Old West Mac OS
I just recently purchased a new iMac G3. Of course Apple hasn’t sold iMac G3s in nearly fifteen years and this one was purchased new in 2000. But that doesn’t mean it’s not new to me. The first question that I’ve been asked is why I would spend money on a computer that is fifteen years old. After all, it only has 64 MB of RAM, a 350 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, and a 10 GB hard drive. It also runs a version of Mac OS that predates protected memory on the Mac (Mac OS 9.2.2). So why did I buy it?
Just remember to never torrent to find old Mac OS X downloads. Apple may offer macOS and OS X for free, but that does not give you the right to pirate it. Also, you will not know if the files you get are safe and do not contain virus or other malicious additions. What is SheepShaver PPC emulator (for Windows + Mac OS X)? SheepShaver is a PowerPC (PPC) emulator which allows you to run Mac OS 7.5 up to Mac OS 9.0.4 on various platforms, such as on Windows. SheepShaver started as a commercial project in 1998 but is now open source since 2002. In other words, if you buy the latest new Mac from Apple, you can't install 10.5 or 10.4 or whatever. So, you need to buy an old Mac too, not just an old OS. The breakdown of the OS ratio really depends on the software. For example, the veritable Omnigroup publishes this version breakdown of the hits of their software update server. Whatever the older Macintosh computer is, to make it useful nowadays you’d likely want to find and download some old Mac software for it. This post will aggregate a collection of links and resources for finding and downloading old Mac software, including old Mac system software, old Macintosh applications, and more, for everything from older Intel Macs, to PowerPC Macs, to 68040 and 030 Macs. Install an older Mac OS on an external drive for migration. If the Mac you’re upgrading to (not from) is in the right range of vintages, you can do the following. Install Mac OS X 10.11 El.
Well, the most obvious answer to that question is nostalgia. I’ve wanted one since they were new and can now finally afford to spend money on one (it cost me 25€). Of course that statement is all the more ridiculous when you consider the fact that I probably spent more money on the gas to go pick it up than I did on the actual machine, but that is beside the point.
Thirteen years ago, I bought an iBook G4 — not one of those iBooks that looked like a colorful toilet seat, but rather its white successor. It originally came with Mac OS X 10.1 and “Classic mode” which allowed me to boot into Mac OS 9.2.2 or run OS 9 applications in an emulated form directly from OS X. That was my first Mac and I didn’t have much software for it yet. Most of what I got at first was given to me by other people with Macs and it was mostly for OS 9. I still have almost all of this software lying around on CDs in dusty cases somewhere in the back of a closet and that is where the new iMac comes in.
Old West Mac Os X
While I obviously won’t be using the old iMac for every day tasks, I will use it to run some of the old games I enjoyed playing back then as well as for a couple of old language learning programs which really never go out of date since languages generally don’t change that quickly. Running OS 9 again has made me very appreciative about modern operating systems and especially about their stability, but I liked OS 9 back then and I still enjoy using it on occasion. I’m just glad I don’t have to use it every day.
Screenshot of Mac OS 9 taken by myself on an iBook when OS 9 was still new
The Mac is dead…long live the Mac!
Last week marked two major shifts in Apple’s personal computing platform: the introduction of Macs built around Apple’s own custom silicon, and the launch of Big Sur, the latest update to the venerable macOS operating system.
And of course, while we want to enjoy the here and now of these latest changes—and, probably, carp a little bit about the things that we don’t like—it’s also worth it to look at the path forward from here: the reverse trail of breadcrumbs laid out and leading, not back to where we came from, but on to the future.
Take the A14 to the M1
Apple’s claims about the performance of its debut Mac processor, the M1, have been met with equal parts amazement and skepticism. As is hardly surprising for a company as versed in marketing as Apple, the graphs and figures promised blockbuster improvements on not only the company’s earlier Macs, but also curves that outstrip much of the PC market. (After all, why make the change if it’s not significant?)
Those claims will be put to the test soon enough, and though I’m relatively confident that Apple isn’t going to brag about improvements that it can’t back up, there will certainly be places where the new Macs do better than others.
That said, even early numbers have pointed to these being jaw-dropping speed increases, of the kind that only come along once in a while. And it’s worth thinking about where the Mac goes from here: as my colleague Jason Snell pointed out, this is just the first chip in a whole family, and Apple’s only targeted its lower-end consumer Macs so far.
One advantage to those of us in the prognostication business is that the Mac’s roadmap is a little more predictable now. We’ve seen the kinds of improvements the company makes year after year to the iPhone and the iPad, the constant iteration of its processors, the gains it makes year over year in performance, graphics, machine learning, and so on. The Mac has hopped on that same treadmill, no longer bound to a third party’s schedule, and with results like those, there’s a reason it’s never getting off.
Old West Masks
Go Big Sur or go home
In the nineteen years since Apple launched Mac OS X—more than half the platform’s life. now—the company has issued more than a dozen major software releases. Sometimes they’ve been hugely significant, other times they’ve felt more modest. But, in many ways, Big Sur seems like the most important update since that initial Aqua interface arrived to replace the classic Mac OS.
Old West Masonic Lodge 813
Design is a big part of that, because it’s something that Apple spends a lot of time on. There have been refinements of the macOS interface over the last two decades years, but it’s often felt more gradual. This time around, Apple seems determined to make everything old new again—perhaps indiscriminately, at times.
But this too is patently Apple. The company has always enforced a top-down approach to the look, feel, and behavior of its operating system, and its users, for the most part, trust the company to make good decisions. Sometimes missteps happen, and they get reeled back, and that too is likely to happen with Big Sur, though don’t expect the big changes to get reversed: this is Apple charting the course for its personal computing operating system for the foreseeable future. No, the Mac and iOS are still not destined to become one and the same, but the company is clearly looking to make them feel even more strongly related than they already do: not just from the same clan, but from the same immediate family.
Theseus statement
At this point, the Mac is like the fabled ship of Theseus. Slowly upgraded over the last 36 years, seeing replacements in processor architectures, underlying software, and pretty much every other component, it’s somehow both instantly recognizable as the same device that appeared on a stage with Steve Jobs in 1984…and yet also completely different.
And that speaks to a larger point of the Mac: it’s not just a product, it’s an ideal. In the same way that every new iPhone seems like it gets closer to some platonic concept of “the smartphone,” the progression of the Mac shows it approaching that fundamental core of what personal computing means. It might seem like the company should have made even more progress as the Mac nears the 40-year mark, but this curve is asymptotic, and I doubt that anyone at the company will ever conclude that the current version is perfect and can never be improved.
This is just what Phil Schiller meant when he said, more than half a decade ago now, that “The Mac keeps going forever.” Come whatever processor architecture, whichever form factors, and any software underpinning that may, the Mac’s work is never done, its watch never ended. The Mac you knew may be gone, but there’s always another just like it around the corner.