Making the Downgrade

[Mac03ForLife]

A few days back, I decided to go back to Lion (the OS that originally shipped with my Late 2011 MBP. I did this for a few reasons:

1. lack of an ssd. The new macOSs are designed to be used with Fusion drives or SSDs. Having neither, I decided to go with 10.7
2. Lack of 8Gb RAM: I have 4GB, was fine with Lion, so keeping it that way
3. Wanted Snow Leopard, but no iCloud. I need iCloud.

I just have a few questions

I have a PowerMac G5 as well, and there are programs that I run on it that I cannot run on my MBP. (duh!) So, with the lack of Rosetta, what am I to do? As I'm heading to College soon, I cannot bring my PMac with me, so that is a problem. Any suggestions?

EDIT: Can I run JDK8 on this? I know Apple dropped their own JDK and JRE for OSX, and Minecraft is a big part of my life (Don't judge). Can I play on this? I was able to in 2011. Or do I need openjdk8?

Also any cool projects to do with a 10.7 machine? Anything you can do with them that cannot be done with Sierra or other OS?

(Sorry for the disjointed post, I wrote this in a hurry).

 

[wicknix]

For Minecraft you "should" be able to run it by installing the legacy java package.
https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US
If that doesn't work you could always try updating java via macports.
https://www.macports.org

Cheers

 

[Mac03ForLife]

@wicknix Thank you! Lifesaver!

 

[Buggyflayer]

A few days back, I decided to go back to Lion (the OS that originally shipped with my Late 2011 MBP. I did this for a few reasons:

1. lack of an ssd. The new macOSs are designed to be used with Fusion drives or SSDs. Having neither, I decided to go with 10.7
2. Lack of 8Gb RAM: I have 4GB, was fine with Lion, so keeping it that way
3. Wanted Snow Leopard, but no iCloud. I need iCloud.

1. This is a popular notion on this site but please look at the current base model iMac & the Mac-Mini, both ship with HDD's. Sure an SSD will mean faster access but the manufacturer who is still actively selling models with HDD's does consider that while developing its OS.

2. I also have 4GB of RAM on both 2011 and 2012 Air's, admittedly have the advantage of SSD but I'm not convinced that either are maxing out on RAM. Granted I'm not using Logic, Protools, Final Cut etc.

3. Until about 4 months ago my home computer was a modded 2006 Mac Mini with HDD & 3GB RAM. The GMA950 graphics meant it couldn't realistically go beyond Lion. There are browsers that will still run on Lion but its getting more & more niche. You can get calendar to sync to iCloud but its a workaround. If you are on iCloud, Photos will be an issue, its going to be a major hassle trying to go back to iPhoto. I could go on... It can be fun to mess with workarounds etc to keep older systems running if you have to but if you are going to college you probably won't have so much time to devote to keeping on top of workarounds to simply get things done ensuring you complete assignments on time.

Also any cool projects to do with a 10.7 machine? Anything you can do with them that cannot be done with Sierra or other OS?

A cool project would be to buy yourself a decent set of small torx, a large aftermarket SSD, carefully blow the dust from the inside & discover how well a 2011 MBP really does still do in 2017. You could then have plenty of room to play with partitions, Virtual-Box and within that various releases and flavours of OSX, Linux, FreeBSD in the knowledge that when you need a computer to do college-work & etc 'it just works'