macOS Archive
For those of us unaware – unlikely on OSNews, but still – for a hot minute in the second half of the ’90s, Apple licensed its Mac OS to OEMs, resulting in officially sanctioned Mac clones from a variety of companies. While intended to grow the Mac’s market share, what ended up happening instead is that the clone makers outcompeted Apple on performance, price, and features, with clones offering several features and capabilities before Apple did – for far lower prices. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he killed the clone program almost instantly. The rather abrupt end of the clone program means there’s a number of variants of the Mac OS that never made their way into the market, most notable variants intended for the Common Reference Hardware Platform, or CHRP, a standard defined by IBM and Apple for PowerPC-based PCs. Thanks to the popular classic Mac YouTuber Mac84, we now have a few of these releases out in the wild. These CDs contain release candidates for Mac OS 7.6 and Mac OS 8 for CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) systems. They were created to support CHRP computers, but were never released, likely due to Steve Jobs returning to Apple in September 1997 and eliminating the Mac Clone program and any CHRP efforts. ↫ Mac OS 7.6/8 CHRP releases page Mac84 has an accompanying video diving into more detail about these individual releases by booting and running them in an emulator, so we can get a better idea of what they contain. While most clone makers only got access to Mac OS 7.x, some of them did, in fact, gain access to Mac OS 8, namely UMAX and Power Computing (the latter of which was acquired by Apple). It’s not the clone nature of these releases that make them special, but the fact they’re CHRP releases is. This reference platform was a failure in the market, and only a few of IBM’s own machines and some of Motorola’s PowerStack machines properly supported it. Apple, meanwhile, only aid minor lip service to CHRP in its New World Power Macintosch machines.
On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail. ↫ Paul Kafasis The downgraded icons listed in this article are just… Sad. While there’s no accounting for tastes, Apple’s new glassy icons are just plain bad, void of any whimsy, and lacking in artistry. Considering where Apple came from back when it made beautifully crafted icons that set the bar for the entire industry. Almost seems like a metaphor for tech in general.
Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple’s first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids or perhaps light users or elderly people. Credit where credit is due: Apple had listened to their users and the next version – macOS Sequoia — shipped with lots of fixes. Border radius was heavily reduced, transparent glass-like panels replaced by less transparent ones, buttons made more serious and less toyish. Most system icons made more serious, too, with focus on more detail. Overall, it seemed like the 2nd version was a giant leap from infancy to teenage years. ↫ Rakhim Davletkali A top quality operating systems shitpost.
With careful observation and a little knowledge of the startup sequence of an Apple silicon Mac, you can learn a lot about what can and can’t happen during that sequence. This article explains how, with examples from the log of a Mac mini M4 Pro. ↫ Howard Oakley Short and sweet.
We removed ads from OSNews. Donate to our fundraiser to ensure our future! What if you could run the full macOS on your iPhone or iPad? Quite a few people have made the case to run macOS especially on the latter, and it seems this isn’t as much of an unobtainable pipe dream as you might think. Duy Tran has been working on getting macOS to run on jailbroken iPhones and iPads, and it seems he’s making some headway. Eventually, I managed to boot somewhat macOS 13.4 natively on my iPhone XS Max on iOS 16.5; keyboard & mouse input is currently done via VNC. After some manual patching, many apps and daemons running (WindowServer, ControlCenter, Dock, and even Xcode 15b8). ↫ Duy Tran on Reddit It should go without saying this is incredibly limited so far, and there’s immense amounts of work required to bring this to a point where anyone could use this in any serious manner. Still, it’s very impressive so far, and it shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that macOS can, indeed, run on iPads if Apple wanted it to. This initial code is on GitHub, but it’s definitely not for the faint of heart.
With Apple’s desktop operating systems straying ever further from what some of us consider its heyday, it’s no surprise people long for the days before Apple started relentlessly focusing on services revenue, bringing iOS paradigms to macOS, and dropping its Aqua design language for whatever they’re doing now. Some people take this longing and channel it into something a bit more concrete, and an example of this is a website I stumbled upon on Fedi: Mavericks Forever. Mavericks Forever is a detailed guide to, as the name implies, keep using Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. It covers everything from hardware options to security patches, browser choices, and so, so much more. It even goes as far as adding more recent emoji releases, custom security patches, and visual customisations. There’s a ton to go over here, and of course, you don’t have to implement every single suggestions. I ostensibly like pain, because I’ve had a soft spot for the trash can Mac Pro ever since they came out. Now that they are wholly and completely outdated by Apple standards, their prices are probably dropping rapidly, so I may have to grab one from eBay or whatever and follow this guide for a modern-ish Mavericks setup. I do actually like the Mac OS X of old quite a bit, I would love to have a usable version of it that I can use when I feel like it. If only to remember the good old days.
In October 1997 you could have bought a PowerBook 3400c running up to a 240MHz PowerPC 603e for $6500 , which was briefly billed as the world’s fastest laptop, or you could have bought this monster new to the market, the RDI PrecisionBook running up to a 160MHz (later 180MHz) PA-7300LC starting at $12,000 . Both provided onboard Ethernet, SCSI and CardBus PCMCIA slots. On the other hand, while the 3400c had an internal media bay for either a floppy or CD-ROM, both external options on the PrecisionBook, the PrecisionBook gave you a 1024×768 LCD (versus 800×600 on the 3400c), a bigger keyboard, at least two 2.5″ hard disk bays and up to 512MB of RAM (versus 144MB) — and HP-UX. And, through the magic of Apple’s official Macintosh Application Environment, you could do anything on it an HP PA-RISC workstation could do and run 68K Mac software on it at the same time. Look at the photograph and see: on our 160MHz unit we’ve got HP-UX 11.00 CDE running simultaneously with a full Macintosh System 7.5.3 desktop. Yes, only a real Power Mac could run PowerPC software back then, but 68K software was still plentiful and functional. Might this have been a viable option to have your expensive cake and eat it too? We’ll find out and run some real apps on it (including that game we must all try running), analyze its performance and technical underpinnings, and uncover an unusual artifact of its history hidden in the executable. ↫ Cameron Kaiser at Old Vintage Computing Research I actually have Apple’s Macintosh Application Environment installed and running on my PA-RISC machines, and it’s incredible just how well-made and complete it really is. You get a full Mac desktop and its applications, excellent integration with the host, file sharing between host and client, and so much more. Running it on newer versions of HP-UX than it was originally intended for does lead to the odd issue here and there, but due to HP-UX’ excellent backwards compatibility, it all just works. It has created this odd situation that my 2004 HP c8000 machine, with two of the fastest dual-core PA-RISC processors ever made, will most likely be the fastest machine I’ll ever officially run classic Mac OS on. Sure, you can use other emulators not created and blessed by Apple and run classic Mac OS on much faster hardware, but if you want to stick to official, supported methods of running the classic Mac OS, it doesn’t get much faster than this.
Disk images have been valuable tools marred by poor performance. In the wrong circumstances, an encrypted sparse image (UDSP) stored on the blazingly fast internal SSD of an Apple silicon Mac may write files no faster than 100 MB/s, typical for a cheap hard drive. One of the important new features introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe is a new disk image format that can achieve near-native speeds: ASIF, documented here. This has been detailed as a major improvement in lightweight virtualisation, where it promises to overcome the most significant performance limitation of VMs running on Apple silicon Macs. However, ASIF disk images are available for general use, and even work in macOS Sequoia. This article shows what they can do. ↫ Howard Oakley Exactly what it says on the tin.
As part of its WWDC announcements, Apple has unveiled Containerization, which uses macOS’ virtualisation framework to run Linux containers on Apple Silicon Macs. Containerization executes each Linux container inside of its own lightweight virtual machine. Clients can create dedicated IP addresses for every container to remove the need for individual port forwarding. Containers achieve sub-second start times using an optimized Linux kernel configuration and a minimal root filesystem with a lightweight init system. vminitd is a small init system, which is a subproject within Containerization. vminitd is spawned as the initial process inside of the virtual machine and provides a GRPC API over vsock. The API allows the runtime environment to be configured and containerized processes to be launched. vminitd provides I/O, signals, and events to the calling process when a process is ran. ↫ Containerization GitHub page Alongside this new tool, Apple also released container, which creates and runs OCI-compliant container images. Yes, both of these names are horribly generic and are definitely going to lead to confusion in online discussions and writing, but the tools themselves seem quite nice. People stuck on macOS who need to do Linux work can now easily get their work done on macOS – if you’re okay with using Electron for developers, of course, which is what containers really are. Clearly, nobody can ignore Linux, not even Apple or Microsoft.
macOS Tahoe is the final software update that Intel-based Macs will get, as Apple works to phase them out following its transition to Apple silicon. During its Platforms State of the Union event, Apple said that Intel Macs won’t get macOS 27, coming next year, though there could still be updates that add security fixes. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors Not particularly surprising, but definitely not great for someone who bought one of those ungodly expensive Intel Mac Pro only a few years ago – it wasn’t taken off the shelves until 2023. That’s a hard pill to swallow, and definitely something I do not think should be legal.
I’ve “launched” the Mac Themes Garden! It is a website showcasing more than 3,000 (and counting) Kaleidoscope from the Classic Mac era, ready to be seen, downloaded and explored! Check it out! Oh, and there also is an RSS feed you can subscribe to see themes as they are added/updated! ↫ Damien Erambert If you’ve spent any time on retrocomputing-related social media channels, you’ve definitely seen the old classic Mac OS themes in your timeline. They are exquisitely beautiful artifacts of a bygone era, and the work Damien Erambert has been doing to make these easily available and shareable, entirely in his free time, is awesome and a massive service to the retrocomputing community. The process to get these themes loaded up onto the website is actually a lot more involved than you might imagine. It involves a classic Mac OS virtual machine, applying themes, taking screenshots, collecting creator information, and adding everything to a database. This process is mostly manual, and Erambart estimates he’s about halfway done. If you have classic Mac OS running somewhere, on real hardware or in a virtual machine, you can now easily theme it at your heart’s content.
Yesterday we had SDL2 for the classic Mac OS, today we have modern SSL/TLS for the classic Mac OS. This is a C89/C90 port of MbedTLS for Mac System 7/8/9. It works, and compiles under Metrowerks Codewarrior Pro 4. This is a basic app that performs a GET request on whatever is in api.h, and prints the result out to the text box (with a lot of debug information, of course). The idea of this project was to build an ‘app’ of sorts for 640by480, my ‘instagram clone for vintage digital cameras’. The idea would be to login, post images, view images, and read comments. I would need HTTPS for that, so here we are: a port of MbedTLS for the classic mac. ↫ MacSSL GitHub page It’s remarkable what tenacity can achieve.
Well, this you certainly don’t see every day. This is a “rough draft” of SDL2 for MacOS 9, using CodeWarrior Pro 6 and 7. Enough was done to get it building in CW, and the start of a “macosclassic” video driver was created. It DOES seem to basically work, but much still needs to be done. Event handling is just enough to handling Command-Q, there is no audio, etc etc etc. ↫ A cast of thousands The hardest part was a video driver for the classic Mac OS, which had to be created mostly from scratch using the QNX driver as a “skeleton” because it happened to be the smallest one. It works on both m68k and PowerPC as well as on SheepShaver and Basilisk II, and there’s already a few screenshots of it up and running at the link, too. Amazing work, and it opens the door for a whole bunch of especially games to be made available on classic Mac OS.
In 1994, a single Macintosh Performa model, the 550, came from the factory with a dedicated, hidden recovery partition that contained a System 7 system folder and a small application that would be set as bootable if the main operating system failed to boot. This application would then run, allowing you to recover your Mac using the system folder inside the recovery partition. This feature was apparently so obscure, few people knew it existed, and nobody had access to the original contents of the recovery partition anymore. It took Doug Brown a lot of searching to find a copy of this recovery partition. The issue is that nobody really knows how this partition is populated with the recovery data, so the only way to explore its contents was to somehow find a Performa 550 hard drive with a specific version of Mac OS that had never been reformatted after leaving the factory. The thing is, this whole functionality was super obscure. It’s understandable that people weren’t familiar with it. Apple publicly stated it was only included with this one specific Performa model. Their own documentation also said that it would be lost if you reformatted the hard drive. It was hiding in the background, so nobody really knew it was there, let alone thought about saving it. Also, I can say that the first thing a lot of people do when they obtain a classic computer is erase it in order to restore it to the factory state. Little did anyone know, if they reformatted the hard drive on a Performa 550, they could have been wiping out rare data that hadn’t been preserved! ↫ Doug Brown Brown found a copy, and managed to get the whole original functionality working again. It’s a fairly basic way of doing this, but we shouldn’t forget we’re talking 1994 here, and I don’t think any other operating system at the time had the ability to recover from an unbootable state like this. Like Brown, I wonder why it was abandoned so quickly. Perhaps Apple was unwilling to sacrifice the hard drive space? Groundbreaking or not, it’s still great to have this recovered and preserved for the ages.
I signed up for GlobalTalk in 2024, but never found the time to get a machine set up. Fast-forward to MARCHintosh 2025 and I wasn’t going to let another year go by. This is a series of notes from my experience getting System 7.6 up and running on QEMU 68k on Ubuntu. Hopefully this will help others that might be hitting a roadblock. I certainly hit several! ↫ Cale Mooth A short and to-the-point guide for those of us who want to partake in GlobalTalk but can’t due to the lack of compatible hardware.
James Thomson, developer of, originally, DragThing and now PCalc, also happens to be the developer of the very first publicly shown version of the Mac OS dock. Now that it was shown to the world by Steve Jobs exactly 25 years ago, he reminisces about what it was like to create such an iconic piece of software history. The new Finder (codename “Millennium”) was at this point being written on Mac OS 9, because Mac OS X wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders quite yet. The filesystem wasn’t working well, which is not super helpful when you are trying to write a user interface on top of it. The Dock was part of the Finder then, and could lean on all the high level C++ interfaces for dealing with disks and files that the rest of the team was working on. So, I started on Mac OS 9, working away in Metrowerks Codewarrior. The Finder was a Carbon app, so we could actually make quite a bit of early progress on 9, before the OS was ready for us. I vividly remember the first time we got the code running on Mac OS X. ↫ James Thomson I especially like the story about how Steve Jobs really demanded Thomson live in Cupertino in order to work on the dock, instead of remaining remote in Ireland. Thomson and his wife decided not to move to the United States, so he figured he’d lose his assignment, or maybe even his job altogether. Instead, his managers told him something along the lines of “don’t worry, we’ll just tell Steve you moved”. What followed were a lot of back-and-forth flights between Ireland and California, and Thomson’s colleagues telling Steve all sorts of lies and cover stories for whenever he was in Ireland and Steve noticed. Absolutely wild. The dock is one of those things from my years using Mac OS X – between roughly 2003 and 2009 or so – that has stuck around with me ever since. To this day, I have a dock at the bottom of my screen that looks and works eerily similar to the Mac OS X dock, and I doubt that’s going to change any time soon. It suits my way of using my computer incredibly well, and it’s the first thing I set up on any new installation I perform (I use Fedora KDE).
Many MacOS users are probably used by now to the annoyance that comes with unsigned applications, as they require a few extra steps to launch them. This feature is called Gatekeeper and checks for an Apple Developer ID certificate. Starting with MacOS Sequoia 15, the easy bypassing of this feature with e.g. holding Control when clicking the application icon is now no longer an option, with version 15.1 disabling ways to bypass this completely. Not unsurprisingly, this change has caught especially users of open source software like OpenSCAD by surprise, as evidenced by a range of forum posts and GitHub tickets. ↫ Maya Posch at Hackaday It seems Apple has disabled the ability for users to bypass application signing entirely, which would be just the next step in the company’s long-standing effort to turn macOS into iOS, with the same, or at least similar, lockdowns and restrictive policies. This would force everyone developing software for macOS to spend €99 per year in order to get their software signed, which may not be a realistic option for a lot of open source software. Before macOS 15.0, you could ctrl+right-click an unsigned application and force it to run. In macOS 15.0, Apple removed the ability to do this; instead, you had to try and open the application (which would fail), and then open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, and click the “Open Anyway” button to run the application. Stupidly convoluted, but at least it was possible to run unsigned applications. In macOS 15.1, however, even this convoluted method no longer seems to be working. When you try and launch an unsigned application in macOS 15.1, you get a dialog that reads The application “Finder” does not have permission to open “(null)”, and no button to open the application anyway appears under Privacy & Security. The wording of the dialog would seem to imply this is a bug, but Apple’s lack of attention to UI detail in recent years means I wouldn’t be surprised if this is intentional. This means that the only way to run unsigned applications on macOS 15.1 is to completely disable System Integrity Protection and Gatekeeper. To do this, you have to boot into recovery mode, open the terminal, run the command sudo spctl --master-disable, reboot. However, I do not consider this a valid option for 99.9% of macOS users, and having to disable complex stuff like this through recovery mode and several reboots just to launch an application is utterly bizarre. For those of you still stuck on macOS, I can only hope this is a bug, and not a feature.
Firmware, software that’s intimately involved with hardware at a low level, has changed radically with each of the different processor architectures used in Macs. ↫ Howard Oakley A quick but still detailed overview of the various approach to Mac firmware Apple has employed over the years, from the original 68k firmware and Mac OS ROMs, to the modern Apple M-specific approach.
You have to wonder how meaningful this news is in 2024, but macOS 15.0 Sequoia running on either Apple Silicon or Intel processors is now UNIX 03-certified. The UNIX 03 Product Standard is the mark for systems conforming to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification. It is a significantly enhanced version of the UNIX 98 Product Standard. The mandatory enhancements include alignment with ISO/IEC 9989:1999 C Programming Language, IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 and ISO/IEC 9945:2002. This Product Standard includes the following mandatory Product Standards: Internationalized System Calls and Libraries Extended V3,Commands and Utilities V4, C Language V2, and Internationalized Terminal Interfaces. ↫ UNIX 03 page The questionable usefulness of this news stems from a variety of factors. The UNIX 03 specification hails from the before time of 2002, when UNIX-proper still had some footholds in the market and being a UNIX meant something to the industry. These days, Linux has pretty much taken over the traditional UNIX market, and UNIX certification seems to have all but lost its value. Only one operating system can boast to conform to the latest UNIX specification – AIX is UNIX V7 and 03-certified – while macOS and HP-UX are only UNIX 03-certified. OpenWare, UnixWare, and z/OS only conform to even older standards. On top of all this, it seems being UNIX-certified by The Open Group feels a lot like a pay-to-play scheme, making it unlikely that community efforts like, say, FreeBSD, Debian, or similarly popular server operating systems could ever achieve UNIX-certification even if they wanted to. This makes the whole UNIX-certification world feel more like the dying vestiges of a job security program than something meaningful for an operating system to aspire to. In any even, you can now write a program that compiles and runs on all two UNIX 03-certified operating systems, as long as it only uses POSIX APIs.
The widely–reported “foo is requesting to bypass the system private window picker and directly access your screen and audio” prompt in Sequoia (which Apple has moved from daily to weekly to now monthly) can be disabled by quitting the app, setting the system date far into the future, opening and using the affected app to trigger the nag, clicking “Allow For One Month”, then restoring the correct date. ↫ tinyapps.org blog Or, and this is a bit of a radical idea, you could use an operating system that doesn’t infantalise its users.
