Secret Mac Owners Thread

[swaaye]

I enjoy working on them. Somewhat recently, I did a cheap tune up on a circa 2007 Core 2 Macbook with newer OS, more RAM and a bigger HDD. It was interesting to see the OS hacking people were doing to run unsupported releases on it. But I couldn't help but think how I could run Windows 8.1 perfectly well on that machine but Apple had abandoned it several years ago.

The weirdest thing was they had applied dielectric grease to the edge connector of the SODIMMs. And the DIMMs installed almost like a slot loader CD drive.

 

[zed]

I used to have one for when I was making stuff for IOS, decent machine (stay away from the mightless mouse though)
pros: task manager actually will kill the frozen processesses, unlike windows 10 (or less) its like flipping a coin, sometimes it kills them sometimes it doesnt, the program launcher, no DLL's
cons: xcode, not as customizable

 

[rcf]

I've always wondered why Apple dropped A/UX during the 68k to PPC transition, instead of porting A/UX and making it the new default OS for the Macintosh. It could run System 7 software and it would have been a much more straightforward path than trying to reinvent everything, just to end up buying NeXT and releasing their "next-gen" OS (another Unix clone) almost a decade late.

 

[idsn6]

decent machine (stay away from the mightless mouse though)

The Mighty Mouse certainly had its problems, what with the scroll ball constantly getting clogged with oil and dirt as well as the need to lift your index finger to right-click.

It was worlds better than the Magic Mouse, though. Since the entire top is a touch surface, you cannot rest your fingers or palm on it without moving the cursor or page at random times. The only way to reliably move it is to claw it gingerly between your thumb and ring finger, hovering the rest of your hand well away from it and making sure not to squeeze too tightly lest the skin of your finger pad edge too far past the side and twitch the cursor. Trying to scroll while clawing the mouse in this fashion is perfect for when you really want to feel the carpal tunnel syndrome setting in. It is an ergonomic nightmare.

 

[Grall]

It could run System 7 software

I think you have your answer here...

System 7 was utter shit. Seriously, it was just The Worst Ever major operating system, and everybody - certainly Apple themselves - knew that. Getting completely rid of that piece of crap and anything remotely associated with it was probably priority #1... (Well, except for the bloody filing system, which we still have to this day... *ahem*)

 

[Florin]

I think you have your answer here...

System 7 was utter shit. Seriously, it was just The Worst Ever major operating system, and everybody - certainly Apple themselves - knew that. Getting completely rid of that piece of crap and anything remotely associated with it was probably priority #1... (Well, except for the bloody filing system, which we still have to this day... *ahem*)

The worst thing about System 7 and classic Mac OS in general was the cooperative multitasking. A/UX didn't suffer from that so at least in theory it was a great way to run some terrific mature desktop applications that other Unix vendors couldn't offer, but in a stable environment.

In practice however its licensing cost put it way out of the reach of most Mac users, and the fact that it needed a memory management unit and a floating point coprocessor further limited its appeal.
Relatively few Macs had one of these, fewer still both.

Apple wasn't a successful company back then and had to pick its battles. Like most of the non-Sun vendors it eventually decided to throw its lot in with OSF as the grand unifying future Unix, which as it turns out never happened.
Nowadays we have Linux for that, of course. And somewhat ironically Apple largely drives the continued relevance of one of the surviving siblings: BSD.

 

[Grall]

The worst thing about System 7 and classic Mac OS in general was the cooperative multitasking.

I would say lack of memory protection myself, but cooperative MT could of course hang the OS just as hard if you were unlucky. The number of times the Powermac I fiddled with at a mate's place just plain crashed and died from normal operations can't be counted on one hand. It was ridiculous.

Supremely unstable OS, if ever I saw one. Way worse than Windows 3.x/9x from a stability perspective.

 

[rcf]

I think you have your answer here...

System 7 was utter shit. Seriously, it was just The Worst Ever major operating system, and everybody - certainly Apple themselves - knew that. Getting completely rid of that piece of crap and anything remotely associated with it was probably priority #1... (Well, except for the bloody filing system, which we still have to this day... *ahem*)

Yeah, but it was just a compatibility feature, just like "Carbon" in OSX. Once your application had been ported to A/UX you would never run the System 7 version again. And even the System 7 version would be running in a better environment with memory protection.

In practice however its licensing cost put it way out of the reach of most Mac users, and the fact that it needed a memory management unit and a floating point coprocessor further limited its appeal. Relatively few Macs had one of these, fewer still both.

That's true for 68k Macs, but not true for PPC Macs.

Apple wasn't a successful company back then and had to pick its battles.

Just porting A/UX was easier. Trying to rewrite everything from scratch isn't a good way to pick your battles. That's why they failed and had to buy NeXT.

 

[Grall]

Okay, so I've just replaced the HDD in my old 2011 Macbook with a brand new SSHD (which is a bizarre contradiction in terms, but it wasn't I who coined this shitty term, so...*shrug*) - which annoyingly involved having to bring out a miniscule torx screwdriver, but luckily I had a bit that fit. Justice prevails!

...Then there's the matter of re-installing OSX, which just goes to show that Apple really isn't very good with software overall. They have this thing called internet restore, or whatever, where you download the OS over the webs, but fuck me did it work? Nope. It just wouldn't kick in - maybe because my new drive wasn't Apple formatted, but how the hell could it possibly be, seeing as it was brand new. Luckily I had prepared a USB stick just for this eventuality. For some reason the stick had not wanted to boot when I'd done a dry run using my old system drive, but now it worked. Weird. And again justice prevails!

So after like...minutes, the installation program has finished booting from the stick. I get a set of choices, one being Install OSX, and another which is Start Disk Utility. I fucking KNOW that Apple being shitty Apple will assume there's a disk formatted and ready if I select Install OSX, but maybe it won't assume, and will (like Microsoft, who knows how to write OS installers) offer to format/partition a drive as a step of the install procedure. So then starting Disk Utility would be a waste. So I pick Install OSX, and hope for the best.

...Of course, it assumes I have a drive prepared and ready, so I fumble around in the menus, trying to get back to the main menu (I should have simply selected Quit Install OSX), and managed to end up in a state where the only way out was to restart the computer and boot it back up again. WOWIE Apple! Awesome stuffs!

So, several minutes later booting up one more time from the USB stick, I'm back at the main menu again. Now I pick Disk Utility, set up the drive, quit Disk Utility, and start OSX installation. Now it's happily chugging away, reading the OS from the USB stick presumably. Will be interesting to see how fast this old Mac boots once I've restarted it a couple times; windows boot times from this drive - once properly run-in - is reported as just a few seconds slower than a good SSD.

 

[swaaye]

I like SSHDs. They are definitely much nicer to have than a typical 5400RPM notebook HDD.

 

[Grall]

@swaaye
It's all installed now, and OSX is running drive encryption in the background. Good that you can enable that right away now during setup by the way, so you don't need to restart your computer to get it running. ...Or fiddle in the control panel to enable it, because most people probably don't bother looking through all the settings, even though OSX is much sparser than Windows with the amount and variety of options presented - and also better than Windows, even Win10, at presenting the options it does offer.

How fast would you say your computer boots with SSHD? I've yet to restart my Mac after it first finished with the setup, I want to let the drive encryption run through fully from start to finish first.

 

[Rys]

I have an SSHD and I don't think I've touched the spinning rust part yet. It's indistinguishable from the prior SSD-only iMac that I had, although I'm sure that'll change when I have enough data for the OS to start to shuffle data back and forth between the SSD part and the spinning rust part.

 

[Grall]

By the way, does anyone know how to stop OSX from adding a metric shit-ton of junk folders and files to any and every USB storage device inserted into it? I briefly inserted a flash stick into my Macbook and boom, 38MB of bullshit junk was added to it.

 

[London Geezer]

"metric shit-ton"

What was in the folder?

 

[Grall]

A bunch of folders actually. Spotlight index stuff I would say offhand, but that's just guessing from looking at file names and stuff. Seems reasonable, though.

Anyway, I've noticed a bug (with icloud keyring, it seems) where OSX El Capitan frequently, in my case, won't accept your password when trying to log in or enter admin credentials. Solution? Disconnect from network to force it to use local credentials... Awesome, as you can't disable wifi from the login screen. I have to pull the power cord out of my access point, ugh! What if this happens when I'm downtown, logged onto some random guest wifi network...? I'd have to walk out of range and then try again, wtf.

As far as catastrophic bugs (since you can get locked out of your own computer) go, this one's particularly obnoxious as it's likely to pop anytime a password prompt appears (which on a laptop can be quite often, with screen saver coming on, closing lid and so on), and from looking at online discussion threads, this one's been around at least since El Capitan open beta without getting fixed...! Typical shitty Apple coding standards.

Also, they've fucked up wifi performance yet again. In OSX Yosemite they replaced their wifi stack with something else which went through several rounds of updates/attempted fixes when it failed to work properly for some people. For me, it worked most of the time. Launch version worked fine, then 5GHz wifi stopped working (reliably) after the first fix. Then on and off I'd have shitty performance or full steam ahead, until the last version before El Capitan, when speed was rather blazing fast, 150+ Mbit/s downloads. Now, after they were supposed to have cured these ailments by going back to their old software stack, I get ~24-40Mbit/s, and it doesn't matter which service I'm using; steam or battle.net.

Don't have any more ports on my router unfortunately, or I would have switched to wired. But, alas.

 

[Pressure]

No problems here with El Capitan. I just installed it on two Macs without incident. I also don't have any problems with passwords and so forth. Do you have anything else that pollutes the 5Ghz spectrum? Slow phone? Does your router support both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz simultaneous?

 

[swaaye]

In the notebooks I've used a SSHD in, the boot time is usually a fraction of what it was with HDD. It's not SSD but man it's far more enjoyable to use than a typical notebook HDD. Of course if you manipulate a lot of data, you'll bog down the sad 5400RPM drive inside.

 

[Simon F]

I had a 512k "Fat Mac". Does that count?

(I still have a stack of discs .... just no way to read them )

 

[Scott_Arm]

I have a 2015 macbook pro. I like it. I switched to Mac in 2008. At that time, it was glorious compared to Windows XP. I setup up bootcamp for Windows 7 and used it for gaming a few times. Now looking at Windows 10, I think the age of OSX is starting to show. Yosemite seemed to have some performance issues when I got this new macbook. Those look to have been solved in El Capitan, but I feel like OSX has kind of stagnated. I'd be more likely to switch back to Windows if the trend continues. I really would like Microsoft to get their shit together and simply installing/uninstalling applications. That's about the last big thing Windows needs to copy. They finally copied Expose and active screen corners.

Edit: I thought Windows 7 was a pretty good OS until we finally switched all of our computers at work over last year. Having to support a number of PCs, I've encountered all kinds of craziness in the network settings of the control panel. Weird behaviour that I can't excuse. So whenever I think switching back to Windows would be fine, there's a a little voice in the back of my head pleading, "Don't do it!"

 

[Grall]

For general use, I actually prefer OSX over win10. Safari is smooth and easy to use with the swipe gestures, OSX fullscreen mode is very very nice and convenient and flipping between apps is also easy, the dock is nicer than win10's shitty start menu (try using it for anything with 150+ installed steam games for example... Total clutterfest!) The system settings app also beats the shit out of win10's super messy-bad control panel.

The only thing really still holding me in the windows camp is expandability and hardware support (as in almost total lack of any for anything not built by Apple, unless connected by USB, and even then it's somewhat sketchy), and games support. There's lots more OSX games now than a couple years ago, but most of it is indie. The big ones are generally windows-only.

Oh, and OSX HPS+ (or whatsitscalled) file system is ancient and terrible and awful. I've gotten unrepairable disk errors spontaneously several times, which has NEVER happened with NTFS. Although maybe my previous macbook HDD is bad, I'm not sure. Haven't taken the time to check it out yet.