macOS Archive

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.

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 Now that they are wholly and completely outdated by Apple standards, their prices are probably dropping rapidly, so I may have to grab one from eBay or whatever and follow this guide for a modern-ish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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

We all know about the Desktop Publishing revolution that the first Macs and their PostScript LaserWriter printers brought in the late 1980s, but many have now forgotten the Desktop Video revolution that followed in the next decade. At its heart was support for multimedia in Apple’s QuickTime. QuickTime isn’t a single piece of software, or even an API in Classic Mac OS, but a whole architecture to support almost any media format you could conceive of. It defines container and file formats for multiple media types, forming the basis for the MPEG-4 standard, extensible encoding and decoding of a wide variety of media using Codecs, and more. ↫ Howard Oakley As a Windows users before I switched to the Mac somewhere in 2003 or 2004 or so, I mostly associated QuickTime with an annoying piece of crapware I sometimes had to install to watch videos, despite my Windows installation being perfectly capable of playing a whole slew of video codecs just fine. To make matters worse, Apple eventually started forcing Windows users to also install their auto-update tool that ran in the background, which would occasionally just… Install stuff without your permission. Of course, QuickTime was a whole lot more than that, especially on the Mac, where it was simply a core technology of the Mac operating system and the name of the built-in video player. It also served as underpinnings for a whole slew of related technologies, from movie editors like iMovie to the QuickTime streaming tools included in Mac OS X Server, so odds are that somehow, somewhere, you’ve used QuickTime in your life time. I’m not entirely ashamed to admit I had to check if QuickTime was still part of macOS today – I haven’t actively used macOS since, I think, the Snow Leopard days in 2009 – but it obviously has been sunset quite a while ago in favour of AVFoundation, which macOS still uses today.

It’s one of the most pervasive common wisdoms shared all over the web, no matter where you go – it’s one of those things everybody seems to universally agree on: Chrome will absolutely devastate your battery life on the Mac, and you should really be using Safari, because Apple’s special integration magic pixie dust sprinkles ensures Safari sips instead of gulps electricity. Whether you read random forum posters, Apple PR spokespeople, or Apple’s own executives on stage during events, this wisdom is hard to escape. Is it true, though? Well, Matt Birchler decided to do something entirely revolutionary and entirely unheard of: a benchmark. Back in the olden days of yore, we would run benchmarks to test the claims from companies and their PR departments, and Birchler decided to dust off this old technique and develop a routine to put the Chrome battery claims to the test. After 3 days of continuous testing on a freshly installed 14” MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro processor and 16 GB RAM running the latest stable releases of both browsers, Birchler came to some interesting conclusions. In my 3-hour tests, Safari consumed 18.67% of my battery each time on average, and Chrome averaged 17.33% battery drain. That works out to about 9% less battery drain from Chrome than Safari. Yes, you read that right, I found Chrome was easier on my battery than Safari. While I did experience some variability in each 3 hour test run, Chrome came out on top in 5 of the 6 direct comparisons. ↫ Matt Birchler His methodology seems quite sound and a good representation of what most laptop users will use their browser for: YouTube, social media, a few news websites, and editing a Google Doc, in a 20 minute loop that was repeated for three hours per test. Multiple of these three hour tests were then ran to counter variability. I highly doubt using different websites will radically change the results, but I obviously am curious to see a similar test ran on Windows and Linux, x86 and ARM, for a more complete picture that goes beyond just the Mac. Conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, and I think we have a classic case of that here. While there may have been a time in the past where Chrome on the Mac devastated battery life, it seems Chrome and Chromium engineers have closed the gap, and in some cases even beat Safari. Now, this doesn’t mean everybody should rush and switch to Chrome, since there are countless other reasons to use Safari over Chrome other than supposed battery life advantages. With Apple PR arguing that alternative browser engines should not be allowed on iOS because Chrome would devastate iOS’ battery life, tests like these are more important than ever, and I hope we’re going to see more of them. Tech media always just seems to copy/paste whatever manufacturers and corporations claim without so much as a hint of skepticism, and this benchmark highlights the dangers of doing so, in case you didn’t already know believing corporations was a terribly idea.