The Last Demon Mac OS
The renowned Demon Hunter once again confronts the powers of darkness. But this time things have taken a different turn: Dawn Ashmoore has been captured by an evil spirit, one that has awoken in the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple. Only one person can save Dawn – her niece, Lila. Yesterday, I opened up my my account settings from preferences and i found there was something called a mac swapper demon. I went to the folder where it said it was located, although I couldn't see it there at all, so from the login items i clicked reveal in finder, and i deleted it that way, but i'm not sure if it has gone.
Nearly a decade has has passed since the last run of PowerPC Macs hit Apple’s store shelves and provided us with one last hurrah on “thinking different” and being part of the trope of “crazy ones” who simply would not conform to the norm.
The Think Different campaign meant a lot to those who hold Apple near and dear and balked changing things just to fit in. The fact that Macs had run PowerPC processors versus Intel or AMD CPUs for so long kept a true point of difference and made Macs unique and unable to run Windows natively (emulation only).
As fate would have it though, just as unthinkable as it was for Steve Jobs to help bring improved versions of Microsoft Office to the Mac shortly after his return and accept an investment of $150 Million from the corporate giant out of Redmond (which many Mac die-hards despised for years), Macs would abandon PowerPC processors in favor of Intel.
No longer did it seem that Macs were “thinking different”. At the time it really felt as if Apple had conceded to be more or less like Windows machines, allowing Windows to run natively on the Mac due to the change in architecture.
PowerPC Goes Out with a Bang
The last gasp of notable Macs maintaining the PowerPC chips came around this time or were just discontinued at this time ten years ago, but are still among the favorites for Mac collectors (see key feature below each Mac that sets it apart).
1.42 GHz eMac G4 – discontinued 10/12/2005
Lucky creek 100 no deposit bonus. Key Feature: Had a 64 MB Radeon 9600 (instead of the Radeon 9200 from the 2004 model), making it the only eMac with Core Image capabilities
17″ and 20″ iMac G5 iSight – introduced 10/12/2005
Key Feature: integrated iSight camera and Iinfrared (IR) receiver, making this the only PowerPC Mac with built-in iSight, hence the “iSight” moniker for this iMac
Power Mac G5 Quad – announced 10/19/2005 and shipped November 2005
Key Feature: Fastest PowerPC Mac ever made and the only PowerPC Mac made (aside from the Daystar Genesis clone) to ship with 4 cores.
Additionally, Apple made 2.0 GHz and 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5 Dual models for those who didn’t need quad-core power.
Hi-Res PowerBook G4 – shipped 10/19/2005
Oddly, but perhaps most importantly, the 1.67 GHz Hi-Res PowerBook G4 that shipped out 10/19/2005 – a mere three months before it would be discontinued in favor of the original 1.83 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro: 15″ model – A1138 or M9969LL/A and its “big brother” counterpart 17″ model – A1139 or M9970LL/A
Key Feature: Only 15″ PowerBook G4 with combined 3.5mm Optical/Analog audio input/output jack (17″ had this feature on the 1.5 GHz in addition to 1.67 GHz).
Note: The 12″ PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz endured much longer than all the rest of the PowerPC line. It hung around until May 2006, stepping aside with the arrival of the polycarbonate white MacBook) due to the fact that no small form factor MacBook or MacBook Pro was released initially alongside the 15″ MacBook Pro in January 2006.
These Macs were the pinnacle of their lines and still can command a premium on eBay and other secondhand markets. I personally had the pleasure of owning a 15″ Hi-Res PowerBook G4 and still have a 12″ 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 and 1.42 GHz eMac G4 in my collection. All of these Macs are still somewhat viable today as web browsers with TenFourFox, video editing stations with iMovie HD ’06, and could even be decent candidates for MorphOS (a third party operating system that is still currently developed for PowerPC Macs).
The Power Mac G5 Quad was more powerful than most “consumer” Intel Macs (Mac Minis, iMac, MacBooks) from 2006 through 2008, with an average Geekbench 2 score in the 3300 to 3600 range. During this time, only the Mac Pro was technically more powerful on paper, but even then (at least early on), many Mac OS X applications were optimized for PowerPC (and not Intel), giving the G5 Quad a significant advantage.
Tiger or Leopard?
Every single one of these aforementioned Macs that shipped in 2005 came with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger installation media and could utilize the 10.4.6 retail installation DVD. Tiger is generally considered the very best version of Mac OS X produced for the PowerPC. It was truly optimized for the PowerPC G4 and G5 in all aspects (even runs great on G3s) and is significantly smoother than Mac OS X 10.3 Panther on systems that support Tiger when provided with ample RAM.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard arrived in 2007, and by that time Intel Macs had displaced all PowerPCs in retail and online outlets (save for clearance and refurbished), but a time of “crossover” existed and allowed both developers and Apple themselves a chance to ween us off of PowerPC gear and PowerPC applications. Apple shipped Leopard on a dual-layer DVD (a first); it was the first and last true “Universal Binary” operating system for PowerPC and Intel Macs.
Note: Although Tiger was also developed for Intel, only Leopard had installation assets for both Intel and PowerPC Macs on the same disc.
At this point, which OS should you run on these late model PowerPC Macs? The short and simple answer: both!
Why?
I could get into a multitude of reasons, but I will keep it down to the two biggest key features that don’t exist on both versions: Classic Mode exists in Tiger only, and Time Machine exists in Leopard only. You can partition your Mac to run both versions of Mac OS X or have multiple boot disks and then boot into Tiger when you want to take advantage of old OS 9 applications that run quite well in Classic Mode and then switch over to Leopard when you want to run a full Time Machine backup (including Tiger partitions/disks).
The key is RAM though – all of these Macs are more than capable of running Leopard and support at least 2 GB of RAM. Make sure you have a minimum of 1 GB of RAM to comfortably run Leopard, but anything more than that is better to allow you more breathing room for multitasking.
Collectible Today
These Macs are becoming sought after for the very reason that they were the pinnacle of their lines and still have limited viability due to the ability to run Leopard rather smoothly.
- Hi-Res PowerBooks in excellent condition still command $200 to $500 eBay prices.
- G5 Quads sell for as much (if not more) than a Mac Pro 1,1, even though a Mac Pro 1,1 can be heavily upgraded with 8 CPU cores and modern GPUs (blowing away a Quad) and can be tricked to run a modern build of OS X.
- Even the eMac G4 1.42 GHz iMac G5 iSight can grab $100.
- The 12″ PowerBook G4 is probably the biggest sleeper of them all. It’s still my favorite sub-compact Mac in the past decade and has more connectivity options than all subsequent subcompacts to this day.
If you can find one of these machines with original box, manuals, and accessories in excellent to mint condition, hang on tight. They will continue to appreciate and be more and more sought after by collectors. They are true low-end Macs!
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I recently had cause to fire up my old Macintosh SE, one of the original all-in-one Macintosh models. It was donated to me by a family friend some years ago, but it was never of much interest to me, and as a result has spent more time gathering dust than doing anything else.
By today’s standards, the Mac SE’s screen is ridiculously small, and the lack of color seemed a curious omission, particularly given the emphasis Apple placed on the color capabilities of its cash cow Apple II. I have read that Steve Jobs was behind this decision (of course!), reasoning that since color printers were rare to non-existent for the average user of the day, the principle of WYSIWYG demanded that the Macintosh screen be similarly monotone. In the end, irrespective of the reasons behind its design decisions, a small screen, black and white device did not fire my imagination and it has spent the majority of its time sitting quietly on a back shelf in the HappyMacs lab since being donated…
…until recently. I needed some information on an old app that would not behave properly on any of my System 7 or later Macs. My long ignored Mac SE was running System 6, and so I set it up and powered it on. What immediately and absolutely impressed me about it was the speed of the machine! I know that saying “Macintosh SE” and “speed” in the same sentence may seem like a bit of an oxymoron, but the numbers bear it out. My Mac SE goes from power on to desktop in only 22 seconds, making it the fastest booting vintage Mac in the HappyMacs lab! In addition, applications seem to launch in a heartbeat and system shutdown is nearly instantaneous.
What lay behind this remarkable performance? Well, for starters the SE is rocking an Applied Engineering Warp 030 Motorola 68030 CPU accelerator. Research into the available Applied Engineering Warp 030 accelerators of the day revealed that both 40 MHz and 50 MHz models were produced. There are no utilities loaded onto the SE (yet) that can tell me what clock rate my SE’s Warp 030 is running at but I plan to find out in the near future.
However, an accelerator alone is not enough to explain the speed. A 68040 is generally understood to be 2x to 3x the speed of an equivalently clocked 68030. Given this, if I assume that my SE has the fastest AE accelerator that was made for it, the 50 MHz model, then the performance of the SE should be in the same rough neighborhood as a 25 MHz 68040 based Macintosh. Happily, I have one of those, a Quadra 660AV, and I measured its boot performance: 63s from the end of its power on RAM tests to full desktop, approximately 3 times longer than the boot time of the Mac SE.
Astute users will quickly point out that this is not an apples to apples comparison (pun intended!). There might be RAM speed differences, there might be hard drive performance differences, and there definitely was a pronounced OS difference: the Quadra 660AV is running Mac OS 7.6.1 while the Mac SE is running Macintosh System 6.0.7.
This last difference is the one I want to focus in on, because I believe it is the true story here. I wasn’t really sure how to calibrate the impact of this difference however. System 6 is nearly a wholly unknown territory to me. My experience with Macs started with the early versions of System 7 and moved on from there.
I did a little web research and confirmed what the SE’s boot time suggested – System 6 is a speed demon, and despite its age, is still remarkably capable relative to its successor, System 7. System 6 ruled the Macintosh world from 1988 until System 7’s debut in 1991. During that period of time, Apple’s CPUs were clocked in the 8 MHz to 16 MHz region, RAM was expensive and not provided in generous amounts and hard drives were sized in the 10 MB to 100 MB range. In short, computers were relatively limited in the resources they provided, and their operating systems had to be in step with the constrained platforms they were deployed on. System 6 was light because it had to be!
The Last Demon Mac Os Sierra
This begins to explain the performance of my Macintosh SE. When you couple a (for the time) beefy 50 MHz 68030 with a light OS that is more in step with a 16 MHz CPU, you begin to experience real speed.
I decided to test this idea by pairing System 6 with a more typical machine of its day. I settled on the Macintosh IIsi as the test machine, a decision guided by the need to meet the very pragmatic requirements of (a) being reasonably available on eBay these days, (b) supporting System 6 and finally, (c) being clocked in the 16 MHz to 20 MHz range.
I will report on the results of my testing in an upcoming post. For now however, I will note that this particular post may not occur for a little while. The Macintosh IIsi I purchased on eBay almost immediately introduced me to one of the truly vexing problems associated with working on really early Macs – blown capacitors on the motherboard. My next post already has the working title of “(Un)Happy Macs”, and will concern itself with the issues I encountered, and how they were overcome.
The Last Demon Mac Os Catalina
Also of some interest, as I started to dig into System 6, was the very real problem of loading software onto a non-networked older Macintosh that supports only dual sided 800K floppies, a media type that has long since disappeared from both Macintosh support and public consciousness. I found two interesting workarounds and will share those in another upcoming post.
The Last Demon Mac Os Download
Until then, my limited work with it to date suggests that System 6 is a remarkable OS, so light that it practically floats, and yet so capable that it will run all the major applications of its day in the blink of an eye, and even get you on the internet! If you haven’t tried it out, it may be worth your time. Moon base defender mac os. More to come…