8 ms·

27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and download official updates

460 points by surprisetalk 9mo ago

gok 9mo ago
The oldest iBook G4 is from October 2003, not even 23 years old.
- queenkjuul 9mo ago
  I was gonna say. I do have an ibook G3 from 1999, but it can't use modern Wi-Fi (though if it's running the right OS, it could maybe update--i think I've done updates as far back as 10.3?) the AirPort card can talk to 802.11b over WEP - i have an old router set up with a MAC whitelist specifically so the ibook can get online still
- apparent 9mo ago
  Yep, in 2000 even the PowerBooks weren't G4 yet. And of course the consumer-grade iBooks line wouldn't get G4s until years after that.
bsimpson 9mo ago
I forgot the portable variant of the iMac was called the iBook. I thought this was about the book version of the Apple App Store.
- GrowingSideways 9mo ago
  [dead]
- jcgrillo 9mo ago
  This one is a fancy G4 instead of the normal G3. I still have the husk of my Ti PowerBook G4 which is the "macbook pro" analog of the era. It was a fantastic machine, I got about 12 solid years of use from it before it finally died. Weirdly, the failure mode that ultimately killed it was something causing some kind of memory (and thereby disk) corruption that increased in severity over a period of about a year eventually rendering it to the junk heap. I went through a couple disks and RAM modules before deciding whatever was going on was beyond my abilities. I credit various Linux and *BSD PPC ports for making at least a third of that lifetime possible. I'm hopeful that the more recent M{1,2,3,...} machines might be similarly long-lived.
gattilorenz 9mo ago
But only if you run Tiger or newer :)
__natty__ 9mo ago
And the UI was so good back then compared to the liquid glass introduced recently
- danielktdoranie 9mo ago
  I don't get the Liquid Glass hate, doesn't really impact me, but I can see it's really disliked by a lot of people!
  - pdpi 9mo ago
    It's a giant "fuck you" to accessibility in general. It reminds me of the first designer I ever worked with, who designed for pretty screenshots and put zero thought into the actual interaction. E.g. the pervasive use of transparency means that you have text overlayed on text all over the place, so just literally can't read things.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - kitten_mittens_ 9mo ago
      Turning transparency off significantly improves the look and responsiveness imo.
      - pdpi 9mo ago
        That's what I did on my phone, yeah. Desktop version still feels all sorts of bad despite that.
      - recursive 9mo ago
        Sounds like an improvement. Maybe in the next version, they can make this improvement the default.
    - layer8 9mo ago
      It's not just the transparency (and distracting highlights and slow animations and inexpressive icons), but also the floating controls and other elements that make it harder to discern what is content and what is UI chrome/controls, not to mention the associated layout bugs.
danielktdoranie 9mo ago
Yeah, I keep an G4 PowerBook around to watch DVDs on and run PowerPC Mac abandonware... it can surprisingly do a lot. IRC, Hotline, BBS, Gopher, etc. A YouTube channel called "Squeezing The Apple" has a lot of videos showing the use you can get out of an old PowerPC Mac. Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@squeezingtheapple6990 https://www.youtube.com/@squeezingtheapple6990 When you max out the RAM (around 2GB) and put in a solid state IDE hard disk they can be useful. I occasionally use mine as a distraction free writing tool. Other than abandonware (old games for example), they can't do anything a modern Mac couldn't do, so I wouldn't go nuts finding and buying one of these but if you have one laying around, and have the parts you need for an upgrade these old Macs can be fun.
queenkjuul 9mo ago
Well the reddit post is massively misleading (no ibook is currently supported, that one isn't 27 years old, and 27 year old ones can't connect to modern Wi-Fi) but i do appreciate that my PowerBook G4 can get on Wi-Fi and download software regardless
- tokyobreakfast 9mo ago
  Of course it's massively misleading, it's farming for updoots. Further proving the (unpopular) point I made earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066456 Source: I own one of these iBooks and it most certainly can NOT connect to modern Wi-Fi, not out of the box. IIRC it cannot do WPA2, or required an update to do so, which was not available in the Tiger install media, so a chicken-or-egg scenario. Definitely will fail on a mixed WPA2/WPA3 network. Assume it can connect to Wi-Fi, the TLS libraries are ancient and nothing will work. Including authenticating to iTunes, etc. Samba is ancient and will not connect to shares running SMB2 or newer. It also ignores than OS X versions newer than Tiger have broken App Stores and other things. Wait till everyone finds out Apple served software updates in those days over plain HTTP which is why it "works"...
amelius 9mo ago
Yes, Apple never misses an opportunity to cripple any decently running hardware.
canpan 9mo ago
Well it fits into the news this month: UT2004 got its latest patch, Diablo 2 got a new expansion. Why not connect a 2003 iBook to download the latest updates?
- ralfd 9mo ago
  Diablo 2 got a new expansion? What year is it?
  - Group_B 9mo ago
    Age of Empires is also continuing to receive new DLC. The 2000s will never die
    - SahAssar 9mo ago
      That's just for the 2019 re-release, right?
  - GloriousKoji 9mo ago
    It's 2026, roughly 4.5 years after the release of the remastered version Diablo II: Resurrected.
  - jcgrillo 9mo ago
    Fresh meat!
ge96 9mo ago
There was a surreal video I watched where an Apple Macintosh connected to Google, it took a really long time. The video I believe it was sitting on a floor
rtpg 9mo ago
Kinda funny how this is true but there's a line of Mac OSes that can't connect to the App Store anymore so you can't upgrade the OS without manually downloading it off of an Apple help page. It's not the end of the world, but I've had to help more than one person walk through this process cuz they're like "I can't update the OS????"
- rconti 9mo ago
  And it's hard to even find the download links, and a lot of them don't work.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    And aren't even hosted by Apple!
    - kalleboo 9mo ago
      And it's funny how at the same time they're still hosting... Apple IIGS OS System 6.0.1 https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Apple_II/Apple_IIGS_System_6.0.1/Disk_1_of_7-Install.sea.bin https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof... The whole 19 floppy images of MacOS 7.5.3 https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.5_Version_7.5.3/System_7.5.3_01of19.smi.bin https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof... (whoever inside of Apple is responsible for for keeping these links alive, thank you for your dedication!)
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - bitigchi 9mo ago
        Is there a way to browse this thing?
        9mo ago
stormed 9mo ago
> Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence. OpenCore would like a word about that. It's nice to get official security patches, but Apple does make perfectly capable machines obsolete.
- benoau 9mo ago
  Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software, which is arguably what is important about the hardware. PPC software is gone, 32 bit apps are gone, x86 apps are next, virtualizing or emulating platforms on iOS devices seems to be eternally damned, and what that looks like on Mac after Rosetta 2's quasi-retirement could only be inferior. In an alternative universe you could connect an eGPU to a Mac or iPad and simply enjoy being the best platform for practically all software that ever existed. Run anything but the most intensive games directly on an AVP or iPad or MacBook Air or even an iPhone.
  - worthless-trash 9mo ago
    > Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software. Apple delivered EFI 32 bit(ppc, 32) firmware updates to their 64 bit mac pro range, make booting/installing alternative operating systems much more difficult only shortly after the new intel range came out. I had a few of these running Linux at the time and made the mistake of booting one into OSX to see if an update would fix an networking corner case, not an easy roll back. You may wish to prefix your statement with "apple software".
    - wtallis 9mo ago
      As I recall, the PPC machines (like the Power Mac G5) never had EFI of any kind, and the early Intel Macs (including the Mac Pro) all had 32-but EFI even after the processors went 64-bit. I don't recall any of those Macs ever being switched from 32-bit EFI to 64-bit (U)EFI with a firmware update, or vice versa. It was a bit of a pain point because Linux was not initially ready to run a 64-bit kernel on top of 32-bit EFI, but that got resolved on the Linux side and I don't recall anything about Apple's firmware updates making that harder.
felixding 9mo ago
The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore? I spent hours each month looking for a way to bring back Aqua on Mac or Linux through theming or alternative DE but nothing comes close to the real thing. If one day I have enough money I’ll just start work on a new DE to faithfully recreate Aqua. One can dream.
- jofzar 9mo ago
  https://youtu.be/ejPqAJ0dHwY https://youtu.be/ejPqAJ0dHwY I saw this video recently, it's crazy how apple lost the tactility of its button.
  - pwthornton 9mo ago
    The flat area and now liquid glass are all post-Jobs creations. Apple needs a true product person back in charge with taste to get this ship back into a better place. Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
    - steveBK123 9mo ago
      The thing killing me with Apple design now is not just the look of UIs but the UX of how they actually work. I swear they move buttons every year for no reason other to move them. Workflows randomly take an extra click that didn't before. I'm not sure if the phone or the Mac OS changes are worse, maybe its a tie. One pet peeve is on the iPhone messages app if you accidentally tap into the search bar they inserted at the bottom, it clears the list of messages (rather than waiting for you to type and start filtering based on context). First time it happened I thought sync failed and the phone didn't have a copy of any of my texts.
      - nandomrumber 9mo ago
        Peak UI / UX was some years ago, exactly when depends on any given persons particular preference. What we have now is akin to a Sheperd tone[1], where the design has to get intentionally worse so that corps. can then go on to boast about how the new design in following years is better than ever, but on the whole no real progress is made. 1. A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
semiquaver 9mo ago
How are the certs not expired? Is this connecting over HTTP or some other mechanism?
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  Considering the age, HTTP is likely.
  - rhplus 9mo ago
    Look carefully at the screenshot. It’s definitely HTTP.
jeroenhd 9mo ago
How on earth do you hook up an iBook to a WPA3 network? Even in WPA2 compatibility mode you'll barely be able to see the SSID? I suppose it's cool of Apple to not take down their old update servers, although I hope they do keep an eye on the use of HTTP or vulnerable ciphers for that purpose and segment the old hosting off from their more secure modern hosting.
mason_mpls 9mo ago
“Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence” Is there something in the water?
- jeroenhd 9mo ago
  It's r/MacOS. The title is disingenuous at best, the comments are all fans upvoting each other for repeating opinions of the hive mind, and this being reddit a good chunk of them are probably bot rings trying to gain karma for resale value without getting caught. Apple does keep the update servers for their ancient hardware running, though, which is better than their main rivals.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    You can still get Ubuntu 6.06 from https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/6.06.0/ https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/6.06.0/
    - TheAmazingRace 9mo ago
      Dapper Drake? Man that takes me WAY back.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
joegibbs 9mo ago
I'm 27 and the UI looks so modern for something from the year after I was born - Windows 98 was at the same time but the MacOS interface has changed a lot less than Windows has.
- snovymgodym 9mo ago
  MacOS basically looked this way up to the mid 2010s.
- bombcar 9mo ago
  Weirdly even the old System versions of Apple OSes don't look as dated as Windows 98 - probably because of the the document vs application paradigm.
- overfeed 9mo ago
  > Windows 98 was at the same time but the MacOS interface has changed a lot less than Windows has. That's only because Windows had to dial things back a lot after Windows Vista. Incidentally, Vista UI was also glass-inspired. Hmm. Windows 8 "Metro" interface was different in its own way too, I suspect if Microsoft's mobile efforts had been more successful[1], Metro's design influences would have a much bigger sway over today's Windows desktop. 1. i.e. had they became the number 2 or 3 phone OS, and sold tablets with volumes comparable to the iPad. Touchscreen-isms would have inevitably crept back to the desktop OS.
rconti 9mo ago
I reinstalled MacOS on a 2011 MacBook Air and it was actually shockingly hard. Thankfully, my machine booted and worked fine, so I didn't need to create a bootable USB stick. From memory: - Network recovery boot cannot connect to your wifi because reasons. It'll see the SSID, but won't even prompt for password. It's totally unclear why nothing is working. - Fall back to old IOT SSID with ancient protocols - You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember. - I can't remember how, but somehow you can install Lion - Launch beautiful Mac desktop. App store won't work because the certs are too old, or something. Safari won't work, because the supported SSL protocols are too old. - Use a modern Mac to download a DMG installer for a slightly newer OS - Copy it to a USB stick - Find a USB stick big enough to hold it, try again - Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it - Now you have a more modern OS that can actually connect to websites - Also teh app store works, so you can upgrade to High Sierra using the app store. But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
- Gigachad 9mo ago
  My best guess is the macbook is freaking out over the combined 2.4 + 5ghz network. It used to be standard to have these with two different SSIDs. Or you have WPA3 required, though I'd think you'd experience issues with many devices doing that.
  - dylan604 9mo ago
    My first thought was incompatible version of 802.11[a-z] as well.
- CharlesW 9mo ago
  OpenCore and MIST are two great tools for fans of obsolete Macs. https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist
  - aa-jv 9mo ago
    Yes .. in case its not obvious, you can use MIST to get all the old MacOS installers for offline use ..
lysace 9mo ago
Last summer I powered up my first 2007 Macbook Pro that hadn't been powered for like 15 years. I was stunned to see it restore everything - the web pages I had opened at the time etc. And damn, Mac OS has changed so much graphically.
yalok 9mo ago
I just had a problem installing iMovie on a MacOS 14 - 11-year old MBP13, perfectly functional otherwise (my 10-year old kid uses it), the original iMovie that used to work earlier, just stopped launching (maybe I need to change some xattrs for it?), and the new iMovie from the App Store can't be installed on such an old OS (why not show the older version there, like iOS AppStore does on older OSes?)...
- eej71 9mo ago
  I had a similar hunt for iMovie to extract video off of MiniDV which required some FireWire to thunderbolt cables. In any event I did find the install on archive.org. May have what you want.
alexpotato 9mo ago
Many years ago (want to say ~2010-ish timeframe), I needed to get data off of an old Pentium machine at my mom's house. My first thought was to just pop out the hard drive, put it in an USB HD enclosure and Linux would automagically detect everything. Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive. My next thought was to see if it would boot and it did! (Windows 98 IIRC) But then the next problem: how to get data off of the machine? It had an ethernet port but no wifi. So I did the following: - Plugged in an ethernet cable - Opened the browser (IE 4!) - Downloaded putty and the putty scp binary - scp'ed the data from the box to a Linux box - Success! It really is wild how older technology can still work nowadays.
- snickerbockers 9mo ago
  >Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive. That's not how things work. If you're using a USB adapter then Linux isn't failing to detect the drive, the adapter is failing to detect the drive. Also I'm pretty sure Linux still supports IDE, not that it matters in this case.
  - klempner 9mo ago
    If anything my guess here would be the master/slave/cable select jumper. Like, last I looked the Linux kernel still had MFM/RLL support, although I'm not sure that's going to get included even as a module in a modern distro.
    - boomlinde 9mo ago
      IIRC, the Soundblaster 16 driver received a bug fix recently.
- bsimpson 9mo ago
  My evening hobby this week is getting my old Rock Band Wii instruments working on Linux. Got inspired by seeing a Linux 7 headline that the CRKD guitar is supported. There's a whole kernel module that exposes all the Wiimote accessories (inc. plastic instruments) as gamepads. It's still shipping in SteamOS today.
donatj 9mo ago
FWIW iBook G3 is circa 2003-2006 so only 20-23 years old. Not 27. Way to make me feel older than I already do lol. We used these in when I was in high school, they'd wheel in a cart full of them into the classroom, and had a Wireless B Airport on the cart they'd plug in to the Ethernet on the wall. Literally my first experience with WiFi
- kn0where 9mo ago
  iBook G4, not G3, but yes.
FarmerPotato 9mo ago
I have a G4 Cube running OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and "Ten-Four Fox" happily. But when it is on the Wifi, every ten seconds it logs an unknown (Bonjour) ping which fills up the log overnight.
andrei_says_ 9mo ago
Amazing. But last year’s iPhone cannot download a critical security iOS update for last year’s iOS 18. Shoving the horribly broken iOS 26 down our throats is not a pleasant experience, Apple.
agentifysh 9mo ago
im quite fond of apple hardware aesthetics as well as the aqua look from this period especially the first imac g3 and ibook , just a nice warm fuzzy feelings from childhood from when things were a lot more simple.
wackget 9mo ago
Yeah that's great and all but my 2nd gen iPad Air from 2017 doesn't get updates past iPadOS 15 (current version: 26). As a result most useful apps flatly refuse to run on it, and my iPad is now a paperweight which yearns for the landfill. Meanwhile the laptop I bought in 2011 is still going strong, now on Windows 10 (or whatever Linux distro I'd care to throw on it).
- scosman 9mo ago
  note: they jumped from 18 to 26 to align to the year.
  - hbn 9mo ago
    I can't believe Apple hasn't pushed an update to their 9-year-old device in 11 years!
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  How is that so? The App Store has allowed you to download the last compatible version since iOS 6? But I hate when people malos this comparison to a laptop, in the first 20 years of the personal computer you weren’t using 10 year old computers because the pace of change was so fast. Your iPad Air has 2GB of RAM and has an A9 processor that is 7x slower in single core performance than the latest iPad Air. The latest iPad Airs come with 8GB of RAM. My iPad Air from 2020 barely runs iOS 26 with 3GB RAM. For comparison, I had a Dell Laptop in 2008 that had 8GB RAM and was my Plex server until 2018. Even today in 2026 low end laptops come with 8GB of RAM.
- gaudystead 9mo ago
  I'm in a similar boat and am wondering... Is there much that can be done with these iPads beside turn them into e-waste?
  - qingcharles 9mo ago
    I don't think there is? I'm holding onto them in the hope that there's a good solution in the future.
Brajeshwar 9mo ago
I still run a MacMini (2012) with Catalina, and it just got a security update. Long back, the drive got an SSD upgrade, with max-out RAM. It still serves as a Media Server. Unfortunately, I don’t want to find out or fix, but my other Macs running Tahoe are unable to access the drives there directly, and a few other issues. I used to just mount it on my local drive like a file server. I had attached two drives, one as an offline Apple Photos copy and another for Dropbox. Both seem to have stopped working the way I want. But hey, it still works. Survived a bad fall while cleaning up, duck-taped as the screws are not screwing.
codezero 9mo ago
Last time I cracked out my blueberry clamshell iBook, it worked fine, though for what it's worth, I was using Linux, and it seems the main limitation for these connections are the SSL certs. Whenever I think about it, I think that getting my old Mac up and running is easier than getting ANY modern PC up and running lol.
senthilnayagam 9mo ago
I have a ipad second generation, it cant be used anymore because the activation server endpoint is gone. wish there was a way to use it as a secondary monitor if not for anything else. all older intel macs which could not be updated to macos 26 have been installed with ubuntu. I have one more old m1 macbook air, which has a broken screen, and mac security does not allow me to login with a external monitor. that would become ubuntu when I get more time to install
poojagill 9mo ago
[dead]
DeathArrow 9mo ago
>Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence That means it's easy for the consumer to replace parts like batteries, ram modules, GPUs, network cards and hard drives?
pcblues 9mo ago
I'm still using a 2010 Macbook Pro with a 1TB SSD for Logic Pro and Mainstage. Does it struggle? Yes. Does it work? Yes. It's still amazing technology that makes my keyboards and guitars sound bananas. To be fair, I just muck around with it, but it still has more than what I'll ever need or be able to discover.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
I regularly use a 2012 MacBook Air 11". It’s stuck with Catalina, but works fine (I use it to run Zoom meetings).
Whatarethese 9mo ago
This post made me boot up my 2013 MacBook Air. 800ish cycles on the battery still at 81% life. A OS update was just released 17 days ago. Amazing.
misiek08 9mo ago
Do you have any uses for stuff like iPad mini 2 Retina? I have that in mint condition (I treat the hardware as tools, but not as a hammer). It didn’t get updates for long time and every website of course breaks, so it even doesn’t work as notes reader…
stevefan1999 9mo ago
The way he said "Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence" makes me really tilted tho
zarcaxm 9mo ago
Things stopped being this fun. Now it's all about symmetry and simplicity. More robot world less human world
kittbuilds 9mo ago
[dead]
zombot 9mo ago
Wow. You could look at Apple GUI without having to retch. Being reminded of those times feels like an act of rebellion now. I'm sure Apple wouldn't want us to make the comparison because it makes it obvious what a fucking catastrophe Tahoe is.
grahar64 9mo ago
I had an old MacMini I hadn't plugged in since 2014-ish and I tried to boot it this year and it refused to boot, and refused to update. It now runs Ubuntu. Good little machine
- clairegraham 9mo ago
  I have one of those too (2011 server version I think) and it runs Debian well.
eleveriven 9mo ago
It says as much about how conservative and stable Wi-Fi standards have been as it does about Apple
kandros 9mo ago
Reading this from an $1300 iPad Pro that can’t even web browse without lagging. Apple’s CPU throttling is a real thing
Razengan 9mo ago
I haven't read any books in years because of how shitty iBooks became. I used to read a lot, on my iPad, iPhone, Mac.. until a few years ago when iBooks (right about when it became called just "Books" I think) started rabidly deleting your downloaded books, even if I have 10s of GBs of free storage on device, and keeps having to redownload the books every week or so, so it's useless when I want to use it the most: away from home where there's no internet so no other entertainment, on flights, or long drives.. Just like Apple's other eternal shitshow Siri, you know it won't work when you need it so you never try again.
altacc 9mo ago
I'd be more impressed if this wasn't the same Apple that's unable to keep Screen Time compatible across the latest minor iOS versions. Downloading updates seems fairly trivial. Host the file, maintain compatibility for the request/response from the OS, which might not have changed much over time, and whilst API versioning is annoying it isn't super difficult for a small API.
mghackerlady 9mo ago
I was messing around with an iBook G4 a year ago or so, and yeah things work "fine". You need to update the certs but otherwise it just works. I mostly used it to sync an old iPod nano since it's the only mac I have and I refuse to use windows, but browsing the internet "worked" on websites that aren't too demanding. I got 4chan to work fine, and youtube loaded but the playback was terrible.
paulrpotts 9mo ago
I have a 2008 Mac Pro that was my daily driver for video and audio production for 16 years before I had to give up on it. The only real reason I had to give up on it was that I couldn't upgrade the software and all the certs were expiring. I was using it for a network music server as well, until Apple broke iTunes home sharing functionality. It's sitting in the hall in my basement. The hardware still functions perfectly. It had four hard drives in it, and I've got all that stuff on a Synology now. It remains the most reliable computer I have ever owned. It literally only was ever off when there was a power outage. I might wind up installing Linux on it for my kids but we already have several little i5 NUCs that are far faster and quieter and easier on our electric bill, so I'm not sure there's much point to that.
1970-01-01 9mo ago
Windows 2000 can do the same Catalog.update.microsoft.com The analogy here is charging a dead battery from 0V to 4v. Your old battery is still dead. Your OS is still insecure. What's the story here?
moon2 9mo ago
I have a collection of Macs from the 2000s, including the iBook G4 and the iMac G4. The iBook G4 still connects to wi-fi, and I've seen this update prompt on my iMac G4 (which is connected to Wi-Fi using a mini wireless access point). I use my iMac G4 to play songs on iTunes, I keep my music library on a server with Samba installed and I mount the volume with the files. I love the Cover Flow design from older iTunes. I can also push songs to my iPod this way.

460 points by surprisetalk 9mo ago

gok 9mo ago

The oldest iBook G4 is from October 2003, not even 23 years old.

queenkjuul 9mo ago
I was gonna say. I do have an ibook G3 from 1999, but it can't use modern Wi-Fi (though if it's running the right OS, it could maybe update--i think I've done updates as far back as 10.3?) the AirPort card can talk to 802.11b over WEP - i have an old router set up with a MAC whitelist specifically so the ibook can get online still
apparent 9mo ago
Yep, in 2000 even the PowerBooks weren't G4 yet. And of course the consumer-grade iBooks line wouldn't get G4s until years after that.

bsimpson 9mo ago

I forgot the portable variant of the iMac was called the iBook. I thought this was about the book version of the Apple App Store.

GrowingSideways 9mo ago
[dead]
jcgrillo 9mo ago
This one is a fancy G4 instead of the normal G3. I still have the husk of my Ti PowerBook G4 which is the "macbook pro" analog of the era. It was a fantastic machine, I got about 12 solid years of use from it before it finally died. Weirdly, the failure mode that ultimately killed it was something causing some kind of memory (and thereby disk) corruption that increased in severity over a period of about a year eventually rendering it to the junk heap. I went through a couple disks and RAM modules before deciding whatever was going on was beyond my abilities. I credit various Linux and *BSD PPC ports for making at least a third of that lifetime possible. I'm hopeful that the more recent M{1,2,3,...} machines might be similarly long-lived.

gattilorenz 9mo ago

But only if you run Tiger or newer :)

__natty__ 9mo ago

And the UI was so good back then compared to the liquid glass introduced recently

danielktdoranie 9mo ago
I don't get the Liquid Glass hate, doesn't really impact me, but I can see it's really disliked by a lot of people!
- pdpi 9mo ago
  It's a giant "fuck you" to accessibility in general. It reminds me of the first designer I ever worked with, who designed for pretty screenshots and put zero thought into the actual interaction. E.g. the pervasive use of transparency means that you have text overlayed on text all over the place, so just literally can't read things.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - kitten_mittens_ 9mo ago
    Turning transparency off significantly improves the look and responsiveness imo.
    - pdpi 9mo ago
      That's what I did on my phone, yeah. Desktop version still feels all sorts of bad despite that.
    - recursive 9mo ago
      Sounds like an improvement. Maybe in the next version, they can make this improvement the default.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    It's not just the transparency (and distracting highlights and slow animations and inexpressive icons), but also the floating controls and other elements that make it harder to discern what is content and what is UI chrome/controls, not to mention the associated layout bugs.

danielktdoranie 9mo ago

Yeah, I keep an G4 PowerBook around to watch DVDs on and run PowerPC Mac abandonware... it can surprisingly do a lot. IRC, Hotline, BBS, Gopher, etc. A YouTube channel called "Squeezing The Apple" has a lot of videos showing the use you can get out of an old PowerPC Mac. Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@squeezingtheapple6990 https://www.youtube.com/@squeezingtheapple6990 When you max out the RAM (around 2GB) and put in a solid state IDE hard disk they can be useful. I occasionally use mine as a distraction free writing tool. Other than abandonware (old games for example), they can't do anything a modern Mac couldn't do, so I wouldn't go nuts finding and buying one of these but if you have one laying around, and have the parts you need for an upgrade these old Macs can be fun.

queenkjuul 9mo ago

Well the reddit post is massively misleading (no ibook is currently supported, that one isn't 27 years old, and 27 year old ones can't connect to modern Wi-Fi) but i do appreciate that my PowerBook G4 can get on Wi-Fi and download software regardless

tokyobreakfast 9mo ago
Of course it's massively misleading, it's farming for updoots. Further proving the (unpopular) point I made earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066456 Source: I own one of these iBooks and it most certainly can NOT connect to modern Wi-Fi, not out of the box. IIRC it cannot do WPA2, or required an update to do so, which was not available in the Tiger install media, so a chicken-or-egg scenario. Definitely will fail on a mixed WPA2/WPA3 network. Assume it can connect to Wi-Fi, the TLS libraries are ancient and nothing will work. Including authenticating to iTunes, etc. Samba is ancient and will not connect to shares running SMB2 or newer. It also ignores than OS X versions newer than Tiger have broken App Stores and other things. Wait till everyone finds out Apple served software updates in those days over plain HTTP which is why it "works"...

amelius 9mo ago

Yes, Apple never misses an opportunity to cripple any decently running hardware.

canpan 9mo ago

Well it fits into the news this month: UT2004 got its latest patch, Diablo 2 got a new expansion. Why not connect a 2003 iBook to download the latest updates?

ralfd 9mo ago
Diablo 2 got a new expansion? What year is it?
- Group_B 9mo ago
  Age of Empires is also continuing to receive new DLC. The 2000s will never die
  - SahAssar 9mo ago
    That's just for the 2019 re-release, right?
- GloriousKoji 9mo ago
  It's 2026, roughly 4.5 years after the release of the remastered version Diablo II: Resurrected.
- jcgrillo 9mo ago
  Fresh meat!

ge96 9mo ago

There was a surreal video I watched where an Apple Macintosh connected to Google, it took a really long time. The video I believe it was sitting on a floor

rtpg 9mo ago

Kinda funny how this is true but there's a line of Mac OSes that can't connect to the App Store anymore so you can't upgrade the OS without manually downloading it off of an Apple help page. It's not the end of the world, but I've had to help more than one person walk through this process cuz they're like "I can't update the OS????"

rconti 9mo ago
And it's hard to even find the download links, and a lot of them don't work.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  And aren't even hosted by Apple!
  - kalleboo 9mo ago
    And it's funny how at the same time they're still hosting... Apple IIGS OS System 6.0.1 https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Apple_II/Apple_IIGS_System_6.0.1/Disk_1_of_7-Install.sea.bin https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof... The whole 19 floppy images of MacOS 7.5.3 https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.5_Version_7.5.3/System_7.5.3_01of19.smi.bin https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof... (whoever inside of Apple is responsible for for keeping these links alive, thank you for your dedication!)
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bitigchi 9mo ago
      Is there a way to browse this thing?
      - 9mo ago

stormed 9mo ago

> Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence. OpenCore would like a word about that. It's nice to get official security patches, but Apple does make perfectly capable machines obsolete.

benoau 9mo ago
Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software, which is arguably what is important about the hardware. PPC software is gone, 32 bit apps are gone, x86 apps are next, virtualizing or emulating platforms on iOS devices seems to be eternally damned, and what that looks like on Mac after Rosetta 2's quasi-retirement could only be inferior. In an alternative universe you could connect an eGPU to a Mac or iPad and simply enjoy being the best platform for practically all software that ever existed. Run anything but the most intensive games directly on an AVP or iPad or MacBook Air or even an iPhone.
- worthless-trash 9mo ago
  > Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software. Apple delivered EFI 32 bit(ppc, 32) firmware updates to their 64 bit mac pro range, make booting/installing alternative operating systems much more difficult only shortly after the new intel range came out. I had a few of these running Linux at the time and made the mistake of booting one into OSX to see if an update would fix an networking corner case, not an easy roll back. You may wish to prefix your statement with "apple software".
  - wtallis 9mo ago
    As I recall, the PPC machines (like the Power Mac G5) never had EFI of any kind, and the early Intel Macs (including the Mac Pro) all had 32-but EFI even after the processors went 64-bit. I don't recall any of those Macs ever being switched from 32-bit EFI to 64-bit (U)EFI with a firmware update, or vice versa. It was a bit of a pain point because Linux was not initially ready to run a 64-bit kernel on top of 32-bit EFI, but that got resolved on the Linux side and I don't recall anything about Apple's firmware updates making that harder.

felixding 9mo ago

The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore? I spent hours each month looking for a way to bring back Aqua on Mac or Linux through theming or alternative DE but nothing comes close to the real thing. If one day I have enough money I’ll just start work on a new DE to faithfully recreate Aqua. One can dream.

jofzar 9mo ago
https://youtu.be/ejPqAJ0dHwY https://youtu.be/ejPqAJ0dHwY I saw this video recently, it's crazy how apple lost the tactility of its button.
- pwthornton 9mo ago
  The flat area and now liquid glass are all post-Jobs creations. Apple needs a true product person back in charge with taste to get this ship back into a better place. Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
  - steveBK123 9mo ago
    The thing killing me with Apple design now is not just the look of UIs but the UX of how they actually work. I swear they move buttons every year for no reason other to move them. Workflows randomly take an extra click that didn't before. I'm not sure if the phone or the Mac OS changes are worse, maybe its a tie. One pet peeve is on the iPhone messages app if you accidentally tap into the search bar they inserted at the bottom, it clears the list of messages (rather than waiting for you to type and start filtering based on context). First time it happened I thought sync failed and the phone didn't have a copy of any of my texts.
    - nandomrumber 9mo ago
      Peak UI / UX was some years ago, exactly when depends on any given persons particular preference. What we have now is akin to a Sheperd tone[1], where the design has to get intentionally worse so that corps. can then go on to boast about how the new design in following years is better than ever, but on the whole no real progress is made. 1. A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

semiquaver 9mo ago

How are the certs not expired? Is this connecting over HTTP or some other mechanism?

Nextgrid 9mo ago
Considering the age, HTTP is likely.
- rhplus 9mo ago
  Look carefully at the screenshot. It’s definitely HTTP.

jeroenhd 9mo ago

How on earth do you hook up an iBook to a WPA3 network? Even in WPA2 compatibility mode you'll barely be able to see the SSID? I suppose it's cool of Apple to not take down their old update servers, although I hope they do keep an eye on the use of HTTP or vulnerable ciphers for that purpose and segment the old hosting off from their more secure modern hosting.

mason_mpls 9mo ago

“Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence” Is there something in the water?

jeroenhd 9mo ago
It's r/MacOS. The title is disingenuous at best, the comments are all fans upvoting each other for repeating opinions of the hive mind, and this being reddit a good chunk of them are probably bot rings trying to gain karma for resale value without getting caught. Apple does keep the update servers for their ancient hardware running, though, which is better than their main rivals.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  You can still get Ubuntu 6.06 from https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/6.06.0/ https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/6.06.0/
  - TheAmazingRace 9mo ago
    Dapper Drake? Man that takes me WAY back.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

joegibbs 9mo ago

I'm 27 and the UI looks so modern for something from the year after I was born - Windows 98 was at the same time but the MacOS interface has changed a lot less than Windows has.

snovymgodym 9mo ago
MacOS basically looked this way up to the mid 2010s.
bombcar 9mo ago
Weirdly even the old System versions of Apple OSes don't look as dated as Windows 98 - probably because of the the document vs application paradigm.
overfeed 9mo ago
> Windows 98 was at the same time but the MacOS interface has changed a lot less than Windows has. That's only because Windows had to dial things back a lot after Windows Vista. Incidentally, Vista UI was also glass-inspired. Hmm. Windows 8 "Metro" interface was different in its own way too, I suspect if Microsoft's mobile efforts had been more successful[1], Metro's design influences would have a much bigger sway over today's Windows desktop. 1. i.e. had they became the number 2 or 3 phone OS, and sold tablets with volumes comparable to the iPad. Touchscreen-isms would have inevitably crept back to the desktop OS.

rconti 9mo ago

I reinstalled MacOS on a 2011 MacBook Air and it was actually shockingly hard. Thankfully, my machine booted and worked fine, so I didn't need to create a bootable USB stick. From memory: - Network recovery boot cannot connect to your wifi because reasons. It'll see the SSID, but won't even prompt for password. It's totally unclear why nothing is working. - Fall back to old IOT SSID with ancient protocols - You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember. - I can't remember how, but somehow you can install Lion - Launch beautiful Mac desktop. App store won't work because the certs are too old, or something. Safari won't work, because the supported SSL protocols are too old. - Use a modern Mac to download a DMG installer for a slightly newer OS - Copy it to a USB stick - Find a USB stick big enough to hold it, try again - Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it - Now you have a more modern OS that can actually connect to websites - Also teh app store works, so you can upgrade to High Sierra using the app store. But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.

Gigachad 9mo ago
My best guess is the macbook is freaking out over the combined 2.4 + 5ghz network. It used to be standard to have these with two different SSIDs. Or you have WPA3 required, though I'd think you'd experience issues with many devices doing that.
- dylan604 9mo ago
  My first thought was incompatible version of 802.11[a-z] as well.
CharlesW 9mo ago
OpenCore and MIST are two great tools for fans of obsolete Macs. https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist
- aa-jv 9mo ago
  Yes .. in case its not obvious, you can use MIST to get all the old MacOS installers for offline use ..

lysace 9mo ago

Last summer I powered up my first 2007 Macbook Pro that hadn't been powered for like 15 years. I was stunned to see it restore everything - the web pages I had opened at the time etc. And damn, Mac OS has changed so much graphically.

yalok 9mo ago

I just had a problem installing iMovie on a MacOS 14 - 11-year old MBP13, perfectly functional otherwise (my 10-year old kid uses it), the original iMovie that used to work earlier, just stopped launching (maybe I need to change some xattrs for it?), and the new iMovie from the App Store can't be installed on such an old OS (why not show the older version there, like iOS AppStore does on older OSes?)...

eej71 9mo ago
I had a similar hunt for iMovie to extract video off of MiniDV which required some FireWire to thunderbolt cables. In any event I did find the install on archive.org. May have what you want.

alexpotato 9mo ago

Many years ago (want to say ~2010-ish timeframe), I needed to get data off of an old Pentium machine at my mom's house. My first thought was to just pop out the hard drive, put it in an USB HD enclosure and Linux would automagically detect everything. Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive. My next thought was to see if it would boot and it did! (Windows 98 IIRC) But then the next problem: how to get data off of the machine? It had an ethernet port but no wifi. So I did the following: - Plugged in an ethernet cable - Opened the browser (IE 4!) - Downloaded putty and the putty scp binary - scp'ed the data from the box to a Linux box - Success! It really is wild how older technology can still work nowadays.

snickerbockers 9mo ago
>Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive. That's not how things work. If you're using a USB adapter then Linux isn't failing to detect the drive, the adapter is failing to detect the drive. Also I'm pretty sure Linux still supports IDE, not that it matters in this case.
- klempner 9mo ago
  If anything my guess here would be the master/slave/cable select jumper. Like, last I looked the Linux kernel still had MFM/RLL support, although I'm not sure that's going to get included even as a module in a modern distro.
  - boomlinde 9mo ago
    IIRC, the Soundblaster 16 driver received a bug fix recently.
bsimpson 9mo ago
My evening hobby this week is getting my old Rock Band Wii instruments working on Linux. Got inspired by seeing a Linux 7 headline that the CRKD guitar is supported. There's a whole kernel module that exposes all the Wiimote accessories (inc. plastic instruments) as gamepads. It's still shipping in SteamOS today.

donatj 9mo ago

FWIW iBook G3 is circa 2003-2006 so only 20-23 years old. Not 27. Way to make me feel older than I already do lol. We used these in when I was in high school, they'd wheel in a cart full of them into the classroom, and had a Wireless B Airport on the cart they'd plug in to the Ethernet on the wall. Literally my first experience with WiFi

kn0where 9mo ago
iBook G4, not G3, but yes.

FarmerPotato 9mo ago

I have a G4 Cube running OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and "Ten-Four Fox" happily. But when it is on the Wifi, every ten seconds it logs an unknown (Bonjour) ping which fills up the log overnight.

andrei_says_ 9mo ago

Amazing. But last year’s iPhone cannot download a critical security iOS update for last year’s iOS 18. Shoving the horribly broken iOS 26 down our throats is not a pleasant experience, Apple.

agentifysh 9mo ago

im quite fond of apple hardware aesthetics as well as the aqua look from this period especially the first imac g3 and ibook , just a nice warm fuzzy feelings from childhood from when things were a lot more simple.

wackget 9mo ago

Yeah that's great and all but my 2nd gen iPad Air from 2017 doesn't get updates past iPadOS 15 (current version: 26). As a result most useful apps flatly refuse to run on it, and my iPad is now a paperweight which yearns for the landfill. Meanwhile the laptop I bought in 2011 is still going strong, now on Windows 10 (or whatever Linux distro I'd care to throw on it).

scosman 9mo ago
note: they jumped from 18 to 26 to align to the year.
- hbn 9mo ago
  I can't believe Apple hasn't pushed an update to their 9-year-old device in 11 years!
raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
How is that so? The App Store has allowed you to download the last compatible version since iOS 6? But I hate when people malos this comparison to a laptop, in the first 20 years of the personal computer you weren’t using 10 year old computers because the pace of change was so fast. Your iPad Air has 2GB of RAM and has an A9 processor that is 7x slower in single core performance than the latest iPad Air. The latest iPad Airs come with 8GB of RAM. My iPad Air from 2020 barely runs iOS 26 with 3GB RAM. For comparison, I had a Dell Laptop in 2008 that had 8GB RAM and was my Plex server until 2018. Even today in 2026 low end laptops come with 8GB of RAM.
gaudystead 9mo ago
I'm in a similar boat and am wondering... Is there much that can be done with these iPads beside turn them into e-waste?
- qingcharles 9mo ago
  I don't think there is? I'm holding onto them in the hope that there's a good solution in the future.

Brajeshwar 9mo ago

I still run a MacMini (2012) with Catalina, and it just got a security update. Long back, the drive got an SSD upgrade, with max-out RAM. It still serves as a Media Server. Unfortunately, I don’t want to find out or fix, but my other Macs running Tahoe are unable to access the drives there directly, and a few other issues. I used to just mount it on my local drive like a file server. I had attached two drives, one as an offline Apple Photos copy and another for Dropbox. Both seem to have stopped working the way I want. But hey, it still works. Survived a bad fall while cleaning up, duck-taped as the screws are not screwing.

codezero 9mo ago

Last time I cracked out my blueberry clamshell iBook, it worked fine, though for what it's worth, I was using Linux, and it seems the main limitation for these connections are the SSL certs. Whenever I think about it, I think that getting my old Mac up and running is easier than getting ANY modern PC up and running lol.

senthilnayagam 9mo ago

I have a ipad second generation, it cant be used anymore because the activation server endpoint is gone. wish there was a way to use it as a secondary monitor if not for anything else. all older intel macs which could not be updated to macos 26 have been installed with ubuntu. I have one more old m1 macbook air, which has a broken screen, and mac security does not allow me to login with a external monitor. that would become ubuntu when I get more time to install

poojagill 9mo ago

[dead]

DeathArrow 9mo ago

>Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence That means it's easy for the consumer to replace parts like batteries, ram modules, GPUs, network cards and hard drives?

pcblues 9mo ago

I'm still using a 2010 Macbook Pro with a 1TB SSD for Logic Pro and Mainstage. Does it struggle? Yes. Does it work? Yes. It's still amazing technology that makes my keyboards and guitars sound bananas. To be fair, I just muck around with it, but it still has more than what I'll ever need or be able to discover.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago

I regularly use a 2012 MacBook Air 11". It’s stuck with Catalina, but works fine (I use it to run Zoom meetings).

Whatarethese 9mo ago

This post made me boot up my 2013 MacBook Air. 800ish cycles on the battery still at 81% life. A OS update was just released 17 days ago. Amazing.

misiek08 9mo ago

Do you have any uses for stuff like iPad mini 2 Retina? I have that in mint condition (I treat the hardware as tools, but not as a hammer). It didn’t get updates for long time and every website of course breaks, so it even doesn’t work as notes reader…

stevefan1999 9mo ago

The way he said "Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence" makes me really tilted tho

zarcaxm 9mo ago

Things stopped being this fun. Now it's all about symmetry and simplicity. More robot world less human world

kittbuilds 9mo ago

[dead]

zombot 9mo ago

Wow. You could look at Apple GUI without having to retch. Being reminded of those times feels like an act of rebellion now. I'm sure Apple wouldn't want us to make the comparison because it makes it obvious what a fucking catastrophe Tahoe is.

grahar64 9mo ago

I had an old MacMini I hadn't plugged in since 2014-ish and I tried to boot it this year and it refused to boot, and refused to update. It now runs Ubuntu. Good little machine

clairegraham 9mo ago
I have one of those too (2011 server version I think) and it runs Debian well.

eleveriven 9mo ago

It says as much about how conservative and stable Wi-Fi standards have been as it does about Apple

kandros 9mo ago

Reading this from an $1300 iPad Pro that can’t even web browse without lagging. Apple’s CPU throttling is a real thing

Razengan 9mo ago

I haven't read any books in years because of how shitty iBooks became. I used to read a lot, on my iPad, iPhone, Mac.. until a few years ago when iBooks (right about when it became called just "Books" I think) started rabidly deleting your downloaded books, even if I have 10s of GBs of free storage on device, and keeps having to redownload the books every week or so, so it's useless when I want to use it the most: away from home where there's no internet so no other entertainment, on flights, or long drives.. Just like Apple's other eternal shitshow Siri, you know it won't work when you need it so you never try again.

altacc 9mo ago

I'd be more impressed if this wasn't the same Apple that's unable to keep Screen Time compatible across the latest minor iOS versions. Downloading updates seems fairly trivial. Host the file, maintain compatibility for the request/response from the OS, which might not have changed much over time, and whilst API versioning is annoying it isn't super difficult for a small API.

mghackerlady 9mo ago

I was messing around with an iBook G4 a year ago or so, and yeah things work "fine". You need to update the certs but otherwise it just works. I mostly used it to sync an old iPod nano since it's the only mac I have and I refuse to use windows, but browsing the internet "worked" on websites that aren't too demanding. I got 4chan to work fine, and youtube loaded but the playback was terrible.

paulrpotts 9mo ago

I have a 2008 Mac Pro that was my daily driver for video and audio production for 16 years before I had to give up on it. The only real reason I had to give up on it was that I couldn't upgrade the software and all the certs were expiring. I was using it for a network music server as well, until Apple broke iTunes home sharing functionality. It's sitting in the hall in my basement. The hardware still functions perfectly. It had four hard drives in it, and I've got all that stuff on a Synology now. It remains the most reliable computer I have ever owned. It literally only was ever off when there was a power outage. I might wind up installing Linux on it for my kids but we already have several little i5 NUCs that are far faster and quieter and easier on our electric bill, so I'm not sure there's much point to that.

1970-01-01 9mo ago

Windows 2000 can do the same Catalog.update.microsoft.com The analogy here is charging a dead battery from 0V to 4v. Your old battery is still dead. Your OS is still insecure. What's the story here?

moon2 9mo ago

I have a collection of Macs from the 2000s, including the iBook G4 and the iMac G4. The iBook G4 still connects to wi-fi, and I've seen this update prompt on my iMac G4 (which is connected to Wi-Fi using a mini wireless access point). I use my iMac G4 to play songs on iTunes, I keep my music library on a server with Samba installed and I mount the volume with the files. I love the Cover Flow design from older iTunes. I can also push songs to my iPod this way.