- 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.

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.

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).

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

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????"

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

Apple’s CPU throttling is a real thing

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.

Catalog.update.microsoft.com

The analogy here is charging a dead battery from 0V to 4v. Your old battery is still dead. Your OS is still insecure. What's the story here?

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.

Downloading updates seems fairly trivial. Host the file, maintain compatibility for the request/response from the OS, which might not have changed much over time, and whilst API versioning is annoying it isn't super difficult for a small API.

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

Is there something in the water?

It now runs Ubuntu. Good little machine

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.

The video I believe it was sitting on a floor

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.

And damn, Mac OS has changed so much graphically.

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.

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

I used to read a lot, on my iPad, iPhone, Mac.. until a few years ago when iBooks (right about when it became called just "Books" I think) started rabidly deleting your downloaded books, even if I have 10s of GBs of free storage on device, and keeps having to redownload the books every week or so, so it's useless when I want to use it the most: away from home where there's no internet so no other entertainment, on flights, or long drives..

Just like Apple's other eternal shitshow Siri, you know it won't work when you need it so you never try again.

That means it's easy for the consumer to replace parts like batteries, ram modules, GPUs, network cards and hard drives?