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

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

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????"

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?

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

Reading this from an $1300 iPad Pro that can’t even web browse without lagging.

Apple’s CPU throttling is a real thing

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.

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.

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.

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?)...

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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…

“Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence”

Is there something in the water?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

But only if you run Tiger or newer :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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?

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.

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