I recently had a discussion about Apple products with a friend. As usual when I discuss Apple, it reminded me of how much control companies have over our overall technological experience.
I recently picked up a vintage Power Mac G4 (a Graphite G4 AGP, for those wondering), and the first thing I thought of was “what OS should I put on it?”
If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you’d know that I’m a proponent of Linux, and I knew Ubuntu at one point had a distro made for PowerPC-based computers, so I started digging. And what I found kind of both disgusted me, and confirmed what I knew about Apple all along.
Time warp: I remember, back in the late 90’s, when they first introduced Mac OS X. It was a huge slap in the face of Microsoft at the time, because it signaled a transition to a “real” operating system, based on Unix. Which of course meant that it was stable, fast, and easily extended. And then of course, Apple took the very best things about Unix, locked them down, and made it into a proprietary platform that was (in some ways) worse than Microsoft Windows.
I could go into a long tirade about how frustrating it is to use older cheap computers (and not for the reasons you’d think: it’s not because they’re slow), but that’s not the point of this post.
Bottom line: if you have an old Mac, say 2008 or older, you’ve got 3 choices:
- Put an old version of OS X on it and use it like that, including whatever software it came with and nothing newer (because Apple prevents it from being updated).
- Put a newer version of Linux on it, and maybe be forced to compile software from source if they haven’t made a powerpc package for it (which is often).
- Buy a newer computer.
I cannot run the latest version of Ableton Live or Pro Presenter on my 2008 Mac, even if I run the last version of OS X it supports (10.11). It’s a 64-bit Mac… it has enough RAM… it’s fast enough… but Apple says “Nope, you can’t do that.”
The truth is, you can’t run new software on older macs without jumping through ridiculous amount of hoops. Apple has made it blatantly obvious that they don’t care about and don’t want to support older Macs, and so the myth of “Mac longevity” is just that: a total myth. Because you have to consider the software as part of the package, and Apple isn’t interested in OS X backwards compatibility at all.
So from this point forward, I have no reason to use OS X on either of my Macs. I will just put Linux on the old G4 and use it as a Gopher server, or something.
Update: I successfully installed Ubuntu on the old G4, and it’s currently running a Gopher server. I’m working on converting my blog to Gopher format as an exercise in digital minimalism. It will be serving content soon.