I envy you. It seems you have some place to keep all of them
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What have you done with an early Intel recently?
- Thread starter Project Alice
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PowerBook 5,2I envy you. It seems you have some place to keep all of them
PowerBook 6,8
PowerMac 3,4
PowerMac 3,5
MacBook 2,1
MacBook 5,2
MacBook 7,1
MacBook Air 5,2
MacBook Air 9,1
MacBook Air 10,1
MacBook Pro 9,2
MacBook Pro 13,1
iMac 9,1
iMac 12,2
iMac 14,1
MacMini 6,1
The definition should be: any Mac whose owner is greeted with responses like "Get a new Mac!" in the 'normal' subforums is welcome here.Maybe the new definition of "early Intel" should be anything that doesn't officially run the latest version of macOS?
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To hell with USB 3.
A NVMe SSD, either in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure attached to a powered TB3 dock and a TB3-to-TB1/2 adapter or in an M.2-to-PCIe adapter in a TB1/2 PCIe enclosure, is the fastest possible boot drive for that Mac with TRIM support.
Yeah, I have a setup like that for my Mid 2011 27" I get about 650/700ish with a Crucial P5 1TB. I really like it, its a Trebleet drive enclosure with 2 slots and it has an additional TB3 port which gives my 2011 a USB C port.To hell with USB 3.
I think a Thunderbolt 4 dock/hub is usable with Thunderbolt 2 Macs but not Thunderbolt 1 Macs. I don't have a Thunderbolt 2 Mac anymore but I think one person in the forums got it to work with a Thunderbolt 2 Mac host. With my Thunderbolt 1 iMac14,2, it does not even detect the Thunderbolt 4 hub (CalDigit Element Hub) (running High Sierra, or Catalina, or Monterey with OCLP). The iMac is running super slow at the moment so I ordered replacement SSDs for the 128 GB SSD and the 1 TB HDD. I'll wait for that to do additional tests (maybe the hub is usable if connected before macOS boot since initialization will be handled by EFI instead of macOS in that case).
Spending the day on Photoshop CC 2015.5, working on a project for a large client, using my 2007 17" MBP (running Mavericks). Love everything about this machine.
Frivolous, but made unsupported Mountain Lion on my Blackbook4,1 a little more modern-looking...
Tickets — uh — ingredients please
I used a Flavours theme that I had modified to look more like Sierra a few years ago as a starting point. I used it to make the menu bar black and the text white, as well as modernize the traffic lights, all of the selection boxes, and the push buttons. I modified the Extras2.rsrc to make the Finder windows pure white, using Theme Park on my Tiger machine (TP doesn't run on 10.8). I then found an old version of Obsidian Menu Bar for 10.8, and took the menu bar resources that he had supplied, and recolored them from dark grey to a much lighter grey using Illustrator. I had to do a little research to figure out where the resources went, but once I did, I replaced them with the lightened ones. The clock was whitened using a menu extra supplied by Obsidian. The dock was modified using Docker, which is pretty self-explanatory, and Candybar for the icons. I pulled the font from my Tiger Sierra theme, ran it through FontForge to convert it to ttc, and applied it, after removing LucidaGrande from the ProtectedFonts folder.
I'm not done with this just yet. I still need to change the Finder arrows and the System Preference icons, and a few other small items. I doubt I'll be able to get a full dark mode happening, but I'm looking into it, time permitting. I found the palette for the system text, but I need to experiment a bit with it.
The original Flavours theme is here. Flavours is still $10 to buy, although it is now unsupported. When I'm done with this, I may put together a page on how to do all of this, again time permitting.
Here's an actual screenshot of the desktop. As you can see, the menu bar is not perfect, especially the clock, which doesn't have bold text.
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My long-suffering MacBook 5,2 daily driver - with a whole bunch of loose connectors and nearly stripped topcase screws from having been opened up way too many times - has gotten what I hope will be its last internal upgrade, with the archaic 5400 rpm 120 GB hard drive I installed in the optical drive bay replaced with a 480 GB Kingston A400 SSD (obtained thanks to Black Friday). Backups now take seconds instead of days!
I just also won NaNoWriMo 2021 too, a whole day ahead of schedule. Woo!
I just also won NaNoWriMo 2021 too, a whole day ahead of schedule. Woo!
I finally figured out a patch to fix the latest FFMPEG 4.4.1 to compile on Mac OS X 10.4 Intel, and with all assembly optimizations! FFPLAY has rock solid 1080p MKV H264 playback on a early 2007 Mac mini 2.0 GHZ GMA 950 with 1GB RAM.
I got Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, which was recently released on GOG, working on my MacBook 4,1 running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS w/Xfce; it's interesting that it can still support rendering at thousands of colours. (Which Lion can't do!)
I remember my first Mac (Macintosh LC) supported thousands colors. That's 5 bits (32 different levels) per component. The display was a 512x384 12" RGB display. A larger display (640x480) could only work at 256 colors (the default 8 bit color lookup table had 6 levels for each component but the pure red, green, blue, and gray gradients had 4 bits for the component = 16 levels). I wrote a program to show all the colors.
I think I remember the early Mac OS X versions supported B&W, 4 color, 16 color, 256 color, Thousands, and Millions (I had a Power Macintosh 8600/200 which was my second Mac and the first I bought for myself). I think there was a lot of dithering for the clut (color lookup table) modes (256 or less colors). There was also a 4, 16, and 256 grayscale mode. These modes may have been related to Classic support - the Monitors control panel in the Classic environment worked? I forget all the details.
Oh, maybe an SSD-upgrade, maxed-out RAM and MojavePatch might be a welcome xmas-upgrade for that 2009MBP ... ?Maybe the new definition of "early Intel" should be anything that doesn't officially run the latest version of macOS?
P.S. I had been looking for a 2011-2015 Mac for my daughter since she had said the MacBookPro5,1 with Catalina was too slow for some stuff. In the end, she's staying with that old 2009 MacBook Pro. She likes it, and it doesn't actually concern her that much that her web games don't work on it for now since she perfectly happy to use her iPad Air 2 for that. I'm sure her outlook on this will change in 1-2 years, but in the meantime we can just wait, as that MBP is otherwise working great. Perhaps in 2023 I can buy her a 2017 MacBook Pro or iMac for cheap, or pass down my 2017 MacBook or 2017 iMac. Or I can pass down my 2014 Mac mini I just got yesterday.
That MacBookPro5,5 already has an SSD upgrade and 8 GB RAM, as well as the Catalina patch. As mentioned, she's OK with it because she also has an iPad that can handle the few things that she thinks don't run well on it. However, I also saw that for a couple of things she said was OK on it, there was actually quite a bit of lag. Being a kid, I guess she just accepted that and didn't complain about it. But then she asked me to help her do her homework and that lag drove me nuts.
It's amazing just how slow some educational web apps in Chrome can be on these machines.Sooo... I was periodically perusing the eBay listings and finally came across a 2015 13" 8 GB Core i5 MacBookPro12,1 that I was able to get for cheap. I just received it this week, and it is mint, with a new Apple OEM battery and flawless Retina screen too. It came with a 128 GB SSD which is actually OK for her, but I also was able to find a very reasonably priced Apple OEM Samsung 256 GB SSD so I've ordered that too. This will make for a great Xmas present.
It is serious overkill for her, but considering it officially runs Monterey, I figure she can use it for many, many years... provided she doesn't drop a juicebox on it or something... BTW, a web design friend said this exact model is what their web developers use at his workplace.
The web designers there get a bit more spec'd up models than the web developers, but are also issued 2015s, the 15" model instead.I thank M1 as well as M1 Pro/Max with all those ports, MagSafe, and the scissor keyboard for bringing down the prices so much on the 2015 MacBook Pros.
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I did some testing on my Power Mac G5 Quad.
256 colors is disabled in Leopard and Leopard doesn't support Classic environment. It does have Thousands and Millions of colors.
In Tiger, the 256 color mode is usable - Mac OS X uses a lot of dithering everywhere (the UI colors of Mac OS X don't match exactly the colors of the 256 color table).
SwitchResX 3.8.7 has a Grays menu item but it doesn't appear to do anything (have to hold the option key to see it in the SwitchResX menu bar menu).
Tiger supports Classic, but you need to use an older version of Monitors control panel (7.5.6) to use it. It doesn't show anything less than 256 color mode. The Grays mode works for 256 color mode.
My B&W G3 and Power Mac 8600 are not connected so I won't be checking those to see if they have less than 256 color mode.
Is it strange that the Power Mac G5 Quad can only use Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard while my Mac Pro 2008 can use all 14 versions of macOS from 10.4 to 12.0 ? I suppose it was the same with the last models of the 68K Macs and we'll see something similar with the last models of the Intel Macs. One reason for Apple to switch to Apple Silicon is that Intel Macs are just too long lived.
I wonder what Leopard does if you have a setup that “necessitates” a 256-colour mode, such as this one. (You'd either need a G4 upgrade in that particular laptop or e.g. an original PowerBook G4 which also has a GPU with 8 MB VRAM.)
That's the one from Mac OS 7.6.1, correct?
Whether PPC Macs should have gotten the final 10.6 has been debated to death elsewhere
The earliest G4s can at least run everything from Mac OS 8.6 to 10.5 Leopard.
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Maybe. I would have to go through all the old System 7 installers to be sure. It's got the old Control Panel UI style at least. Not like the new Mac OS 8 platinum style.
Here is Monitors 8.5.1 from Mac OS 9.1 running in SheepShaver.
I just fired up Mac OS 7.6.1 in Basilisk II and it has version 7.5.6 of the control panel. The 4-, 16- and 256-level greyscale modes plus B/W can be selected.
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Fun to read this thread, gets me all nostalgic about the time I was still a freelance graphic designer and illustrator. We had Macs which now would be considered properly ancient…