6 ms·

They're possibly something like a dosdude patcher or modified bootloader to run an OS like Catalina on it.

Alupis 6y ago
I have trouble understanding why people go through these hoops. Yeah, I get it, people love their Mac's... but the company that produces them actively undermines your ability to continue using perfectly good hardware past what they feel is "profitable". This leads to huge efforts to hack/reverse the updaters, or alter newer OS versions to trick them into installing, etc. I'd personally jump over to some system that doesn't hate it's users nearly as much. But, that's just me.
- boardwaalk 6y ago
  Do you really need to pivot into Apple bashing on this thread? It’s not really on topic or needed.
- gambiting 6y ago
  It's not out of some love for Macs. I have a 2008 MacBook running Catalina and it's simply because the cost of replacing it is >0. If this works and works well(and it does) then why would I get rid of it? Just to spite apple, which doesn't care either way? I also have a 2005 car that still runs - should I get rid of it because the company that made it stopped providing any kind of support for it long time ago? Or you know....keep using it because it works?
  - Alupis 6y ago
    Maybe it was easy for you to modify your OS to continue updating, or you downloaded some ISO of Catalina someone else pre-hacked for you - but it was certainly a non-trivial effort for whoever figured out how to trick the OS into installing and/or updating. It just seems like wasted effort, since the company all this supports really has made it clear they do not want you to have this ability, and can at any moment make future updates break everything all over again, leading to a new effort to reverse engineer the changes.
    - gambiting 6y ago
      So I don't agree, and I will use the car analogy again - old cars are not "supported" in any way and yet many people keep them going. There's serious engineering effort to make the parts, to write new software, to improve existing firmware etc. By your logic, that's also "wasted" effort since the manufacturer chooses to abandon cars after just few years, so why would you keep them going. I feel the same way about computers - like, who gives a damn what apple thinks. I have a laptop that is still going because people keep making it compatible. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
      - Alupis 6y ago
        The difference there is you're not violating some TOS or EULA by replacing parts on your classic car, and when you change your oil (do OS updates) there's no chance of suddenly your transmission refusing to allow you to shift gears until you perform more heroics and disable the artificial limitations. Very few non-classic and/or popular cars receive massive aftermarket support for all parts - often the aftermarket supports parts that are in common with a lot of vehicles or are vehicle-agnostic (such as belts, etc), and in some cases you're plain SOL (try replacing an airbag on a 1993 Dodge Caravan, for example - all you can find are OEM used ones pulled from junkers). I think your comparison would be more apt if, say, Ford disabled all vehicles that were 10 years + 1 day old. While Apple isn't disabling your OS, they leave you exposed without security patches, etc... - making it approximately the same.
        bigiain 6y ago
        >The difference there is you're not violating some TOS or EULA by replacing parts on your classic car, and when you change your oil (do OS updates) there's no chance of suddenly your transmission refusing to allow you to shift gears until you perform more heroics and disable the artificial limitations. How long do we have to wait for the early Teslas to be considered "classics", because they're doing worse than this already... "Self driving? No, that was only licensed to the original purchaser, you need to pay us $8000 now because we just remote disabled it when we worked out you bought this Roadster second hand. Hope that helps, have a nice day - Elon"
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  As opposed to how “easy” it is to install Linux this doesn’t seem half bad.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    What do you mean? You download an ISO, put it on a USB key or burn it to a CD, and install it like you would Windows10 or any other OS.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      You download an ISO, put it on a USB key or burn it to a CD, and install it like you would Windows10 or any other OS. If only it was that easy all the time. I have an old laptop (2017) that I wasn't for anything else, using so I tried putting Linux on it. Nope. I went through five distributions before I found one that would finally work. And then, it was not really useable. The whole reason people use MacOS is because they know what to expect. Linux is still a crapshoot.
      - fuzxi 6y ago
        YMMV. I've installed several distros on my old laptop (2010) and never had any issues. Currently running Manjaro on it.
- rsync 6y ago
  I agree with this. It's why a hackintosh has never appealed to me. However, in this case, the tweak I needed to do to the mac pro was so trivial as to be (essentially) cost-free. No need to alter the installer, etc. It pleases me to be (re)using this machine for over 12 years now - especially given what a triumph of workstation design these mac pros were ...
  - Alupis 6y ago
    My last personal desktop was about 11 years old when I retired it. It had an AMD Phenom II 965, just to emphasize it's age. It started life with Windows 7 (Win7 was like a month old at the time) and was subsequently upgraded to Windows 8, then Windows 8.1, then finally Windows 10 (and all it's "feature" updates) until it was retired. It ran slower than a new system, but fit my needs perfectly. If Microsoft had arbitrarily decided I wasn't allowed to run Windows 10 on that hardware, it's very likely I would have installed Linux or BSD - after all, the hardware was a non-trivial investment and discarding it purely to please some company really rubs me the wrong way. So, I guess I can sort of understand why people jump through these hoops... although personally I would just move onto some other OS that doesn't undermine my ability to operate my personal computer.
    - NortySpock 6y ago
      Hah, I am still occasionally using my AMD Phenom II 955 as an occasional gaming PC... I admit it now is powered off more than half the time. Anyways, similar story: I'm not about to put up with Microsoft telling me my machine is too old to us; that just promotes e-waste.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    I like to get that kind of use out of my machines though I upgrade workstation on a more regular basis (though the last one went a full 7 years with nothing new but a RAM upgrade and an SSD midlife) - You come to identify with the hardware after a while, it takes on a life of it's own. Since I'm (excluding Win10 for gaming when I rarely have time) exclusively a Linux user I get to use the old hardware for other purposes at the end until it finally becomes either useless or lets out the magic smoke (as my 2004 R50e Thinkpad finally did - man I miss those keyboards, so much better than the T470P (which itself is excellent)). It paid of just recently, I had 2012 Vostro 3750 kicking around and when schools went into lockdown with a quick wipe and Fedora install it made a perfectly serviceable machine for my step-son to do his remote learning on - there was an irony in running MS Teams on Linux on a machine that wouldn't have been able to run current generation Windows 10 and Teams anywhere near as comfortably.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  Linux just isn't plug and play enough yet to make the switch less painful than dealing with the pain-points created by anti-consumer practices by Apple and Microsoft on MacOS and Windows, even for technically literate people. I made the switch a year ago after having reached my breaking point with Windows and it still was a massive pain and daily loss of performance. For comparison, I also rooted my Android phone and installed LineageOS without google services which crippled it significantly and it still wasn't as much as a pain to do as using Linux on my workstation. People often say (not talking about you, just something I see on HN often) that it's easy nowadays and anyone can use it but it's not been my experience and I think it's the very attitude that keeps it from being a commonplace OS for the consumer market. I keep a list in a file I call "linux sins" but without having to look at it you can figure out the problem by just googling any benign problem someone might encounter on their OS and checking the answers. Do the answers start with "Click there" or "Open your terminal"? I don't see the situation changing since people who develop for linux generally refuse to acknowledge the problem.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    Fair criticisms. We're still waiting for the fabled "year of the linux desktop". Although, I feel the specific issues you raise are less of a problem on a desktop-focused distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Those distros really focus on a complete desktop experience, and really try to never require a user to drop into a shell to get anything done. So, perhaps it's a case of people using the "wrong" distro for their needs?
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
      I'm afraid the issues I describe have been with Ubuntu. Here's the first line from my "linux sins" file as an example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1151283/disable-nautilus-caching-mechanism https://askubuntu.com/questions/1151283/disable-nautilus-cac... If you copy a large file to a USB drive on either Ubuntu or Mint the progress bar goes to 100% instantly and closes and the actual transfer of the file is done in the background without the knowledge of the user. And the answer is "It's your fault, just try to eject the drive until it works." And even beyond the OS, the whole software ecosystem is broken. It's impossible to find simple, working UIs for the most basic pieces of software, everything goes through the commandline.
- cpach 6y ago
  Every operating system/hardware combination has its own pros and cons. For you, it seems the cons outnumber the pros when it comes to macOS and Apple hardware. Fair enough. For me, I see no major reasons to consider anything else than Mac. I really enjoy using both the OS and the hardware. To each their own.

I have trouble understanding why people go through these hoops. Yeah, I get it, people love their Mac's... but the company that produces them actively undermines your ability to continue using perfectly good hardware past what they feel is "profitable". This leads to huge efforts to hack/reverse the updaters, or alter newer OS versions to trick them into installing, etc. I'd personally jump over to some system that doesn't hate it's users nearly as much. But, that's just me.

boardwaalk 6y ago
Do you really need to pivot into Apple bashing on this thread? It’s not really on topic or needed.
gambiting 6y ago
It's not out of some love for Macs. I have a 2008 MacBook running Catalina and it's simply because the cost of replacing it is >0. If this works and works well(and it does) then why would I get rid of it? Just to spite apple, which doesn't care either way? I also have a 2005 car that still runs - should I get rid of it because the company that made it stopped providing any kind of support for it long time ago? Or you know....keep using it because it works?
- Alupis 6y ago
  Maybe it was easy for you to modify your OS to continue updating, or you downloaded some ISO of Catalina someone else pre-hacked for you - but it was certainly a non-trivial effort for whoever figured out how to trick the OS into installing and/or updating. It just seems like wasted effort, since the company all this supports really has made it clear they do not want you to have this ability, and can at any moment make future updates break everything all over again, leading to a new effort to reverse engineer the changes.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    So I don't agree, and I will use the car analogy again - old cars are not "supported" in any way and yet many people keep them going. There's serious engineering effort to make the parts, to write new software, to improve existing firmware etc. By your logic, that's also "wasted" effort since the manufacturer chooses to abandon cars after just few years, so why would you keep them going. I feel the same way about computers - like, who gives a damn what apple thinks. I have a laptop that is still going because people keep making it compatible. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      The difference there is you're not violating some TOS or EULA by replacing parts on your classic car, and when you change your oil (do OS updates) there's no chance of suddenly your transmission refusing to allow you to shift gears until you perform more heroics and disable the artificial limitations. Very few non-classic and/or popular cars receive massive aftermarket support for all parts - often the aftermarket supports parts that are in common with a lot of vehicles or are vehicle-agnostic (such as belts, etc), and in some cases you're plain SOL (try replacing an airbag on a 1993 Dodge Caravan, for example - all you can find are OEM used ones pulled from junkers). I think your comparison would be more apt if, say, Ford disabled all vehicles that were 10 years + 1 day old. While Apple isn't disabling your OS, they leave you exposed without security patches, etc... - making it approximately the same.
      - bigiain 6y ago
        >The difference there is you're not violating some TOS or EULA by replacing parts on your classic car, and when you change your oil (do OS updates) there's no chance of suddenly your transmission refusing to allow you to shift gears until you perform more heroics and disable the artificial limitations. How long do we have to wait for the early Teslas to be considered "classics", because they're doing worse than this already... "Self driving? No, that was only licensed to the original purchaser, you need to pay us $8000 now because we just remote disabled it when we worked out you bought this Roadster second hand. Hope that helps, have a nice day - Elon"
throwaway1777 6y ago
As opposed to how “easy” it is to install Linux this doesn’t seem half bad.
- Alupis 6y ago
  What do you mean? You download an ISO, put it on a USB key or burn it to a CD, and install it like you would Windows10 or any other OS.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    You download an ISO, put it on a USB key or burn it to a CD, and install it like you would Windows10 or any other OS. If only it was that easy all the time. I have an old laptop (2017) that I wasn't for anything else, using so I tried putting Linux on it. Nope. I went through five distributions before I found one that would finally work. And then, it was not really useable. The whole reason people use MacOS is because they know what to expect. Linux is still a crapshoot.
    - fuzxi 6y ago
      YMMV. I've installed several distros on my old laptop (2010) and never had any issues. Currently running Manjaro on it.
rsync 6y ago
I agree with this. It's why a hackintosh has never appealed to me. However, in this case, the tweak I needed to do to the mac pro was so trivial as to be (essentially) cost-free. No need to alter the installer, etc. It pleases me to be (re)using this machine for over 12 years now - especially given what a triumph of workstation design these mac pros were ...
- Alupis 6y ago
  My last personal desktop was about 11 years old when I retired it. It had an AMD Phenom II 965, just to emphasize it's age. It started life with Windows 7 (Win7 was like a month old at the time) and was subsequently upgraded to Windows 8, then Windows 8.1, then finally Windows 10 (and all it's "feature" updates) until it was retired. It ran slower than a new system, but fit my needs perfectly. If Microsoft had arbitrarily decided I wasn't allowed to run Windows 10 on that hardware, it's very likely I would have installed Linux or BSD - after all, the hardware was a non-trivial investment and discarding it purely to please some company really rubs me the wrong way. So, I guess I can sort of understand why people jump through these hoops... although personally I would just move onto some other OS that doesn't undermine my ability to operate my personal computer.
  - NortySpock 6y ago
    Hah, I am still occasionally using my AMD Phenom II 955 as an occasional gaming PC... I admit it now is powered off more than half the time. Anyways, similar story: I'm not about to put up with Microsoft telling me my machine is too old to us; that just promotes e-waste.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  I like to get that kind of use out of my machines though I upgrade workstation on a more regular basis (though the last one went a full 7 years with nothing new but a RAM upgrade and an SSD midlife) - You come to identify with the hardware after a while, it takes on a life of it's own. Since I'm (excluding Win10 for gaming when I rarely have time) exclusively a Linux user I get to use the old hardware for other purposes at the end until it finally becomes either useless or lets out the magic smoke (as my 2004 R50e Thinkpad finally did - man I miss those keyboards, so much better than the T470P (which itself is excellent)). It paid of just recently, I had 2012 Vostro 3750 kicking around and when schools went into lockdown with a quick wipe and Fedora install it made a perfectly serviceable machine for my step-son to do his remote learning on - there was an irony in running MS Teams on Linux on a machine that wouldn't have been able to run current generation Windows 10 and Teams anywhere near as comfortably.
ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
Linux just isn't plug and play enough yet to make the switch less painful than dealing with the pain-points created by anti-consumer practices by Apple and Microsoft on MacOS and Windows, even for technically literate people. I made the switch a year ago after having reached my breaking point with Windows and it still was a massive pain and daily loss of performance. For comparison, I also rooted my Android phone and installed LineageOS without google services which crippled it significantly and it still wasn't as much as a pain to do as using Linux on my workstation. People often say (not talking about you, just something I see on HN often) that it's easy nowadays and anyone can use it but it's not been my experience and I think it's the very attitude that keeps it from being a commonplace OS for the consumer market. I keep a list in a file I call "linux sins" but without having to look at it you can figure out the problem by just googling any benign problem someone might encounter on their OS and checking the answers. Do the answers start with "Click there" or "Open your terminal"? I don't see the situation changing since people who develop for linux generally refuse to acknowledge the problem.
- Alupis 6y ago
  Fair criticisms. We're still waiting for the fabled "year of the linux desktop". Although, I feel the specific issues you raise are less of a problem on a desktop-focused distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Those distros really focus on a complete desktop experience, and really try to never require a user to drop into a shell to get anything done. So, perhaps it's a case of people using the "wrong" distro for their needs?
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
    I'm afraid the issues I describe have been with Ubuntu. Here's the first line from my "linux sins" file as an example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1151283/disable-nautilus-caching-mechanism https://askubuntu.com/questions/1151283/disable-nautilus-cac... If you copy a large file to a USB drive on either Ubuntu or Mint the progress bar goes to 100% instantly and closes and the actual transfer of the file is done in the background without the knowledge of the user. And the answer is "It's your fault, just try to eject the drive until it works." And even beyond the OS, the whole software ecosystem is broken. It's impossible to find simple, working UIs for the most basic pieces of software, everything goes through the commandline.
cpach 6y ago
Every operating system/hardware combination has its own pros and cons. For you, it seems the cons outnumber the pros when it comes to macOS and Apple hardware. Fair enough. For me, I see no major reasons to consider anything else than Mac. I really enjoy using both the OS and the hardware. To each their own.