>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.

OpenCore and MIST are two great tools for fans of obsolete Macs. https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

https://youtu.be/ejPqAJ0dHwY

I saw this video recently, it's crazy how apple lost the tactility of its button.

> 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...

And it's hard to even find the download links, and a lot of them don't work.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

Diablo 2 got a new expansion? What year is it?

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.

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!

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

> 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 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.

>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.

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.

Considering the age, HTTP is likely.

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"...

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.