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Going down Highway 1 ...

Installed OCLP_Monterey side by side with Dosdude1's PatchedMojave onto my late'08 aluminum Unibody 13"MB5,1.
When it comes to speed and performance (and 32bit-Support) Mojave is my favorite macOS for early Intels.
how much RAM is in the MacBook?
Mojave was great on my MacBook Air 2010 4GB until last September, thank to Dosdude.
but other users are posting here that Mojave and safari are slower than last year.
seems to me the 2023 web is getting "too fast" for Mojave.

Im running Sierra now.
 
Mavericks goes electronic paper :D 16 shades of grey ain’t that bad. This is using just the sunlight:

497CBE35-EF7D-4BD3-8285-1F27A302F6E4.jpeg


When the sun’s down, just flip on a nice warm frontlight:

6EEFAE2E-FBCC-4A1F-9E09-AB062EA2AEF9.jpeg
 
how much RAM is in the MacBook?
Mojave was great on my MacBook Air 2010 4GB until last September, thank to Dosdude.
but other users are posting here that Mojave and safari are slower than last year.
seems to me the 2023 web is getting "too fast" for Mojave.
Both my '08 MB5,1 and the mid'12 MBP9,1 currently sport 8GB (the MB is at it's limit, the MBP might get a 16GB upgrade).

Nevertheless (patched) Mojave is still the macOS of my choice.
@dosdude1 has done an incredible job for us users of early-intel Macs!

Bloated, data-collecting, spying, advertising Web has become a man-eater for all related resources (hardware, power-consumption, human-labor, environment etc.)
If hardware using PatchedMojave can't cope, all other constellations of newer macOS-versions are going to fail too.
Just think about the increasing footstep of the sheer operating-system-software (6GB Mojave vs. 12GB BigSur/Monterey/Ventura). Insane!
It took web and industry 14-16 years to render the latest and fastest PowerPC Macs close to be obsolete.
So for intel-Macs 10-12 years might be the life-span for web&cloud-support (counted from the very onset of Apple's move to it's own SOC-silicon) Good prospects? I don't know ...
Many thanks to @dosdude1 and the OCLP-community for their outstanding job breathing new life into aged and disowned Apple-hardware.
Im running Sierra now.
That's not a bad decision at all! (though I'd miss the dark mode...)
 
I installed Ubuntu 22.04.1 on my a1278 running Catalina and it is stable. My previous attempt on this machine last year was terribly unstable, prone to freezes and crashing. This is a most recent iso for x86 DLd off the ubuntu site and is working very well on this hardware+ethernet.
Screenshot from 2023-02-16 20-45-03.png

The single issue I am running into is the broadcom wireless driver. It is throwing
an error when I attempt to install. Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?
Screenshot from 2023-02-16 20-41-28.png

All in I'm happy with this build of Ubuntu as it is functioning very well over ethernet on elderly cored2duo hardware and is reporting support through 2027. I'm hoping to figure out a fix for the wifi but can switch over to Catalina if I need it until I can figure out a fix.
 
I was given a basically new, unused 32GB iPhone 6 recently, by someone who’d upgraded their daily iPhone and their previous daily iPhone as their fallback, with the aforementioned iPhone 6 being their previous fallback they no longer needed.

They know I’m an Android phone user, but thought I’d like to tinker with it. “Sure, why not,” I replied.

As someone who has used Macs non-stop since, well, 1990, I have frowned on iOS/iPadOS-based products from the moment Apple announced waaaay back in 2007 how these would always, software-wise, be controlled by Apple like, well, overzealous corrections officers.

So I wanted to try something really basic with this iPhone 6 (an A1549) and my regular daily driver laptop of late, my A1261 MBP running 10.6.8. I started with taking a test picture on the camera which, to my shock, has virtually no configuration options aside from setting how slow-motion and time exposure images were handled. Like, what, lmao…

Nevertheless, the image quality was surprisingly not bad.

Next: “OK, does this connect to my Mac to allow me to see the device like a hard drive volume the way my iPod nano does, so that I can move that photo to my laptop, even if I have to dig into some hidden directory via Terminal to do so?”

Nope, you may not.

The iPhone, when connecting to the laptop, asks if the laptop is a trusted device (obviously). Nothing happened on the MBP. I opened iTunes 10.6.3, but it showed an error (which I later learnt was because for the iPhone 6 to play nice, iTunes 11.4 or higher is needed). Pass.

OK. So, let’s try Image Capture.app.

Lollllllllnope.

Fair. That was kind of a long shot.

Next up: sending the file via Bluetooth.

Absolutely not, implied the iPhone 6’s lack of being able to share files by sharing a file via Bluetooth.

This one surprised me, sincerely. And AirDrop, which uses the Bluetooth protocol, does not play nice with Snow Leopard. Nevertheless, it’s stunning Apple prevents Bluetooth file sharing as Bluetooth file sharing, out-of-box.

So by this point, I was running out of ideas. Then, I thought I may as well open vmware and see what VMs I had on this laptop (which was a partial mirror from my A1278 back in 2021). Ah yes, Windows XP.

I opened XP in vmware, then re-connected the phone, getting the “do you trust this device” pop-up on the iPhone display. But lo and behold, the iPhone photos directory shows up without a hitch on Windows Explorer (!!!). I moved the test photo from there to my external share point which is my 10.6.8 volume.

And that was it.


While I’m sure there are possibly thousands of pages on MR forums alone discussing/debating/complaining around the thorough ways Apple locks down their iOS/iPadOS devices, it doesn’t come up very often on here, even as I’m sure folks still use their iPads and iPhones with their older Intel Macs (running a bog-standard macOS build or an OpenCore Legacy-patched one). I recognize this strategy of ultra-max lockdown is how Apple played Venus flytrap with everyone who bought into the iOS/iPadOS ecosystem from 2007 and locked them into their walled garden of significant proportions, in order to hold consumers inside and extract their wealth, vis-à-vis the App Store.

But to be a multi-decade Mac user to never have been a part of that personally, only to test it and realize just how pernicious that enforcement is — to the point of disabling basic industry standards-based functionality (like Bluetooth file sharing, mounting volumes, etc.) — I’m, idk, kind of appalled, frankly. Like, wow. Ugly af.

Yes, I completely understand the company desire to create a default use environment to make their devices as simple as possible to use (irrespective of one’s first language or their familiarity with other computer-based technology, such as one’s grandparents). But within that, one would think there could also be more advanced functions which a more advanced user could opt to have as a setup system configuration (without running afoul of Apple — such as an opt-in “expert mode” for privilege escalation). But nope. Apple more or less went with a carceral model of information security by creating a non-competitive environment from the outset, within which everyone of all levels of capability are kept confined to using the same baseline of limited function.

Anyway, as this almost belongs in another forum (mods, pwease no steppy), what I did today was use an early Intel Mac running OS X to use VMware to open XP to pull a test photo from a brand-new (100 per cent battery life-new) iOS 12.5.7-installed iPhone 6, because that was the only way I could move that photo to my laptop without having to rely on Apple’s cloud-based servers as a nosy (and carbon-intensive!) intermediary.

Again, just… wow. :O

[EDIT to add: I did find a terminal app(lication) via the App(lication) Store, which let me see, well, my own home directory. There was no superuser commands/options (no surprise), but also no way to cd into /System (because the person who owns the phone/pad isn’t allowed to. 🤦‍♀️ ) Next up: jailbreak it and try to run either Snow Leopard or Leopard on it.]
 
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I might try something else, I mean why not. I tried a void live environment iso to give it a spin before committing to an install but could not get it to boot.
 
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I was given a basically new, unused 32GB iPhone 6 recently, by someone who’d upgraded their daily iPhone and their previous daily iPhone as their fallback, with the aforementioned iPhone 6 being their previous fallback they no longer needed.

They know I’m an Android phone user, but thought I’d like to tinker with it. “Sure, why not,” I replied.

As someone who has used Macs non-stop since, well, 1990, I have frowned on iOS/iPadOS-based products from the moment Apple announced waaaay back in 2007 how these would always, software-wise, be controlled by Apple like, well, overzealous corrections officers.

So I wanted to try something really basic with this iPhone 6 (an A1549) and my regular daily driver laptop of late, my A1261 MBP running 10.6.8. I started with taking a test picture on the camera which, to my shock, has virtually no configuration options aside from setting how slow-motion and time exposure images were handled. Like, what, lmao…

Nevertheless, the image quality was surprisingly not bad.

Next: “OK, does this connect to my Mac to allow me to see the device like a hard drive volume the way my iPod nano does, so that I can move that photo to my laptop, even if I have to dig into some hidden directory via Terminal to do so?”

Nope, you may not.

The iPhone, when connecting to the laptop, asks if the laptop is a trusted device (obviously). Nothing happened on the MBP. I opened iTunes 10.6.3, but it showed an error (which I later learnt was because for the iPhone 6 to play nice, iTunes 11.4 or higher is needed). Pass.

OK. So, let’s try Image Capture.app.

Lollllllllnope.

Fair. That was kind of a long shot.

Next up: sending the file via Bluetooth.

Absolutely not, implied the iPhone 6’s lack of being able to share files by sharing a file via Bluetooth.

This one surprised me, sincerely. And AirDrop, which uses the Bluetooth protocol, does not play nice with Snow Leopard. Nevertheless, it’s stunning Apple prevents Bluetooth file sharing as Bluetooth file sharing, out-of-box.

So by this point, I was running out of ideas. Then, I thought I may as well open vmware and see what VMs I had on this laptop (which was a partial mirror from my A1278 back in 2021). Ah yes, Windows XP.

I opened XP in vmware, then re-connected the phone, getting the “do you trust this device” pop-up on the iPhone display. But lo and behold, the iPhone photos directory shows up without a hitch on Windows Explorer (!!!). I moved the test photo from there to my external share point which is my 10.6.8 volume.

And that was it.


While I’m sure there are possibly thousands of pages on MR forums alone discussing/debating/complaining around the thorough ways Apple locks down their iOS/iPadOS devices, it doesn’t come up very often on here, even as I’m sure folks still use their iPads and iPhones with their older Intel Macs (running a bog-standard macOS build or an OpenCore Legacy-patched one). I recognize this strategy of ultra-max lockdown is how Apple played Venus flytrap with everyone who bought into the iOS/iPadOS ecosystem from 2007 and locked them into their walled garden of significant proportions, in order to hold consumers inside and extract their wealth, vis-à-vis the App Store.

But to be a multi-decade Mac user to never have been a part of that personally, only to test it and realize just how pernicious that enforcement is — to the point of disabling basic industry standards-based functionality (like Bluetooth file sharing, mounting volumes, etc.) — I’m, idk, kind of appalled, frankly. Like, wow. Ugly af.

Yes, I completely understand the company desire to create a default use environment to make their devices as simple as possible to use (irrespective of one’s first language or their familiarity with other computer-based technology, such as one’s grandparents). But within that, one would think there could also be more advanced functions which a more advanced user could opt to have as a setup system configuration (without running afoul of Apple — such as an opt-in “expert mode” for privilege escalation). But nope. Apple more or less went with a carceral model of information security by creating a non-competitive environment from the outset, within which everyone of all levels of capability are kept confined to using the same baseline of limited function.

Anyway, as this almost belongs in another forum (mods, pwease no steppy), what I did today was use an early Intel Mac running OS X to use VMware to open XP to pull a test photo from a brand-new (100 per cent battery life-new) iOS 12.5.7-installed iPhone 6, because that was the only way I could move that photo to my laptop without having to rely on Apple’s cloud-based servers as a nosy (and carbon-intensive!) intermediary.

Again, just… wow. :O

[EDIT to add: I did find a terminal app(lication) via the App(lication) Store, which let me see, well, my own home directory. There was no superuser commands/options (no surprise), but also no way to cd into /System (because the person who owns the phone/pad isn’t allowed to. 🤦‍♀️ ) Next up: jailbreak it and try to run either Snow Leopard or Leopard on it.]
This is something I knew going in when I got my first full-purchase iPhone (the iPhone 5) in 2012. I'd had a 3GS to play with for about a year at that point and I'd done everything to that 3GS I could possibly try. By the time I got my iPhone 5 I was competent at jailbreaking and had developed a few rules for myself. It was one thing to mess up the 3GS, which didn't even have an active line, another to mess up my primary phone.

So jailbreaking is how I got around these sorts of restrictions you speak to. There's a JB tweak that leverages AFP to allow you to connect to your iPhone exactly as you expected. It's a simple 'Connect to Server', enter credentials and the iPhone appears as a drive on your desktop. Someone else at some point also leveraged SMB for the same thing.

Both tweaks are old and you can't do that anymore. In any case, jailbreaking has moved away from being a fully-untethered jailbreak to semi-untethered. And a lot of devs have abandoned the scene since 2015.

But I still manage to get photos off my devices quite easily. The trick is third-party services. Dropbox and Google Photos both have a Camera upload feature. Any photo I take, typically to post here, I open Dropbox and it immediately uploads - then downloads straight to my MacPro and my Minis. Just a matter of attaching it from my Dropbox/Camera Uploads folder. Google Photos operates in the same way.

If you have an iPad, Apple has allowed some limited access to the filesystem on the device itself, but it's still not the same as jailbreaking.
 
Installed Ventura on my 2009 Mini for the hell of it.
Scherm­afbeelding 2023-02-18 om 22.29.29.png

Surprising to see that the weather app and Freeform both work perfectly fine. As expected, everything is a lot slower than on Catalina. But most apps do work. Funny to see that this Mac is running a newer version of macOS than my main Mac, which is running Monterey :p
 
But I still manage to get photos off my devices quite easily. The trick is third-party services. Dropbox and Google Photos both have a Camera upload feature. Any photo I take, typically to post here, I open Dropbox and it immediately uploads - then downloads straight to my MacPro and my Minis. Just a matter of attaching it from my Dropbox/Camera Uploads folder. Google Photos operates in the same way.

And that’s returning to the problem I brought up before: the compulsory intermediary of a “cloud service” far away to move a file from one’s iPhone/iPad to one’s laptop or desktop — whether it be Apple’s iCloud, or Dropbox, or Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive, or whatever.

Injecting a cloud service into moving local files from one local device to another local device is a profusely inefficient model.

And when this model gets scaled out to levels which render cloud services as a profit-minded venture, it’s a retrogressive kludge. Further, it’s wasteful once one factors the total energy footprint (whether at the tiny, individual level or when aggregated and scaled out, en masse) of moving a local file from local device, to cloud service infrastructure, and back to the other local device.

The energy consumed in the power to send a file upstream though varying physical infrastructure, to be processed and stored on a remote cloud service (including the energy to produce and maintain those server materials and to run those cloud server farms), followed then by the return trip to, virtually, the same spot where the file originated (on the same or on a slightly different infrastructure path of varying energy consumption)?

All because/so a cloud service can “learn”/build a user’s use profile for how one uses, stores, and moves files? That’s a bargain of, well, insanity on a mess of levels.

The energy (as well as resources and time, especially once scaled out) consumed by connecting one device to another physically to move a file or files, whether by cord; by a 1998-based protocol called Bluetooth; or within one’s wifi local network (a 1997-based standard, which nowadays serves as the basic, de facto network infrastructure on which every home, home office, or office exists these days), is far less — and far less invasive — than what an iDevice (and to wide extent, the default of Android devices) business model pressed users to rely on. The compulsory dependence of using a remote cloud service to do once-basic, routine tasks we were already doing locally for decades is a great (giant) slide backward.

My jaw is still slack when thinking about how absurd it was/is to move a simple .jpg test image from the iPhone 6 to my MBP, relying on a VM (living incidentally on my MBP), to move it locally from source to destination, when Apple’s preferred/enforced approach is for users/product owners to rely on a remote cloud service as an intermediary — whether their own or a competing service. It’s been giving me a headache just putting my mind around it.
 
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@B S Magnet and @eyoungren I too have a 32GB iPhone 6 - mine was picked up cheaply on eBay and became a successful repair project. I've not done much with it (the plan is that if I'm abroad it can be used as a secondary phone with a local network provider to save me the hassle of switching SIM cards on my main phone) as I predominantly use an Android.

After reading about your difficulties @B S Magnet, I looked for solutions and most of them were inaccurate, a ploy to sell third-party software or misleading. The best source of information came from Apple themselves. Using my 11" 2010 C2D MacBook Air and Catalina, here's the best method for importing photos/videos from an iPhone to a Mac:

7xlba90.jpg


I connected my iPhone to the MBA via USB and signed in with my passcode: at this point I was prompted to trust the MBA, which I did.

wNWsioe.png


As you can see, the iPhone was then mounted as a device in Finder. After turning off Photos in the iPhone's iCloud options, I was able to access photo and video content in Photos on the MBA.

USwNAZX.png


From Photos, I could view the iPhone's camera roll and then select how many images that I wanted to import. I've blurred the gallery (courtesy of GIMP) because I don't think that my mum would appreciate me sharing snaps of her with people she doesn't know. :D

That's it - your content will be imported to a folder in macOS, where you can do whatever you please with it.

RE-EDIT!

This functionality is also supported in Mojave too. I've just carried out a test with High Sierra on my 2011 MBP and a different tactic is required. Connect the iPhone via USB and ensure that it's unlocked. It will not mount in Finder, instead you have to open iTunes - where your iPhone will be recognised and listed.

You'll be asked if you want to access its files, confirm in the affirmative, a trust request will appear which you'll also have to accept but another step is still required to view your photos/videos. Next, open Photos and you'll see the iPhone also listed there. Click on "Open Photos for this device" and your camera roll will appear and you can then import them.

I don't have a machine with El Capitan installed at the moment so I'm unable to test it with that to see if the process is the same - but the interoperability does exist in later iterations of macOS beyond Snow Leopard. :)
 
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@B S Magnet and @eyoungren I too have a 32GB iPhone 6 - mine was picked up cheaply on eBay and became a successful repair project. I've not done much with it (the plan is that if I'm abroad it can be used as a secondary phone with a local network provider to save me the hassle of switching SIM cards on my main phone) as I predominantly use an Android.

After reading about your difficulties @B S Magnet, I looked for solutions and most of them were inaccurate, a ploy to sell third-party software or misleading. The best source of information came from Apple themselves. Using my 11" 2010 C2D MacBook Air and Catalina, here's the best method for importing photos/videos from an iPhone to a Mac:

7xlba90.jpg


I connected my iPhone to the MBA via USB and signed in with my passcode: at this point I was prompted to trust the MBA, which I did.

wNWsioe.png


As you can see, the iPhone was then mounted as a device in Finder. After turning off Photos in the iPhone's iCloud options, I was able to access photo and video content in Photos on the MBA.

USwNAZX.png


From Photos, I could view the iPhone's camera roll and then select how many images that I wanted to import. I've blurred the gallery (courtesy of GIMP) because I don't think that my mum would appreciate me sharing snaps of her with people she doesn't know. :D

That's it - your content will be imported to a folder in macOS, where you can do whatever you please with it.

RE-EDIT!

This functionality is also supported in Mojave too. I've just carried out a test with High Sierra on my 2011 MBP and a different tactic is required. Connect the iPhone via USB and ensure that it's unlocked. It will not mount in Finder, instead you have to open iTunes - where your iPhone will be recognised and listed.

You'll be asked if you want to access its files, confirm in the affirmative, a trust request will appear which you'll also have to accept but another step is still required to view your photos/videos. Next, open Photos and you'll see the iPhone also listed there. Click on "Open Photos for this device" and your camera roll will appear and you can then import them.

I don't have a machine with El Capitan installed at the moment so I'm unable to test it with that to see if the process if the same - but the interoperability does exist in later iterations of macOS beyond Snow Leopard. :)

Interesting — all of this.

I went ahead and, instead of powering on the iPhone, connecting it, and opening Image Capture (which previously did not work), I opened iPhoto (another Apple application I never use). This time, unlike with Image Capture, a dialogue box popped up notifying the user that the connected iPhone was locked (which I unlocked with my passcode/pin, as I never set up the thumbprint scan). And just like that, iPhoto displayed the pic tests I shot with the iPhone:

1676809012492.png


But you’ll also notice that Image Capture is also open and showing the photos on the iPhone, too. What this indicates (to me, at least) is the aforementioned device unlock alert subroutine built into iPhoto was never built into Image Capture (or, at least the SL edition of Image Capture). [EDIT: see more about this below.]

That said, dragging the iPhoto gallery into a directory in Finder doesn’t work, but dragging the same from Image Capture into Finder does — which has nothing to do with the iPhone and everything to do with how iPhoto works.

So… from at least SL, there is a process to make this work, but it involves iPhoto (or, later, Photos) as the first, (possibly) one-time step, and Image Capture for dragging the photos to a directory. So that’s definitely something, and I have you to thank for that.

Trying the same on High Sierra, Photos abruptly quits after launching (possibly related to my perma-disabling NotificationCenter on HS, idk), so I can’t really test it from that, but unlike SL, Image Capture does the work on its own, informing the user to unlock the iPhone, after which it reveals access to the photos (much as it does on SL after iPhoto handles the unlock routine). [EDIT: after running this experiment on High Sierra, and then returning the iPhone to the Snow Leopard box, Image Capture this time handled the lock/unlock routine warning handled previously by iPhoto. Why it didn’t do so, initially, several days ago, I’m not sure.]

Otherwise, much of what I wrote about dependency on cloud servers as intermediary remains germane, as non-photo/video files (such as downloaded documents like PDFs), as far as I can assess, can’t exactly be accessed directly via the above Mac OS X/macOS applications.

Anyway, enjoy a straight-from-the-iPhone test pic featuring my cat, who’s as tired of this winter as I am.

IMG_0052a.jpg
 
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[EDIT: after running this experiment on High Sierra, and then returning the iPhone to the Snow Leopard box, Image Capture this time handled the lock/unlock routine warning handled previously by iPhoto. Why it didn’t do so, initially, several days ago, I’m not sure.]

My experiences have been the complete opposite, I rebooted into SL and didn't bother with iTunes because of the incompatibility that you mentioned earlier - nor iPhoto for that matter. I went straight to Image Capture and lo and behold:

H866sPo.jpg

5g56cRZ.png


The iPhone 6 was automatically detected and my photos were available to me. Why you've faced this issue whilst I haven't is strange but then I've had strange experiences with the iPhone and my Macs. Last month I found myself unable to restore the handset to its factory settings in Catalina and Mojave on my MBA but succeeded with High Sierra on my MBP.

Otherwise, much of what I wrote about dependency on cloud servers as intermediary remains germane, as non-photo/video files (such as downloaded documents like PDFs), as far as I can assess, can’t exactly be accessed directly via the above Mac OS X/macOS applications.

We shall find a way! :D

Anyway, enjoy a straight-from-the-iPhone test pic featuring my cat, who’s as tired of this winter as I am.


View attachment 2161120

Adorable! :)
 
And that’s returning to the problem I brought up before: the compulsory intermediary of a “cloud service” far away to move a file from one’s iPhone/iPad to one’s laptop or desktop — whether it be Apple’s iCloud, or Dropbox, or Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive, or whatever.
After reading about your difficulties @B S Magnet, I looked for solutions and most of them were inaccurate, a ploy to sell third-party software or misleading. The best source of information came from Apple themselves. Using my 11" 2010 C2D MacBook Air and Catalina, here's the best method for importing photos/videos from an iPhone to a Mac:
I went ahead and, instead of powering on the iPhone, connecting it, and opening Image Capture (which previously did not work), I opened iPhoto (another Apple application I never use). This time, unlike with Image Capture, a dialogue box popped up notifying the user that the connected iPhone was locked (which I unlocked with my passcode/pin, as I never set up the thumbprint scan). And just like that, iPhoto displayed the pic tests I shot with the iPhone:
I think, no I know, I stand on the opposite end of this. @B S Magnet I believe we had this conversation before, as you mention.

A large part of my reliance on third party solutions comes from having to use them in order to actually use my iPhone. Back in 2012 a lot of the solutions @TheShortTimer shows were not available to me on a PowerBook using Leopard. In fact, it's only been since 2020 that I've had access to any of this (when I got my MacPro).

That aside, I hold a knee jerk reaction to using Apple's own apps to accomplish what should be a very simple process - if Apple allowed it. I have the (mis)fortune of getting a Windows Mobile phone as my first smartphone. For three years it worked perfectly with my PowerBook. Plug it in, drive appears on desktop, access DCIM folder, copy over pics. There were no apps involved - it was easy.

Then I got the iPhone and that required iTunes to do anything because Apple would not allow you to mount the iPhone to the desktop. Yet they'd allow some limited ability of that on Windows PCs!

So, the iPhone 5 does not sync with the PowerBook G4. I'm out of luck, but at that time I'd already been with Dropbox for a couple years. So, I went with that because Dropbox was still working with PowerPC. It meant having to open an app on the iPhone/iPad (which I still hate doing) but after that my images were right there. No having to dig around in Apple's apps and drag them over. But as great as that is, it only works easily one way. If I want to get an image on to my iPhone/iPad I drop an image into Dropbox, then open the Dropbox app on my device(s) and then download the image to the Camera Roll.

Last year I broke my 11 Pro Max and had to turn it in for a replacement. I purchased a 2TB iCloud sub in order to back my photos up. I ended up having to deal with the Photos app anyway because despite the sub - not all my photos were backed up. So, there I am digging through backups and drag/dropping photos directly in to the Photos app so they can upload to my iPhone.

But, one of my main annoyances with the Photos app is that despite MOST of my images being named by my iPhone or iPad with Apple's naming convention, the Photos app is a giant unorganized mess. None of my images came back in how they were organized originally. I've got old images before new images and so on. This is a primary reason I continue to use Dropbox to get images on to my devices. They appear at the top of my camera roll, not wherever the Photos app decides to put it.

All of this, all these issues and Apple provided apps and workarounds could be mitigated if Apple would just allow the iDevice to mount to the desktop when plugged in - even if it's just the camera roll. Maybe that's available with later versions of macOS. I do not know as I haven't used those yet. But on Mojave, it's not possible.

I'm capable of being as intractable as Apple is for as long as they are. I've got a long history of working around people who seek to block me or deny me things and as long as those options are still there in a manner I'm comfortable using I will continue to have my cake (iPhone/iPad) and eat it too (jailbreaking, third-party services).
 
Honestly, you can avoid iCloud on newer hardware with AirDrop - which is surprisingly robust. I've used it to move 15GB files between iPads in a matter of minutes, no cable required. It's mostly the PPC and early Intel stuff that's somewhat in limbo, because the improvements came in later OSes. iOS's built in Files app got a lot better in 16.x - especially handling high resolution 15MB+ image files.
 
There's one other way of file transfers from iPhone to any Mac, and that's a Lightning-USB flash drive. SanDisk does one, it looks like this:
Screen shot 2023-02-20 at 8.34.47 AM.png

It requires a proprietary app to work, which may now limit outdated iOS as of 2023, but I had reasonable success getting photos off my iPhone SE 1st gen and 6S just like a USB storage device a few years ago.
 
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