Embracing Early Intel

[repairedCheese]

An '09 MacBook would fit the bill nicely. You can dual boot SL and El Cap so when you need compatibility you can use SL and when you need more modern applications you can use El Cap.

That is also, at its core, the same reason I went after a G4 MDD. Picking the best hardware for the most software support is my goal here. And I suspect it would end up running Linux too, as I only have so many Windows 10 Pro keys to go around, and Home is just kind of a pain.

 

[Amethyst1]

An '09 MacBook would fit the bill nicely.

Or a 2011 13" which is heaps and bounds faster than any C2D and has FW800 and Thunderbolt. Put an SSD in there and SL is quicker than quick.

 

[Amethyst1]

For using Intel compatible applications only what is unique about SL?

It's the last version of OS X that hasn't been defiled by the addition of stupid iOS "features" like AutoSave, Launchpad or razor-thin scrollbars with no arrows.

 

[B S Magnet]

Or a 2011 13" which is heaps and bounds faster than any C2D and has FW800 and Thunderbolt. Put an SSD in there and SL is quicker than quick.

I can attest this. The same 2011 13" can run Sierra (and probably High Sierra) comparable to much newer hardware, given how Moore’s law finally fell apart during the teens.

 

[Amethyst1]

The same 2011 13" can run Sierra (and probably High Sierra)

I also run Mojave on mine due to Dark Mode and it's OK, just a tad sluggish at times.

 

[retta283]

It's the last version of OS X that hasn't been defiled by the addition of stupid iOS "features" like AutoSave, Launchpad or razor-thin scrollbars with no arrows.

Lion and newer drive me crazy, especially without tweaking. Tiger-Snow Leopard work great for me out of the box and look much better than Lion, IMO. The scrollbar change in particular drove me batty, on a mouse without a scrollwheel or just when you want to grab the scrollbar it usually ends with you resizing the window, as Lion introduced dynamic window sizing. I really never minded resizing being restricted to the bottom-right corner, it avoids the majority of accidental resizing issues.

Autosave just ends up being a pain, I ruined many documents with it and had to go back and fetch the earlier versions. Is command+S really that hard for people to learn? Launchpad was another way to put an existing feature in people's faces, an Applications stack in the dock works just as well if not better. OS X before Lion had so many powerful features that they have removed or tweaked to make useless, it's a shame because to me OS X was always easy to access and at the same time a power user's OS.

 

[eyoungren]

2008 is the only version of MS Office I usually use. It works natively on PPC Tiger and Leopard. It also is universal. Though sometimes on my Intel Macs I’ll install 2011 instead.

I've found 2011 on my Intels to be problematic. Office 2016 was good, as is the latest version. But my 2006 MBP is still using 2008.

 

[timidpimpin]

My late 09 mini and I are best buds! We hang out every single day!

 

[RogerWilco6502]

That is also, at its core, the same reason I went after a G4 MDD. Picking the best hardware for the most software support is my goal here. And I suspect it would end up running Linux too, as I only have so many Windows 10 Pro keys to go around, and Home is just kind of a pain.

Ah, cool! My DA G4 serves sort of a similar purpose for me, it can run Tiger and OS9, so it's a good bridge machine.

Or a 2011 13" which is heaps and bounds faster than any C2D and has FW800 and Thunderbolt. Put an SSD in there and SL is quicker than quick.

I probably would have gone for something along those lines if I didn't need FW400 for my Power Mac

My late 09 mini and I are best buds! We hang out every single day!

Same with me and my Mid 09 MacBook

 

[philgxxd]

There is no problem going from FW800 to FW400. It's like USB downward compatible and you only need a cable or adapter.

 

[RogerWilco6502]

There is no problem going from FW800 to FW400. It's like USB downward compatible and you only need a cable or adapter.

At the time I bought the laptop, I was on a pretty tight budget so I didn't want to have to buy other cables. Also that just didn't occur to me at the time (I was still pretty new to all of this at the time). Now if I were to be purchasing a laptop for this purpose, I'd definitely consider a FW400-FW800 cable.

 

[philgxxd]

No problem
I still use Firewire a lot.
My favourite firewire toy is my Compact-Flash-pimped 2nd generation iPod mini with which I installed OSX Leopard Server on my G5.

 

[eyoungren]

At the time I bought the laptop, I was on a pretty tight budget so I didn't want to have to buy other cables. Also that just didn't occur to me at the time (I was still pretty new to all of this at the time). Now if I were to be purchasing a laptop for this purpose, I'd definitely consider a FW400-FW800 cable.

I have an eternal iSight connected to my Mac Mini and my MacPro. Both Macs are FW800 only, but two $4 Firewire 400 to 800 adapters off eBay make this possible.

FW cables can also be had on eBay for less than $20. I think I've paid around $10-12 for each of mine. It's much easier when your PowerPC Macs also have FW800 though.

 

[sanfrancisofont1984]

I got use to trackpad gestures and natural scrolling as I started to use MBP and Lion in 2011. Cheapest current model at the time, obviously. I later upgraded the RAM to 16G; the biggest I ever had in notebooks. The machine died though and I didn’t attempt to repair it back then. Nowadays I do stuff using a Mac Pro.

If you have used Xcode you would know that oldest deployment target available keep moving forward. Currently it is probably at 10.8+ (esp. Swift). Not all developers care about backwards compatibility so plenty of new apps want Mojave even Catalina.

Anything built for Intel (even Carbon) should generally be good until Mojave (hey dark mode) for the most part. You start to see warnings for 32 bit just ignore them.

 

[B S Magnet]

I got use to trackpad gestures and natural scrolling as I started to use MBP and Lion in 2011. Cheapest current model at the time, obviously. I later upgraded the RAM to 16G; the biggest I ever had in notebooks. The machine died though and I didn’t attempt to repair it back then. Nowadays I do stuff using a Mac Pro.

If you have used Xcode you would know that oldest deployment target available keep moving forward. Currently it is probably at 10.8+ (esp. Swift). Not all developers care about backwards compatibility so plenty of new apps want Mojave even Catalina.

Anything built for Intel (even Carbon) should generally be good until Mojave (hey dark mode) for the most part. You start to see warnings for 32 bit just ignore them.

The refurbished early 2011 MBP I bought in later 2011 was bundled with 10.7 (possibly 10.7.1, I’d have to go look). The very first thing I did when the MBP arrived was I pulled out the HDD with Lion and moved my build of 10.6.8 from a just-died 2009 MBP into the 2011 MBP.

Your response above also reminded me of another thing about Lion which I found positively infuriating: “““natural””” scrolling.

It wasn’t so much that it was offered as an option. That would have been ok. Rather, it was new and made as the new default.

That, the aforementioned skinny scroll bars, the removal of “Save as…” and, honestly, the “AirDrop” feature, felt as if much of what was learnt by the UI/UX team, in the time between 10.0b and 10.6.8, was being tossed out thereafter.

I also found it frustrating to see the eventual removal of Finder labels being replaced with “tags” — which no longer highlighted the whole line of a file or directory and, confusingly, were still the same basic “labels”, albeit with the addition of being able to assign multiple labels to a file (which I generally have never needed to do). To this day, this UI change slows down my ability to visually scan the contents inside a large directory where I previously colour-coded the contents with labels to signify particular purposes.

In Snow Leopard, everything works. The Finder experience is sharper, multi-touch gestures are supported, and it remains quick.

 

[sanfrancisofont1984]

The more neutral terms are like scroll the view versus scroll the content. Since pinch-to-zoom is as if we are manipulating the content then scroll the content does make intuitive sense. If using a mouse with scroll wheel then it is hard to say.

 

[sanfrancisofont1984]

Another FWIW, good idea to get machines with 64-bit EFI. Otherwise more hoops to jump through when using (64-bit) Linux. Lots of distros dropped i386 lately.

 

[Raging Dufus]

Another FWIW, good idea to get machines with 64-bit EFI. Otherwise more hoops to jump through when using (64-bit) Linux. Lots of distros dropped i386 lately.

Undeniably true, but for anyone interested, this guy has solved a lot of these problems:

Linux DVD images (and how-to) for 32-bit EFI Macs (late 2006 models) | mattgadient.com

Apple's 32-bit EFI implementation on late 2006 Macs makes it tricky to get 64-bit Linux distros installed. Tricky, but not impossible...

mattgadient.com

​

I've yet to try his methods to roll my own, but I have used a few of the installers he's made with those methods and they've worked flawlessly. He continues to produce new ones as various distros are updated, and also sometimes on request.

 

[bobesch]

An early-2008 intel is my daily driver.
As @eyoungren said, using intel-Macs doesn't mean to abandon PPC, but some stuff, like video-streaming and fast web do not work the same or not at all on a PPC-Book.

My personal experience is, that the "early" early-intels are more rare to find (spare parts as well) and somehow more worn out. So I'd rather go for an early-2008 15/17" MBP unless you want the earlier ones as a collectors item...

Well, the early intels can't run Tiger/Classic, but currently they can cope with a lot (and only 4k-video and kind of that stuff makes them look old). Dual-Boot Leopard plus newer (up to Mojave-Patch) is a great option.
(Even if Catalina might be possible, for me it's currently a no-go, since I don't want to loose all my favorite 32-bit-Apps, HFS+ and connectivity to PPC/Leopard).

About Office'08 (there already have been a lot of votes about that): it is great to see it working on both PPC(Tiger/Leopard) and Mojave-Patch and every other OSX in between. You may really call it a killer-App!
And there's a bunch of other nice programs, that I do enjoy on all pre-Catalina-macOSs.

About the hardware of the early-intels:
- they do have a great display! (I like it more, than the glossy version on the later books)
- they all have a crappy GPU (unless you are lucky to find an "emerald-book" sporting a green-dot on the RAM-bench, that indicates a refurbished unit - or unless you've got a model with a new GPU, like @dosdude1 recommends)
- they have FW400/800 and optional USB3.0 (by USB3.0 PCExpressCard)

And the next-best after the early-intels (if you don't want to be a victim of a faulty GPU) are all the Core2Duo starting with and beyond late-2008.

And if you should ever reach the end of your wits: Apple is offering you recycling for free ...
(but before that will happen and whenever my last early-2008 MBP is going to fail I'm gonna ask @dosdude1 for repairing aid ... )

 

[2984839]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort#Integrated_AirPort_Extreme_802.11a/b/g_and_/n_cards IIUC all Intel Macs with WiFi would support 802.11g.

Offhand, I don’t know what chipset is bundled on the MBPs and MBs from 2006–08.

What I can tell you is the Airport Extreme cards in any PowerBook or iBook will never work in an Intel box, because all of those weren’t running on a PCIe bus the way all the Intel-era AE cards (which were standard with 802.11n, backward-compatible with b/g) were.

So I did some more research and I had forgotten that the early MBPs had Atheros wifi cards until they went back to Broadcom. This might actually work; Atheros open source drivers are pretty good in my experience.

 

[bobesch]

There are both "Airport-" Atheros and Broadcom cards in the early intels.
The Sierra/HighSierra/Mojave-Patches do not support all kind of them, but you'll get a proper replacement Wifi/BT-card at a reasonalbe price (about 10 bucks) #125

 

[bobesch]

The scrollbar change in particular drove me batty

Yep, that's one of the first things, I always reset back to the old-fashionded "fat-scrollbar" style within the SystemPreferences.

 

[RogerWilco6502]

No problem
I still use Firewire a lot.
My favourite firewire toy is my Compact-Flash-pimped 2nd generation iPod mini with which I installed OSX Leopard Server on my G5.

That sounds epic

I have an eternal iSight connected to my Mac Mini and my MacPro. Both Macs are FW800 only, but two $4 Firewire 400 to 800 adapters off eBay make this possible.

FW cables can also be had on eBay for less than $20. I think I've paid around $10-12 for each of mine. It's much easier when your PowerPC Macs also have FW800 though.

Ok, thanks for the info

 

[sanfrancisofont1984]

So I did some more research and I had forgotten that the early MBPs had Atheros wifi cards until they went back to Broadcom. This might actually work; Atheros open source drivers are pretty good in my experience.

b43 became quite good on Linux (firmware blob still required) from what I see.

 

[bobesch]

FW cables can also be had on eBay for less than $20. I think I've paid around $10-12 for each of mine. It's much easier when your PowerPC Macs also have FW800 though.

I've got a "big-box" with kind of innumerable FW (and also USB/HDMI) cables for about 4€ (plus shipping). It's sitting now at the attic. Wish you all would live next door to share them ...