing) really upset everything was broken. Gmail app gave obscure can’t connect messages, almost all websites failed to load. When i went there of course the os wouldn’t update as well. We use https for everything now.

The keychain system is so hidden from users it was hard to even get to for myself. Took a usb key of a set of certificate updates. Harder than you think because when you look in keychain you’re not sure of which certificate is used for which and it’s a pain to find what you need. In the end a transfer from a healthy mac worked enough to get a manually downloaded os update running and from there it was fine.

What a doozy though! If you know of people with old macs that stopped working at the start of this year this is why

> The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.

I wish I knew this last week while trying to restore a 2010 21" iMac.

Apart from this, I encountered another annoyance mid-way; the official download urls for Sierra and High Sierra were nowhere to be found. I somewhat remember being able to download the official dmg/disk image from some official repository, probably some App store public url?

> The keychain system is so hidden from users it was hard to even get to for myself.

These days, keychain access is under /System/Library/Core Services/Applications/Keychain Access.app. That's not intuitive, but, once you know it's there, it's not hard to navigate to it. Was it different under older versions?

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.

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.

> Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.

I get the same feeling when doing a fresh install+boot of both OS X 10.9 Mavericks and Windows 7. They're just so much more pleasant than what we have now.

It'd be nice if modern desktop operating systems took a lesson or two from their past selves.

I feel the average HN user though might be a bad representation of the general population. Personally I prefer the aesthetic of windows 11 over 7, it’s about the ONLY thing I prefer about windows 11, but windows 7 looks extremely dated to me now.

i 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.

>but windows 7 looks extremely dated to me now.

This is a highly subjective thing.

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.

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.

>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.

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?

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

>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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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 ..

Temporarily disable dual-band wifi and go to 2.4. Temporarly open the network with no WPA - should be good to go

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.

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.

Probably this- my IOT network forces 2.4GHz, whereas my WPA2 and WPA3 networks both use 2.4 and 5GHz on the same SSID.

I assume that's what

- Fall back to old IOT SSID with ancient protocols

meant 2.4G and not WPA3.

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 did this and considered it the easy way of installing an OS on a Mac circa 2011 vs. DVD then messing around updating that ...

> Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it

Apple has a whole page on making a bootable USB, it can save you a step: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101578

If the bootable USB even works. Monterey won't, or any out of support OS.

I 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.

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.

Yeah LOTS of devices are iced out of wifi because wifi devices started combining the 2.4ghz and 5ghz SSIDs to the same name

and for whatever reason 2.4ghz only devices cant find the SSID unless you if there is a name conflict on the 5ghz frequency

its also less likely that you have access to the router now to change the SSID

Or you can do things the easy way and install a Kubuntu 25.10 and have all good modern amenities without a fight.

I started as a desktop Linux user in 1994 and I can guarantee you it would have been more work for me to install Kubuntu for the first time :)

Regardless, this one is going on eBay, so it's probably best for it to be running the latest Apple OS. Whether the $60-or-whatever I get for it is worth the hassle is another story.

LOL, yes.

I just tried to put Monterey on a 2021 MBP and holy hell.

USB installer. "Not supported OS, you can quit, or install in reduced security mode". Reduced security is fine for me.

"Installation of Reduced Security failed." Cool.

"Get the IPSW and do a DFU install". Nah, you can't do that. "Drag the IPSW onto the target Mac where it says DFU in Apple Configurator". Nope. No error, just nope.

Dig dig dig. "You might need to do this from an older computer. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura". Hey look, I have one!

Alright, install Apple Configurator.

"Nope. You need Sequoia to install Configurator."

Jesus wept. This is an OS that is 4 years old, on a 5 year old laptop. Apple, "It just works".

Find an old version of Configurator from some guy on Reddit that zipped one up.

Now we can do an IPSW install.

Good luck, mortals.

Helped an aqaintance set up a new computer with pre installed Windows 11 a while ago. As in Windows was already on there. How hard could it be?

Just getting past the mandatory online account ID took us half an hour, and only worked because she was diligent in writing down her password for Skype 10 years ago which somehow (I realize why but it's insane) now is her Microsoft account and involved in logging in to Windows. Then we stared at a non-interactive initial update screen for another half an hour before it offered the option to postpone updates. I assume if you ship your new computer somewhere without Internet, you simply cannot use it?! And of course all the dumb dark patterns, as if designed by a scumbag pick-up artist.

Then I had to deal with Windows file sharing to copy stuff from the old PC which was exactly as intuitive as it was in LAN parties around 2000 (used mostly the same UI, as well); but at least unlike the new quick share features worked eventually.

Don't get me started on how we got her old printer to work. It's still a miracle to me and involved multiple reinstalls of multiple drivers and finally digging through to a Windows 2000 era dialog listing various printer interfaces and manually selecting the right one that at some point popped up. I was all but convinced she'd need to buy a new one.

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!

don't knobs also serve a practical purpose since otherwise you'd have a ton of horizontal sliders, which would quickly crowd the interface?

This didn't look real. It looks like what we'd consider a TUI today

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/

> 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.

why is this a good thing? This sucks, it would randomly cause IP conflict in some cases

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.

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.

> 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 looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?

Because "good looking UI" is a completely subjective metric.

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.

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.

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.

Because your opinion is in the minority

There used to be a really nice Aqua theme for Gtk back in the day, but like everything else it's gone out of fashion and succumbed to bitrot.

I don't even know where you'd find a copy of it any more, even if it could be ported to modern toolkit libraries.

I wish freshmeat.net was still on the go, that was full of things like that.

> The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?

From the perspective of a Macintosh System 6 appreciator, OSX is kind of fussy with gratuitous details.

https://aaron.cc/opening-screenshots-from-a-vintage-macintos...

Yeah that's great and all but my 2nd gen iPad Air from 2017 doesn't get updates past iPadOS 15 (current version: 26).

As a result most useful apps flatly refuse to run on it, and my iPad is now a paperweight which yearns for the landfill.

Meanwhile the laptop I bought in 2011 is still going strong, now on Windows 10 (or whatever Linux distro I'd care to throw on it).

Right, the key point being it is almost impossible to reuse iPhone or iPad hardware once the updates stop coming, even though the hardware is absolutely amazing. A 2017 iPad Air is still awesome hardware if you could jam an optimized version of Android/Linux onto it.

If you don't need it to be an Air, I bought an 8th gen iPad on eBay last year for about $80 and it will let you install iOS 26, although with the 32GB model you can't fit many apps on it.

I'm in a similar boat and am wondering... Is there much that can be done with these iPads beside turn them into e-waste?

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

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

You can still browse the internet. Safari still works. I have ancient 1st gen iPad Air and I use it for that; you can still watch YouTube (from the web), it still works fine. Anything that has a web app mostly works.

I don't think there is? I'm holding onto them in the hope that there's a good solution in the future.

Wait for a trade in special and take advantage of it. Or use it for safari only.

note: they jumped from 18 to 26 to align to the year.

How is that so? The App Store has allowed you to download the last compatible version since iOS 6?

But I hate when people malos this comparison to a laptop, in the first 20 years of the personal computer you weren’t using 10 year old computers because the pace of change was so fast.

Your iPad Air has 2GB of RAM and has an A9 processor that is 7x slower in single core performance than the latest iPad Air. The latest iPad Airs come with 8GB of RAM.

My iPad Air from 2020 barely runs iOS 26 with 3GB RAM.

For comparison, I had a Dell Laptop in 2008 that had 8GB RAM and was my Plex server until 2018. Even today in 2026 low end laptops come with 8GB of RAM.

The way he said "Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence" makes me really tilted tho

> Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence.

OpenCore would like a word about that. It's nice to get official security patches, but Apple does make perfectly capable machines obsolete.

Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software, which is arguably what is important about the hardware.

PPC software is gone, 32 bit apps are gone, x86 apps are next, virtualizing or emulating platforms on iOS devices seems to be eternally damned, and what that looks like on Mac after Rosetta 2's quasi-retirement could only be inferior.

In an alternative universe you could connect an eGPU to a Mac or iPad and simply enjoy being the best platform for practically all software that ever existed. Run anything but the most intensive games directly on an AVP or iPad or MacBook Air or even an iPhone.

> Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software.

Apple delivered EFI 32 bit(ppc, 32) firmware updates to their 64 bit mac pro range, make booting/installing alternative operating systems much more difficult only shortly after the new intel range came out.

I had a few of these running Linux at the time and made the mistake of booting one into OSX to see if an update would fix an networking corner case, not an easy roll back.

You may wish to prefix your statement with "apple software".

Kinda funny how this is true but there's a line of Mac OSes that can't connect to the App Store anymore so you can't upgrade the OS without manually downloading it off of an Apple help page.

It's not the end of the world, but I've had to help more than one person walk through this process cuz they're like "I can't update the OS????"

Not being connected to the App Store is a feature, not a bug.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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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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.

Sounds like an improvement. Maybe in the next version, they can make this improvement the default.

That's what I did on my phone, yeah. Desktop version still feels all sorts of bad despite that.

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!

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.

Things stopped being this fun. Now it's all about symmetry and simplicity. More robot world less human world

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…

The oldest iBook G4 is from October 2003, not even 23 years old.

Yep, in 2000 even the PowerBooks weren't G4 yet. And of course the consumer-grade iBooks line wouldn't get G4s until years after that.

I was gonna say. I do have an ibook G3 from 1999, but it can't use modern Wi-Fi (though if it's running the right OS, it could maybe update--i think I've done updates as far back as 10.3?) the AirPort card can talk to 802.11b over WEP - i have an old router set up with a MAC whitelist specifically so the ibook can get online still

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 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

Last time I cracked out my blueberry clamshell iBook, it worked fine, though for what it's worth, I was using Linux, and it seems the main limitation for these connections are the SSL certs.

Whenever I think about it, I think that getting my old Mac up and running is easier than getting ANY modern PC up and running lol.

I'm 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'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.

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.

I regularly use a 2012 MacBook Air 11". It’s stuck with Catalina, but works fine (I use it to run Zoom meetings).

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.

im quite fond of apple hardware aesthetics as well as the aqua look from this period especially the first imac g3 and ibook , just a nice warm fuzzy feelings from childhood from when things were a lot more simple.

Well the reddit post is massively misleading (no ibook is currently supported, that one isn't 27 years old, and 27 year old ones can't connect to modern Wi-Fi) but i do appreciate that my PowerBook G4 can get on Wi-Fi and download software regardless

Of course it's massively misleading, it's farming for updoots.

Further proving the (unpopular) point I made earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066456

Source: I own one of these iBooks and it most certainly can NOT connect to modern Wi-Fi, not out of the box. IIRC it cannot do WPA2, or required an update to do so, which was not available in the Tiger install media, so a chicken-or-egg scenario. Definitely will fail on a mixed WPA2/WPA3 network.

Assume it can connect to Wi-Fi, the TLS libraries are ancient and nothing will work. Including authenticating to iTunes, etc. Samba is ancient and will not connect to shares running SMB2 or newer. It also ignores than OS X versions newer than Tiger have broken App Stores and other things.

Wait till everyone finds out Apple served software updates in those days over plain HTTP which is why it "works"...

“Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence”

Is there something in the water?

It's r/MacOS. The title is disingenuous at best, the comments are all fans upvoting each other for repeating opinions of the hive mind, and this being reddit a good chunk of them are probably bot rings trying to gain karma for resale value without getting caught.

Apple does keep the update servers for their ancient hardware running, though, which is better than their main rivals.

You can still get Ubuntu 6.06 from https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/6.06.0/

>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?

There was a surreal video I watched where an Apple Macintosh connected to Google, it took a really long time.

The video I believe it was sitting on a floor

Yeah, I keep an G4 PowerBook around to watch DVDs on and run PowerPC Mac abandonware... it can surprisingly do a lot. IRC, Hotline, BBS, Gopher, etc. A YouTube channel called "Squeezing The Apple" has a lot of videos showing the use you can get out of an old PowerPC Mac.

Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@squeezingtheapple6990

When you max out the RAM (around 2GB) and put in a solid state IDE hard disk they can be useful. I occasionally use mine as a distraction free writing tool.

Other than abandonware (old games for example), they can't do anything a modern Mac couldn't do, so I wouldn't go nuts finding and buying one of these but if you have one laying around, and have the parts you need for an upgrade these old Macs can be fun.

But only if you run Tiger or newer :)

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.

I still run a MacMini (2012) with Catalina, and it just got a security update. Long back, the drive got an SSD upgrade, with max-out RAM. It still serves as a Media Server. Unfortunately, I don’t want to find out or fix, but my other Macs running Tahoe are unable to access the drives there directly, and a few other issues. I used to just mount it on my local drive like a file server. I had attached two drives, one as an offline Apple Photos copy and another for Dropbox. Both seem to have stopped working the way I want.

But hey, it still works. Survived a bad fall while cleaning up, duck-taped as the screws are not screwing.

Amazing.

But last year’s iPhone cannot download a critical security iOS update for last year’s iOS 18.

Shoving the horribly broken iOS 26 down our throats is not a pleasant experience, Apple.

How on earth do you hook up an iBook to a WPA3 network? Even in WPA2 compatibility mode you'll barely be able to see the SSID?

I suppose it's cool of Apple to not take down their old update servers, although I hope they do keep an eye on the use of HTTP or vulnerable ciphers for that purpose and segment the old hosting off from their more secure modern hosting.

Last summer I powered up my first 2007 Macbook Pro that hadn't been powered for like 15 years. I was stunned to see it restore everything - the web pages I had opened at the time etc.

And damn, Mac OS has changed so much graphically.

Wow. You could look at Apple GUI without having to retch. Being reminded of those times feels like an act of rebellion now. I'm sure Apple wouldn't want us to make the comparison because it makes it obvious what a fucking catastrophe Tahoe is.

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Yes, Apple never misses an opportunity to cripple any decently running hardware.