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.

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

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????"

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?)...

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

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.

“Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence”

Is there something in the water?

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

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

But only if you run Tiger or newer :)

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.

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.

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.

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