alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
> Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
I get the same feeling when doing a fresh install+boot of both OS X 10.9 Mavericks and Windows 7. They're just so much more pleasant than what we have now.
It'd be nice if modern desktop operating systems took a lesson or two from their past selves.
The road is bit longer when you decide to use Open Core Legacy Patcher.
I managed to install Sonoma or Sequoia on my 2011 mbp but it was barely usable - nearly every Apple application was broken due to lack of Metal support. So I've pick Manjaro and while every now and then Wifi stops working, it's bit more capable but nothing crazy tho since it's nearly 15 yo machine.
OpenCore and MIST are two great tools for fans of obsolete Macs. https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist
Apple’s EFI embeds an older version of wpa supplicant, possibly you are trying to connect to a network with a newer encryption standard like WPA3. I don’t that’s too unreasonable for a 15 year old computer
> But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
". . . that new user interface builds on Apple's Legacy and carries it into the next century and we call that new user interface Aqua because it's liquid. One of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it . . ."
Steve Job, Macworld San Francisco 2000: https://youtu.be/Ko4V3G4NqII?t=405
I did this and considered it the easy way of installing an OS on a Mac circa 2011 vs. DVD then messing around updating that ...
> Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it
Apple has a whole page on making a bootable USB, it can save you a step: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101578
I had to do a fresh install on a 2015 iMac. Same problems with the SSL certificates. I found it rather shocking that a 10 year old computer cannot be booted anymore, and as far as I understand it it's mostly because apple chooses to serve certificates with poor backwards compatibility on a domain that is used for updates, which is just lazy.
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.
Temporarily disable dual-band wifi and go to 2.4. Temporarly open the network with no WPA - should be good to go
I bought one of those old Apple brand USB Ethernet adapters for pennies on eBay which can help to have on hand in situations like this.
I have an old iPad and a not that old MacBook Pro maybe 2017?) which both are almost useless as they cannot connect to many WiFi routers.
Any work arounds?
I had to reinstall MacOS Lion manually recently, as Macs do not have a BIOS and require a MacOS environment to begin installing Windows. I was installing Windows on legacy Macs, because it gives me 30+ years of software and performs well, unlike MacOS (5 years software if lucky, unusably slow performance on older hardware). I intentionally did it all the hard way offline from a Windows host, so that I could replicate it without depending on someone else's flakey servers (which incidentally refused to serve me OS installer images)
I detest crummy Unix-style online stub installers and package managers, because the original downloads are always down when you need them, and it's much harder than it should be to force offline replicable reinstallation.
That era of macOS had a kind of clarity and restraint that’s hard to describe
Yeah LOTS of devices are iced out of wifi because wifi devices started combining the 2.4ghz and 5ghz SSIDs to the same name
and for whatever reason 2.4ghz only devices cant find the SSID unless you if there is a name conflict on the 5ghz frequency
its also less likely that you have access to the router now to change the SSID
It was designed to hydrate the soul.
Or you can do things the easy way and install a Kubuntu 25.10 and have all good modern amenities without a fight.
LOL, yes.
I just tried to put Monterey on a 2021 MBP and holy hell.
USB installer. "Not supported OS, you can quit, or install in reduced security mode". Reduced security is fine for me.
"Installation of Reduced Security failed." Cool.
"Get the IPSW and do a DFU install". Nah, you can't do that. "Drag the IPSW onto the target Mac where it says DFU in Apple Configurator". Nope. No error, just nope.
Dig dig dig. "You might need to do this from an older computer. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura". Hey look, I have one!
Alright, install Apple Configurator.
"Nope. You need Sequoia to install Configurator."
Jesus wept. This is an OS that is 4 years old, on a 5 year old laptop. Apple, "It just works".
Find an old version of Configurator from some guy on Reddit that zipped one up.
Now we can do an IPSW install.
Good luck, mortals.
>You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember.
This one’s a doozy because i hit it last month.
The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.
I had an elderly relative (who disabled updates because they were scared of the computer changing) really upset everything was broken. Gmail app gave obscure can’t connect messages, almost all websites failed to load. When i went there of course the os wouldn’t update as well. We use https for everything now.
The keychain system is so hidden from users it was hard to even get to for myself. Took a usb key of a set of certificate updates. Harder than you think because when you look in keychain you’re not sure of which certificate is used for which and it’s a pain to find what you need. In the end a transfer from a healthy mac worked enough to get a manually downloaded os update running and from there it was fine.
What a doozy though! If you know of people with old macs that stopped working at the start of this year this is why