Apple Thread - The most overrated technology brand?

[Ginger Piglet]

That's an interesting case. Personally I would prefer to see these devices refurbished and resold whenever possible, and from what I understand, it's legal precedent that if you've thrown something away, someone else can claim possession of it. But if their contract said the recycling company couldn't resell them or absolutely had to destroy them, I guess that's another matter.

There's destroy and destroy. Back in the 1980s unsold LPs of less successful Western artists were "destroyed" by having the cover scratched a few times and posted to China.

 

[byuu]

and had it last a normal lifetime.

What's a normal lifetime? I would expect a premium post-CFL laptop to last at least 10 years (except for shit battery capacity).

 

[Troon Carey]

What's a normal lifetime? I would expect a premium post-CFL laptop to last at least 10 years (except for shit battery capacity).

I still have a 2006 Macbook and it boots up just fine and works great for general use. Results may vary but I also take care of my equipment. I refurbish a lot of Apple laptops and have given a few away to family members 4+ years ago with no complaints. With that said, I have the same results with non-Apple machines too though. I do believe the Apple products hold up better operationally because of how they cap their software.

 

[Least Concern]

What's a normal lifetime?

It depends on how poor I am at the time, but in terms of laptops with limited upgradability, which my last few Macs have been, I think around four to five years. Of course the system still works just fine but the speed boost and other improvements of newer models become irresistible. (YMMV if you're just a consoomer but I use my machine to get work done.) I'd say maybe three to four years for an iPhone, though that's been increasing recently with new iOS releases working just fine on really old models and such.

Apple has announced another "Event" for October 13, a week from today. Expect the iPhone 12.

 

[Orange Rhymer]

Please take the question mark out of the thread title.

 

[Van Darkholme]

Remember I was saying how bad the wired "Mighty Mouse" is?

Turns out there's no side buttons - the "zones" of the left and right buttons* extend down to the sides. They get very unresponsive on top, but oversensitive on the sides. So as I said, this results in constant unintentional clicks and intentional clicks failing to work. It's really bad holding a click - like with clicking and dragging, or selecting text.

I may need to buy another mouse...

*(there's no physical division between the two visible)

That's funny, because today's the first time I've ever used the thing, it came with an old mac mini I bought for shits and giggles (btw: can someone get me a bootable image for 10.4 for Intel? Can't find a working one online).. And yes, it's pretty terrible. Very uncomfortable to use, just a plain weird feeling. The whole righteclick thing fucks me up. I think this is just another case of style over function.

The Magic Mouse came with my 2009 27" i3 Mac (long sold now, but goddamn the screen was nice) and I didn't like that either, went back to my Logitech fast.

 

[Joe Swanson]

That's funny, because today's the first time I've ever used the thing, it came with an old mac mini I bought for shits and giggles (btw: can someone get me a bootable image for 10.4 for Intel? Can't find a working one online).. And yes, it's pretty terrible. Very uncomfortable to use, just a plain weird feeling. I think this is just another case of style over function.

The Magic Mouse came with my 2009 27" i3 Mac (long sold now, but goddamn the screen was nice) and I didn't like that either, went back to my Logitech fast.

Tiger for Intel is notorious for being hard to find I'd say try this

https://archive.org/details/os-x-10.4-tiger-intel-any-machine

 

[Van Darkholme]

Thanks. I forgot about archive.

Also for such a small device the mini is actually pretty easy to work on interally.

 

[Least Concern]

LGR tinkers with a "Graphite" Mac Pro G4:

I remember lusting for these machines when I was in college. One of the computer labs on school had them, though of course I wasn't able to satisfyingly crack them open like that. I believe these were among the last machines to use the "translucents and pinstripes" hardware design language and the Power Mac G5 was the first "cheese grater," though I might be wrong.

I was surprised at how well Virtual PC worked. I've never used it myself back in the day but I figured it would have been much slower than that, since it had to emulate an Intel, not just virtualize. It definitely started up much faster than modern Windows does when I need to virtualize it for work. I suppose Windows 10 really is that much more complex and bloated than Windows 98 or whatever was installed on that machine.

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

Apple sues recycling company for reselling more than 100,000 Apple products it was supposed to destroy.

https://www.theverge.com/apple/2020/10/4/21499422/apple-sues-recycling-company-reselling-ipods-ipads-watches

Nooooo, not my heckin refurbisherinos for my teenage daughterino who needs to flaunt that applerino!!!

 

[Pissmaster]

That's an interesting case. Personally I would prefer to see these devices refurbished and resold whenever possible, and from what I understand, it's legal precedent that if you've thrown something away, someone else can claim possession of it. But if their contract said the recycling company couldn't resell them or absolutely had to destroy them, I guess that's another matter.

I'd never get caught because I'd just end up hoarding all those old computers in my garage instead

and tiling my bathroom with lids of broken white macbooks from the pre-unibody days

 

[Joe Swanson]

I'm typing this on an IMac G5

Surprised it's even possible tbh

 

[Pickle Dick]

I'm typing this on an IMac G5
View attachment 1650542
Surprised it's even possible tbh

I would say "based and PPCMac-pilled", but G5 Macs are pretty much as powerful as a PowerPC Mac can possibly get, and no doubt I think it would be better to watch YouTube on a G5 Mac than a G4 Mac like my eMac, which has to go into mobile YouTube to get any videos to play, and even then it won't play the video at full quality.

 

[Joe Swanson]

I would say "based and PPCMac-pilled", but G5 Macs are pretty much as powerful as a PowerPC Mac can possibly get, and no doubt I think it would be better to watch YouTube on a G5 Mac than a G4 Mac like my eMac, which has to go into mobile YouTube to get any videos to play, and even then it won't play the video at full quality.

Well I’ve yet to see how it handles it as I haven’t managed to get Leopard on the thing yet (still waiting on double density disks to arrive so I can burn an install disk) and tiger doesn’t seem to have the protocols, either way this is the weakest IMac G5 with 64 megs of vram and that 1.6 ghz processor doesn’t do it any favors either, but it’s good for running software made for G4’s so it should handle YouTube at least that well

 

[Sammy]

I'm typing this on an IMac G5
View attachment 1650542
Surprised it's even possible tbh

Welp, I have a new project and short term goal. I think I know where to get an old G5.
I can't remember, do the G5s run OS9 and Classic apps or was that killed with the mirrored drive bay door G4 series?

 

[Least Concern]

Well I’ve yet to see how it handles it as I haven’t managed to get Leopard on the thing yet (still waiting on double density disks to arrive so I can burn an install disk)

Double-density disks? As in, floppies? Why do you need those to burn an install disk?

If you just want to use it as a web terminal, I bet it'd work pretty well if you installed a BSD or a more lightweight Linux on it. A lot of those still do PPC builds and since Macs were the most common PPC boxes, the hardware they came with - graphics cards, networking hardware, etc. - are generally well supported.

Just because you're visiting the site on a PPC doesn't excuse using light mode, though.

 

[Doggo]

I'm a little proud of this. It took ages to get it to work, but I was given a 2009 Mac Mini to try out, which was running Snep. I've got it running Catalina on a 250GB SSD I had laying around. If anyone wants to do this themselves, and has issues with the Catalina patch, even though the machine doesn't have USB 3, the install will fail if you use a USB 3 device. Something to do with how the host negotiates with the device, I think. But use a USB 2.0 flash drive if you have one, or I guess you could use a USB 3 external hard drive with a USB 2 cable. The only thing I had that worked, was an external USB-C SSD. I've got a few USB A to C cables that are wired in USB 2.0 mode. They came with an oscilloscope and logic analyzer that I recently bought.

Point being, use something that can run in USB 2.0 mode. But I'm pretty happy with how this has turned out. I'd love to throw some more RAM in it, but it's working well enough. It'll be perfect for my electronics hobby since I have slightly weird hardware like aforementioned scopes, EEPROM programmers, UART interfaces, etc, which like running under a *nix environment. So this thing will be perfect. It was a fun little project getting it working, and I'm happy.

 

[Least Concern]

You've got a machine booting from Catalina on an external HDD over a USB 2.0 connection? And it only has 4GB of RAM so it's probably hitting virtual memory just to start up a modern browser?

I can only imagine how glacially that thing runs. Well, actually I don't have to imagine, since I've done goofy stuff like that too from time to time.

 

[Pickle Dick]

Welp, I have a new project and short term goal. I think I know where to get an old G5.
I can't remember, do the G5s run OS9 and Classic apps or was that killed with the mirrored drive bay door G4 series?

G5 Macs can't natively run Mac OS 9 (as is the case with any PowerPC Mac after the initial Mirrored Drive Bay Door PowerMac G4s) but they are capable of running Classic applications, unless you're on Leopard.

 

[Doggo]

You've got a machine booting from Catalina on an external HDD over a USB 2.0 connection? And it only has 4GB of RAM so it's probably hitting virtual memory just to start up a modern browser?

I can only imagine how glacially that thing runs. Well, actually I don't have to imagine, since I've done goofy stuff like that too from time to time.

Nah, I just installed it from said USB 2 hard drive. It has a 250GB SATA SSD which it boots from, and it's reasonably usable. I would like to stick more RAM in it, though.