I love my Late 2009 Mac mini, and Early 2009 MacBook. It was originally an early 2008, but I swapped the logic board as seen here.
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macOS 10.12 Sierra Unsupported Macs Thread
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I agree 100% with everything being mentioned and pointed out here. There are many discrepancies with this recent decision to institute forced obsolescence with these otherwise perfectly competent machines. What makes it simply unwarranted and unacceptable to me is the fact that there is absolutely nothing challenging about Sierra and hardware in the machines they elected to make obsolete what so ever.
I'll continue to be resourceful and make lemonade out of that which is deemed a lemon by Apple. Look closely at my guide here for installing Windows 10 64 bit on a perfectly competent 2006 iMac.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/os-x-yosemite-on-unsupported-macs-guide.1761432/page-41
Its located @ Post #1015
I'll continue to be resourceful and make lemonade out of that which is deemed a lemon by Apple. Look closely at my guide here for installing Windows 10 64 bit on a perfectly competent 2006 iMac.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/os-x-yosemite-on-unsupported-macs-guide.1761432/page-41
Its located @ Post #1015
I am on my work machine now which is a MP 1,1 with a crappy Nvidia GeForce 210 for QE/CI running ElCap thanks to MacPostFactor Sierra introduced new CPU requirements?
Apple shot themselves in the foot when they decided to rewrite the USB drivers for El Capitan. They had to create port injector kext for their own machines, much newer than 2009.
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yes they did, I had slow, REALLY slow USB ports, no isight and I had to downgrade my AC BT4.0 airport card because they killed the bluetooth USB pins. I didnt go back to El Capitan until the USB ports and iSight worked again in 10.11.4, still miss my BT4.0
Yep, I did the same thing with my mid 2009 MacBook, it's now in the housing of a 2008 Black MacBook.
Oh this was so true. And it was the reason that several of us worked so hard to get 9.2 running on our Macs. It was pretty obvious from the betas that the decision to cut machines wasn't completely made while 9.2 was being developed. Oddly, we found code changes in 9.2.1 and 9.2.2 that ONLY impacted cut machines! So somebody inside Apple was still working on them. Kimo Yap, one of the guys I was working with, actually found an fixed a FireWire bug that had been gremlining 9.x for a long while, that impacted official machines too. My patcher ended up being BETTER than Apple's releases. It was just such a joke. But there was no doubt that 9.2 had a lot of bug fixes that should have been delivered; what Jobs did was unconscionable. I was later told by an Apple OS engineer at MacWorld Expo that my name had come up at meetings and the exec team considered suing me. Huh, wonder why I've never gotten rehired at Apple.
I have the 144MB upgrade in my 3400c. That thing was actually my daily driver Mac for a LONG time! (And I'm an IT consultant!) But it got the job done, worked great, was bullet-proof. Actually, now that I think about it, I think it was my daily driver up until I got a PowerBook G3 (Bronze) sometime after Y2K. Which I used right up until Apple finally shipped a worthy/price was right machine to buy new, the Late-2006 MacBook, which I bought Day of Intro (being able to run Windows and Mac OS X was just killer at the time; the "value" of that era's Macs was astonishing compared to the PC competition). After 2006, for the next 5 years, I sold/converted more Windows users to Mac than I have in the past 5 years by 10x. Apple has lost it, at least on the "value proposition" front. New lower-end/lower-priced Macs are too expensive and too powerless (iMac 21" with soldered RAM and 4200RPM hard drive, WHAAAT???) compared to today's commodity PC hardware. 2007 to 2012 were the hey days for Mac, no doubt. They might still be selling, but they aren't competing against PC hardware like they could be.
Well, it's actually a 5400RPM drive, they haven't used a 4200RPM since the 1.8" drive in the first MacBook Air. But I think a lot of Apple's rationale (not saying I agree with them however) is that the difference in performance between 5400 and 7200 has shrunken a lot since bit density in hard drives has increased by several orders of magnitude since 7200RPM drives were introduced in consumer machines 15-20 years ago. They really should have put one as the base in the iMac, but I doubt it makes THAT much of a difference. I'd rather have an SSD than either speed of hard drive. I do get where folks are coming from in this, but the type of person who buys a base model iMac probably isn't in a position to notice the difference anyway.
Oh this was so true. And it was the reason that several of us worked so hard to get 9.2 running on our Macs. It was pretty obvious from the betas that the decision to cut machines wasn't completely made while 9.2 was being developed. Oddly, we found code changes in 9.2.1 and 9.2.2 that ONLY impacted cut machines! So somebody inside Apple was still working on them. Kimo Yap, one of the guys I was working with, actually found an fixed a FireWire bug that had been gremlining 9.x for a long while, that impacted official machines too. My patcher ended up being BETTER than Apple's releases. It was just such a joke. But there was no doubt that 9.2 had a lot of bug fixes that should have been delivered; what Jobs did was unconscionable. I was later told by an Apple OS engineer at MacWorld Expo that my name had come up at meetings and the exec team considered suing me. Huh, wonder why I've never gotten rehired at Apple.
I have the 144MB upgrade in my 3400c. That thing was actually my daily driver Mac for a LONG time! (And I'm an IT consultant!) But it got the job done, worked great, was bullet-proof. Actually, now that I think about it, I think it was my daily driver up until I got a PowerBook G3 (Bronze) sometime after Y2K. Which I used right up until Apple finally shipped a worthy/price was right machine to buy new, the Late-2006 MacBook, which I bought Day of Intro (being able to run Windows and Mac OS X was just killer at the time; the "value" of that era's Macs was astonishing compared to the PC competition). After 2006, for the next 5 years, I sold/converted more Windows users to Mac than I have in the past 5 years by 10x. Apple has lost it, at least on the "value proposition" front. New lower-end/lower-priced Macs are too expensive and too powerless (iMac 21" with soldered RAM and 4200RPM hard drive, WHAAAT???) compared to today's commodity PC hardware. 2007 to 2012 were the hey days for Mac, no doubt. They might still be selling, but they aren't competing against PC hardware like they could be.
Thanks for all the great information, and just so there are plenty of folks(myself included) that still use OS 9 helper(along with Xpostfacto) to this day. The team that wrote these(I'm guessing, from your post, that you were part of it) did a great job.
I've never had a computer running 9.1 where installed 9.2.2 didn't perk it up considerably. Like I said, I stick to 8.x on lower spec machines, but the late 604E-based Macs absolutely fly with it. I think one of the bigger handicaps on low end machines was that many maxed at 128mb of RAM or somewhere around, an amount that is a bit "tight" for me considering the resource footprint of OS 9 relative to 8(esp. my favorite, 8.6). The 8600 and 9600 have so many RAM slots that I tend to load them up with "junk" ram(8 and 16mb sticks) although one trick I've found with that is that unless you have "matched" RAM you should avoid putting sticks of the same size in the paired slots-otherwise the computer will sometimes try to interleave them and end up with degrade performance or even an all out crash. If the sticks are different capacities, the computer won't even try to interleave. Of course, if you have correctly matched sticks that's the best since you get the performance benefit of interleaving
. One of these days I'm going to order a crap ton of RAM from OWC to max my 8600(which I'm planning on running Leopard on) and at least get some good sticks in the 9600. OWC recently doubled their price on EDO RAM, which means it would be $240 to actually get a 9600 to 1.5gb. In any case, I think Apple did something similar in the early versions of OS X. All G3s(except the poor Kanga) were supported up to 10.2, the point where OS X quit being a science experiment. They didn't get 10.3, which actually made OS X useable, or 10.4, the gold standard in stability and performance on G3s(and lower spec G4s). I find that even a 233mhz beige(admittedly with the RAM maxed) will run better with 10.4 than 10.2. Even the early iMacs, iBooks, and Powerbook G3s got cut off after 10.3. It's just nice that there are ways to install them.
By the way, I've said for a while that Apple is moving back toward Steve Job's original "closed box" model for the Macintosh. In 1984, few folks had Torx screwdrivers(much less the super long one needed to reach the handle screws) and even with the computer open there's no obvious way to upgrade. The Plus was a big revolution in allowing that, and of course the post-Jobs Macs(like the Mac II and SE) were significantly more upgradeable.
And, before I stop rambling, I'll just comment on the fact that one of my co-workers just bought a new Macbook and tracked me down today to see about installing office on it. He didn't have the "umbilical" dongle, so I actually ended up imaging an Office disk, uploading it to Google Drive for him to download, and the of course install with the key he just bought. Just a single real USB port would have save a lot of time in my loading and him downloading. Granted I'd still have to image the disk, but once I have the image sucking data off my SSD into a USB 3 flash drive and then dumping it over USB C would have taken a couple of minutes instead of a few hours.
I tend to judge computers by their capability and performance rather than age. A 2006 Mac Pro, with the proper upgrades, does not feel like a dinosaur.
However, a brand new 2014 Mac mini with the stock 5400 RPM HDD does.
The Mac mini Late 2009 boots, but I have no USB!!! No keyboard, no mouse. And they are Apple Wired Keyboard, and Generic USB Mouse.
I am now stuck at the "Welcome" screen. But I cannot continue. Since I have no USB...
I am now stuck at the "Welcome" screen. But I cannot continue. Since I have no USB...
Spoken like someone who hasn't been selling Macs for the past few years. (You were right about the 5400rpm drive, vs 4200rpm, however benchmarks have shown that the drives they ARE using are no speed demons, and certainly nowhere near as fast as fast 5400s or anywhere near 7200s.)
Back in that hey day I referred to, the entry level Mac was never a punishment. Today, comparing ALL the entry level models of every Mac, buying the base price model is a sucker's buy. Every. Single. Model. My 2009 MBP was the base model. But the only thing I missed out on was CPU speed, which I knew over time would become less relatively significant. When you buy a bolted-shut iMac with 4GB of RAM (now it is higher than that, but wasn't a year or so ago), a GHz slower CPU than the next step up, and slow HD when the OS -expects- an SSD, that's punitive. By the time you sit and BTO the current 21" iMac with a good SSD or adequate Fusion Drive (24GB SSD in a Fusion Drive? What is the point??), you're almost to the price of the base 27" (which has a MUCH BETTER base model value proposition). That's dumb. The MacBook, the iMac 21", the Mac mini... all are like this. They only two units that aren't so bad are the MacBook Pro Retina and the iMac 27". The recently updated MacBook Air, now that it comes base with 8GB, is OK too. But for how long did they ship that stupid thing with 4GB of RAM (or less). And getting back to the MBP, when I got mine, part of the value proposition was that I could start with the base RAM and the system could grow WITH me. That's dead now; and serves to further destroy the value proposition. If I buy the base model, within 3 or 4 years I'm likely to need more RAM, which means a new machine if I actually end up doing REALLY "Pro" stuff with it. Translated: the value is GONE. Poof! Since I need to buy a whole new machine again. At the very least, Apple could be putting one empty SIMM slot in these things; at least then we could go from 8GB to 16, or more given future RAM densities. Today's Macs just don't hold up to any sort of discerning consumer. If you're rich or dumb, Apple has product for you, otherwise go be a Windows user or suffer.
That is a GREAT example of what I'm saying about Apple losing on the "value proposition". Why in the name of everything holy didn't Apple stick with the power brick size of the 13" MacBook Air and embed a USB hub and at least a Type-A and a second Type-A|Type-C into the MacBook one brick?? It wouldn't have cost that much, we've all seen USB3 hubs for $10. And it would have served as a bridge between the ONE port in the MacBook that's Type-C and all the Type-A products (ahem, like the iPhone!) that are already out there. Lost opportunity. If Apple had done that ONE thing, every reviewer on the PLANET would have pointed and exclaimed "APPLE IS BRILLIANT!" I'd have to imagine that the Venn of MacBook owners being iPhone owners is nearly a circle; just think that MacBook owners would then only need to carry one brick and two cables and be able to charge both devices conveniently, as well as perhaps connect a peripheral. THAT would be engineering, THAT would be "value". Apple failed. For two model years now. That's not a mistake, that's sheer stupidity.
We're all allowed to have opinions, but do spare us the logical appeals, Internet tough guy. Last benchmarks I've seen of modern 5400RPM and 7200RPM drives don't bear your statements out entirely, but what do I know, I don't sell Macs, I "only" work in a group that has several thousands of machines to support that have either 5400, 7200, or SSDs in them. I clearly don't have enough experience.
That's nice, however I wasn't really addressing any of that. Although, Apple has had a few bad value entry level models even from the era you're referencing (edu iMac for one). Most of what you're complaining about also won't ever really apply to the layman; this is a forum for nerds, after all. Those laymen do keep buying those 16GB iPhones too, you know. That's why Apple gets away with the low end models they have. Appeals from people like us aren't going to change that.
What should I do to install Sierra on my MacBook 5,2? I need to clone preinstalled.dmg to hard drive and get script to work or I have to write dmg to usb to install?
I'm in the same boat except I have a MacBook 5,1 and have access to a supported MacBook Air.
I have a portable USB HDD ready to go and have the DMG of 10.12.
Just need some guidance on what i need to do in what order using what MacBook.
I have a 95% complete tutorial. If someone could explain how to get the USB working, I can complete it and upload it!!!!
Hello Herfindale;
Could you please send me the contact information? I do have the beta installer.
Thank you.