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.
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
>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
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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???
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
Hold on your home screen to start editing, then edit in top left and then customize. Not sure why it would’ve defaulted to the tinted option though. Don’t think I had that happen.
On the iPhone, the performance is much worse and my battery life is easily a less than 2/3 of what it was before Liquid Glass. This is on top of Apple forcing the OS updates in ways they haven't before.
It does not feel good that you can pay $2000 for a device and then see Apple unilaterally make it worse shortly later.
I 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.
>Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive.
That's not how things work. If you're using a USB adapter then Linux isn't failing to detect the drive, the adapter is failing to detect the drive. Also I'm pretty sure Linux still supports IDE, not that it matters in this case.
If anything my guess here would be the master/slave/cable select jumper.
Like, last I looked the Linux kernel still had MFM/RLL support, although I'm not sure that's going to get included even as a module in a modern distro.
My evening hobby this week is getting my old Rock Band Wii instruments working on Linux. Got inspired by seeing a Linux 7 headline that the CRKD guitar is supported.
There's a whole kernel module that exposes all the Wiimote accessories (inc. plastic instruments) as gamepads. It's still shipping in SteamOS today.
im quite fond of apple hardware aesthetics as well as the aqua look from this period especially the first imac g3 and ibook , just a nice warm fuzzy feelings from childhood from when things were a lot more simple.
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 just had a problem installing iMovie on a MacOS 14 - 11-year old MBP13, perfectly functional otherwise (my 10-year old kid uses it), the original iMovie that used to work earlier, just stopped launching (maybe I need to change some xattrs for it?), and the new iMovie from the App Store can't be installed on such an old OS (why not show the older version there, like iOS AppStore does on older OSes?)...
I had a similar hunt for iMovie to extract video off of MiniDV which required some FireWire to thunderbolt cables. In any event I did find the install on archive.org. May have what you want.
I'm 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.
Well the reddit post is massively misleading (no ibook is currently supported, that one isn't 27 years old, and 27 year old ones can't connect to modern Wi-Fi) but i do appreciate that my PowerBook G4 can get on Wi-Fi and download software regardless
Source: I own one of these iBooks and it most certainly can NOT connect to modern Wi-Fi, not out of the box. IIRC it cannot do WPA2, or required an update to do so, which was not available in the Tiger install media, so a chicken-or-egg scenario. Definitely will fail on a mixed WPA2/WPA3 network.
Assume it can connect to Wi-Fi, the TLS libraries are ancient and nothing will work. Including authenticating to iTunes, etc. Samba is ancient and will not connect to shares running SMB2 or newer. It also ignores than OS X versions newer than Tiger have broken App Stores and other things.
Wait till everyone finds out Apple served software updates in those days over plain HTTP which is why it "works"...
It's r/MacOS. The title is disingenuous at best, the comments are all fans upvoting each other for repeating opinions of the hive mind, and this being reddit a good chunk of them are probably bot rings trying to gain karma for resale value without getting caught.
Apple does keep the update servers for their ancient hardware running, though, which is better than their main rivals.
Yeah, I keep an G4 PowerBook around to watch DVDs on and run PowerPC Mac abandonware... it can surprisingly do a lot. IRC, Hotline, BBS, Gopher, etc. A YouTube channel called "Squeezing The Apple" has a lot of videos showing the use you can get out of an old PowerPC Mac.
When you max out the RAM (around 2GB) and put in a solid state IDE hard disk they can be useful. I occasionally use mine as a distraction free writing tool.
Other than abandonware (old games for example), they can't do anything a modern Mac couldn't do, so I wouldn't go nuts finding and buying one of these but if you have one laying around, and have the parts you need for an upgrade these old Macs can be fun.
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.
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).
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.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
>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
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
OpenCore and MIST are two great tools for fans of obsolete Macs. https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist
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
Or you can do things the easy way and install a Kubuntu 25.10 and have all good modern amenities without a fight.
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
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!
> 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.
why is this a good thing? This sucks, it would randomly cause IP conflict in some cases
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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
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????"
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!)
Huh? They're all linked from https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662
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.
> 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.
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.
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
It's 2026, roughly 4.5 years after the release of the remastered version Diablo II: Resurrected.
Fresh meat!
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.
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!
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.
It's quite difficult to recall any redesign being liked on this site.
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.
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.
My evening hobby this week is getting my old Rock Band Wii instruments working on Linux. Got inspired by seeing a Linux 7 headline that the CRKD guitar is supported.
There's a whole kernel module that exposes all the Wiimote accessories (inc. plastic instruments) as gamepads. It's still shipping in SteamOS today.
im quite fond of apple hardware aesthetics as well as the aqua look from this period especially the first imac g3 and ibook , just a nice warm fuzzy feelings from childhood from when things were a lot more simple.
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
I just had a problem installing iMovie on a MacOS 14 - 11-year old MBP13, perfectly functional otherwise (my 10-year old kid uses it), the original iMovie that used to work earlier, just stopped launching (maybe I need to change some xattrs for it?), and the new iMovie from the App Store can't be installed on such an old OS (why not show the older version there, like iOS AppStore does on older OSes?)...
I had a similar hunt for iMovie to extract video off of MiniDV which required some FireWire to thunderbolt cables. In any event I did find the install on archive.org. May have what you want.
I'm 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.
How are the certs not expired? Is this connecting over HTTP or some other mechanism?
Considering the age, HTTP is likely.
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"...
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
But only if you run Tiger or newer :)
“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/
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.
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.
Yes, Apple never misses an opportunity to cripple any decently running hardware.