One or two years ago, I have tried to run a recent macOS on a Macbook air 11" from 2011, 4GB of ram, it was just unbearable, any actions would take seconds, I wonder if it is still problematic.
8 GB RAM is the baseline for modern macOS. It really doesn’t like being forced to do with less, even if the 4 gb macbooks are not that old (4 gb airs were sold until 2016).
People keep nagging apple to up the baseline RAM from 8 to 12 or 16 on the new machines, but given how the 4 to 8 jump played out it would probably quickly make that vast sea of soldered 8 gb machines incapable of running newer macOS versions well.
Depends which version you tried to run, the MacBooks without metal graphics are really bad on modern OSes, but they have made a lot of progress with the patches.
For my macbook pro 13" late 2011 I've pick manjaro with gnome and with OpenCore Legacy Patcher I managed to squeeze macos 13.5 on in.
While manjaro makes the machine relatively useful for the current day - for really simple tasks that is, the 13.5 misses much especially with low amount of ram. But worse thing is that this device comes with Intel HD Graphics 3000 and some stuff just simply won't load like Maps because this GPU isn't supported by Metal API.
In the past I tried Lubuntu on eMac G4 with 800mhz PPC - it was a rather painful experience. So I replaced it with 10.4 and with help of Macintosh Garden slapped additionally os 9.2.2 for for some dualboot retro fun
I’m running Manjaro on a late 2012 MacBook Pro, it’s running flawlessly.
The only initial issue I had was that I had to configurate the broadcom WiFi driver manually. Super easy after some googling for the more technically interested person… But nothing I would expect the general person to solve without frustration.
8gb RAM, 125gb SSD. 1xBattery replacement.
It does not run IDE’s like ST32 (based on Eclipse) and OneNote via Firefox smoothly simultaneously. But everything else so far has worked flawlessly. I use it every day and have done so since the beginning of this fall.
Edit: Call me a script kid all you want, for this particular laptop it’s just more convenient for me to run Manjaro rather than Arch right of the bat. But I guess I could eventually set up a shared partition for storage and an individual partition for each OS.
> Or, the MacBook and MacBook Air can run newer macOS using OpenCore Legacy:
This project is amazing. I just installed Ventura on an Apple Mac mini "Core i7" 2.7 (Mid-2011, “Macmini5,2”). The process went smoothly once I figured out that I needed another old Intel Mac to create the USB boot volume for an even older Intel Mac.
I'm glad you posted this info but this is where I'm stuck.
My mbp 2015 is the only Intel device I have Available and the main position died...so my only working position is windows and I'm running into issues getting into recovery. Even internet recovery wont work :/.
If one wants to put these old machines to good use, it's worth remembering (after checking that they still work), that these older machines (the iMac and the MacBook) are still user-upgradable.
The iMac should allow for 4GB of RAM (of which only 3 will be usable), the MacBook unofficially supports 8GB. Add in a cheap S-ATA SSD, and for some not too high, two digit amount of EUR or USD, these machines will be actually useful for someone.
Virtually every step in the iFixit upgrade guide for separating the screen glued onto my iMac was followed by "if you do this wrong you'll crack the screen" so I've stuck with it as a beautiful screen for connecting to other more powerful machines.
I was going to add an caveat about that, but it turns out, that for the iMac 5,1 (the model discussed in the article) RAM upgrades are easy [1] (SSD not so much, but it should still be better than some of its aluminum successors [2]).
That said, I definitely agree and advise:
Before you order parts to upgrade things, check whether you feel up for the install procedure.
I upgraded both of my parents iMacs (about 10 years old now, but importantly with USB 3), which would otherwise have required screen removal to do the drive, by just hooking up a portable USB SSD, making it the boot drive, and taping it to the back of the machine. Huge improvement over the HDD.
These older iMacs like the one in the article didn't use glue yet! That only started with the 2012 ones iirc. So anything before that is pretty easy to fix or Upgrade!
(Especially the old aluminum ones, they just had magnets holding the front bezel in place)
I upgraded the hdd to an ssd in a 2009 iMac.
Don't think I ever noticed the "you may crack it" warning.
Honestly it's not too bad.
The more painful thing is actually working on the guts while also trying to hold the screen up (because it's attached to things).
That said, the RAM is user-accessible on these older iMacs from a tray at the bottom edge of the screen.
I first parsed this as "decades old" and "mk linux", heh. Was rather surprised to see the new intel machines in the article and not, like, an m68k or ppc model. :)
You know you're getting old when "lightweight distro" no longer means something that boots from a 3.5" diskette and only needs single-digit megabytes of ram.
Those are actually slightly newer than my "daily driver".
If you take care to avoid the "modern" bloated crap, or notoriously intensive like new games, or now AI-related stuff, a decade-old computer is absolutely more than enough computing power for a lot of things.
Many people expect a ‘daily driver’ to run Teams, Outlook and a browser with a couple of tabs running client side apps.
There is absolutely a lot of bloat out there, including Office apps, but that’s just the landscape these days. People get used to running a lot of stuff when they have lots of resources, and will start closing apps once they start to see some performance issues, but there doesn’t seem to be many apps outside of the Linux ecosystem that promote a lightweight ethos, and even fewer sites are built like HN.
My daily driver is over 10 years old, from 2013. Still going remarkably well.
It runs Teams and Zoom just fine. I have thousands of browser tabs. I often use the common office apps; sometimes LibreOffice and Microsoft Office are open at the same time. It is always running Firefox, Telegram, Discord, Emacs and a Linux VM. YouTube often, no problems. And many sw dev tools.
When connected, it drives dual 27 inch monitors, but usually I take it out with me. The 10 year old battery still lasts a few hours and has never been replaced. It outlasted the brand new Dell I was given for a contract last year.
As well as MacOS it runs Linux in a VM, full screen so I can four-finger swipe between different OS desktops. I use the Linux desktop mainly for Inkscape in GNOME and other scripted image manipulations. In practice for most work I prefer to SSH from MacOS to Linux, to enjoy the benefits of the iTerm2 terminal, and use Emacs as a MacOS native GUI application, operating on my Linux files.
Currently using it for compiler and OpenGL development, zero-knowledge cryptography performance optimisation, database/storage engine development, and accounting software, in C, C++, Go, Rust, WebAssembly, TypeScript and Nim and a fledgling language I'm designing.
Credit to Apple, I think my 10 years old laptop is still serving me very well!
That said, I've just ordered Apple's latest M3 Max with 128GB RAM. I expect it to feel similar, though faster, not running low on RAM and storage any more, and Homebrew not warning of an unsupported OS and compiling everything from scratch. The M3 Max will be my first daily driver upgrade in 10 years, and is quite exciting.
There are a few things I'll be able to work on more easily with the new laptop and its larger RAM. LLM architecture exploration of course, but I have my eye on EDA and silicon and photonic simulations, large scale code analysis, new data storage and indexing architectures, current gen GPU APIs, and getting back into 3D graphics. I expect the 128GB will actually be useful for new types of activities for me. I use servers now but my internet connections are slow and high latency so local will be transformative.
But old-school things like Teams, Discord, Telegram, browsers with many tabs, office applications like spreadsheets, and various software dev tools, compilers, YouTube et al, even open at the same time, seem to work pretty well on my 10 year old laptop.
It will do all the things you mentioned (the CPU score is 33% that of an M2).
The entire machine cost about $1000 at the time (exclusive of case) if I remember right. It certainly wasn't $2000.
Since then I put a more modern video card in it for better compatibility (not performance).
I'd guess the original card it had (NVIDIA GTX 560) could run teams, a web browser, etc, fine, but NVIDIA's binary linux drivers don't really support that card any more (they claim to, but they don't support modern OpenGL APIs)
Very true. My daily driver at the moment is a Latitude from like 2011 or so. It already had an SSD, I just needed to upgrade the ram to 8gb. I can browse the web, watch movies and can play older games (including csgo before they upgraded to cs2).
Some stuff sucks, YouTube is awfully resource intensive as are some other sites like Facebook, but since I mostly write it's acceptable for daily use. Thing sure does get hot though.
Sounds like my Latitude e6220 - running TLP and thermald will help with the overheating. It's a great little machine, unfortunately the screen lets it down.
>If you take care to avoid the "modern" bloated crap, or notoriously intensive like new games, or now AI-related stuff, a decade-old computer is absolutely more than enough computing power for a lot of things.
Most likely your phone is more powerful than those old computers. Why not just hook it into an external monitor and use it?
I have a soft spot for old hardware. And a 10-12 year old machine is able to play 1080p video smoothly (unless it was a low-end machine at the time), which makes it fine for 90+ percent of my needs. Plus, these older machines can be obtained very cheaply. With a bit of luck for free, if you offer to save friends and relatives the effort to dispose of them properly.
The Geekbench results for my phone (3 year old iPhone 12 Mini) do suggest it might actually be better than my 15" 2014 Macbook Pro, which at the time was about the fanciest you could get. Just 6 years of progress! I imagine the latest round of iPhones are even better, particularly if you go for the enormous ones.
But, meanwhile, my Macbook Pro can drive two external displays, as well as having a good size internal display of its own that will still be useful. It's got 2 standard USB ports, for connecting keyboard and mouse. Add USB hub, and you have even more options. It has fans inside, so it can run at full tilt for quite a while before hitting any thermal throttling. 16 GB RAM means it's feasible to run a VM - and, since it's an x64 system, it can be persuaded to run many x64 OSs natively. One example would be Microsoft Windows, which you may have heard of, and which has been ported to x64.
The UX without any extra devices is fine as well. As well as the nice built-in display (which is a good size, and >200 dpi), it also has a solid inbuilt keyboard and a very useable trackpad. For all that I do much prefer a proper setup on a desk with a full-size keyboard and a mouse and a nice set of displays, the UX for general use without any peripherals is quite reasonable.
I use a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo 2007 iMac running Snow Leopard as my photo lab workstation. Upgraded to 5GB RAM, 512GB SSD. Runs Aperture 2, scans film, and prints photos like a dream. It can even do some light web browsing with https://github.com/wicknix/InterWebSnow, but it often struggles with the modern web.
This machine can also be upgraded to a Core 2 Extreme, but I haven't found that necessary for my workflow.
After Snow Leopard MacOS went downhill in performance, every app ran very slowly in my MacBook Pro 2007 with El Capitan, without ever using more than 30% of CPU capacity, the system just crippled them.
Agreed 100%. 10.6 is arguably the best version of Mac OS ever. It gave us 64bit GCD and was highly optimized for the hardware of the time. Native software of the time flys on the build listed above.
Personally I stopped messing with old hardware on the desktop side.
Old laptops make great servers though -- built in UPS and KVM! Fire up some containers and enable all the P states
But as a desktop there is a lot that is obnoxiously slow or flat out unusable on old gear. The modern web is really taxing on old hardware like this and its super frustrating to experience severe lag on even basic sites like youtube
Old laptops make great servers for the very reasons you mentioned Built-in UPS, good enough performance and also reusing old hardware instead of a landfill.Am currently using an 8GB laptop for a server as it's become rather expensive to use a 400W (on average) 4U server 24/7.
You may want to turn it on and check how it is doing, just in case. That model is infamously known for its bad capacitors and their tendency to bulge and die.
As a side note, I find OpenBSD the best modern OS for those old PowerPC machines. The main "problem" is the lack of modern web browsers, but it is not like the CPU can handle the modern web anyway :-)
Readit News
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...
The MacBook can run Catalina with full graphics support, and the MacBook Air can run anything all the way up to the latest Sonoma.
The iMac still run Lion with updated browsers / SSL certs that'll let it be used for simple tasks like watching YouTube.
People keep nagging apple to up the baseline RAM from 8 to 12 or 16 on the new machines, but given how the 4 to 8 jump played out it would probably quickly make that vast sea of soldered 8 gb machines incapable of running newer macOS versions well.
While manjaro makes the machine relatively useful for the current day - for really simple tasks that is, the 13.5 misses much especially with low amount of ram. But worse thing is that this device comes with Intel HD Graphics 3000 and some stuff just simply won't load like Maps because this GPU isn't supported by Metal API.
In the past I tried Lubuntu on eMac G4 with 800mhz PPC - it was a rather painful experience. So I replaced it with 10.4 and with help of Macintosh Garden slapped additionally os 9.2.2 for for some dualboot retro fun
The only initial issue I had was that I had to configurate the broadcom WiFi driver manually. Super easy after some googling for the more technically interested person… But nothing I would expect the general person to solve without frustration.
8gb RAM, 125gb SSD. 1xBattery replacement.
It does not run IDE’s like ST32 (based on Eclipse) and OneNote via Firefox smoothly simultaneously. But everything else so far has worked flawlessly. I use it every day and have done so since the beginning of this fall.
Edit: Call me a script kid all you want, for this particular laptop it’s just more convenient for me to run Manjaro rather than Arch right of the bat. But I guess I could eventually set up a shared partition for storage and an individual partition for each OS.
This project is amazing. I just installed Ventura on an Apple Mac mini "Core i7" 2.7 (Mid-2011, “Macmini5,2”). The process went smoothly once I figured out that I needed another old Intel Mac to create the USB boot volume for an even older Intel Mac.
My mbp 2015 is the only Intel device I have Available and the main position died...so my only working position is windows and I'm running into issues getting into recovery. Even internet recovery wont work :/.
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Multiboot/oc/linux.html#...
It’s such a cool project.
Pity about the lack of security updates in the intervening years.
The iMac should allow for 4GB of RAM (of which only 3 will be usable), the MacBook unofficially supports 8GB. Add in a cheap S-ATA SSD, and for some not too high, two digit amount of EUR or USD, these machines will be actually useful for someone.
That said, I definitely agree and advise: Before you order parts to upgrade things, check whether you feel up for the install procedure.
[1] https://de.ifixit.com/Anleitung/iMac+Intel+17-Inch+RAM+Repla...
[2] https://de.ifixit.com/Anleitung/iMac+Intel+17-Inch+Hard+Driv...
(Especially the old aluminum ones, they just had magnets holding the front bezel in place)
That said, the RAM is user-accessible on these older iMacs from a tray at the bottom edge of the screen.
You know you're getting old when "lightweight distro" no longer means something that boots from a 3.5" diskette and only needs single-digit megabytes of ram.
If you take care to avoid the "modern" bloated crap, or notoriously intensive like new games, or now AI-related stuff, a decade-old computer is absolutely more than enough computing power for a lot of things.
There is absolutely a lot of bloat out there, including Office apps, but that’s just the landscape these days. People get used to running a lot of stuff when they have lots of resources, and will start closing apps once they start to see some performance issues, but there doesn’t seem to be many apps outside of the Linux ecosystem that promote a lightweight ethos, and even fewer sites are built like HN.
It runs Teams and Zoom just fine. I have thousands of browser tabs. I often use the common office apps; sometimes LibreOffice and Microsoft Office are open at the same time. It is always running Firefox, Telegram, Discord, Emacs and a Linux VM. YouTube often, no problems. And many sw dev tools.
When connected, it drives dual 27 inch monitors, but usually I take it out with me. The 10 year old battery still lasts a few hours and has never been replaced. It outlasted the brand new Dell I was given for a contract last year.
As well as MacOS it runs Linux in a VM, full screen so I can four-finger swipe between different OS desktops. I use the Linux desktop mainly for Inkscape in GNOME and other scripted image manipulations. In practice for most work I prefer to SSH from MacOS to Linux, to enjoy the benefits of the iTerm2 terminal, and use Emacs as a MacOS native GUI application, operating on my Linux files.
Currently using it for compiler and OpenGL development, zero-knowledge cryptography performance optimisation, database/storage engine development, and accounting software, in C, C++, Go, Rust, WebAssembly, TypeScript and Nim and a fledgling language I'm designing.
Credit to Apple, I think my 10 years old laptop is still serving me very well!
That said, I've just ordered Apple's latest M3 Max with 128GB RAM. I expect it to feel similar, though faster, not running low on RAM and storage any more, and Homebrew not warning of an unsupported OS and compiling everything from scratch. The M3 Max will be my first daily driver upgrade in 10 years, and is quite exciting.
There are a few things I'll be able to work on more easily with the new laptop and its larger RAM. LLM architecture exploration of course, but I have my eye on EDA and silicon and photonic simulations, large scale code analysis, new data storage and indexing architectures, current gen GPU APIs, and getting back into 3D graphics. I expect the 128GB will actually be useful for new types of activities for me. I use servers now but my internet connections are slow and high latency so local will be transformative.
But old-school things like Teams, Discord, Telegram, browsers with many tabs, office applications like spreadsheets, and various software dev tools, compilers, YouTube et al, even open at the same time, seem to work pretty well on my 10 year old laptop.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2600+...
It will do all the things you mentioned (the CPU score is 33% that of an M2).
The entire machine cost about $1000 at the time (exclusive of case) if I remember right. It certainly wasn't $2000.
Since then I put a more modern video card in it for better compatibility (not performance).
I'd guess the original card it had (NVIDIA GTX 560) could run teams, a web browser, etc, fine, but NVIDIA's binary linux drivers don't really support that card any more (they claim to, but they don't support modern OpenGL APIs)
Some stuff sucks, YouTube is awfully resource intensive as are some other sites like Facebook, but since I mostly write it's acceptable for daily use. Thing sure does get hot though.
Most likely your phone is more powerful than those old computers. Why not just hook it into an external monitor and use it?
But, meanwhile, my Macbook Pro can drive two external displays, as well as having a good size internal display of its own that will still be useful. It's got 2 standard USB ports, for connecting keyboard and mouse. Add USB hub, and you have even more options. It has fans inside, so it can run at full tilt for quite a while before hitting any thermal throttling. 16 GB RAM means it's feasible to run a VM - and, since it's an x64 system, it can be persuaded to run many x64 OSs natively. One example would be Microsoft Windows, which you may have heard of, and which has been ported to x64.
The UX without any extra devices is fine as well. As well as the nice built-in display (which is a good size, and >200 dpi), it also has a solid inbuilt keyboard and a very useable trackpad. For all that I do much prefer a proper setup on a desk with a full-size keyboard and a mouse and a nice set of displays, the UX for general use without any peripherals is quite reasonable.
Also, it has a headphone jack.
Phones are content consumption devices. Maybe he wants to do something beyond watching tiktok.
This machine can also be upgraded to a Core 2 Extreme, but I haven't found that necessary for my workflow.
Old laptops make great servers though -- built in UPS and KVM! Fire up some containers and enable all the P states
But as a desktop there is a lot that is obnoxiously slow or flat out unusable on old gear. The modern web is really taxing on old hardware like this and its super frustrating to experience severe lag on even basic sites like youtube
Old laptops make great servers for the very reasons you mentioned Built-in UPS, good enough performance and also reusing old hardware instead of a landfill.Am currently using an 8GB laptop for a server as it's become rather expensive to use a 400W (on average) 4U server 24/7.
The collector in me still keeps a G5 iMac in sight on a desk. Don't think I've turned it on this year.
As a side note, I find OpenBSD the best modern OS for those old PowerPC machines. The main "problem" is the lack of modern web browsers, but it is not like the CPU can handle the modern web anyway :-)
I really don't know how people used the G5 iMacs (i bought it used for like eur 100). I ordered another set of fans and both are vaccum cleaner-ish.