M1 Inside a G4 Sunflower iMac
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In my opinion the '00s produced some absolutely wonderful visual designs across Apple's product range. The fifth generation iPod, first generation iPhone, and pretty much all the iMacs and MacBooks from 2002-2008 are just really nice objects to look at and touch. This is true for the software as well, Tiger remains to this day my favourite interface for any OS ever and I think it's a real shame you can't skin modern macs to look like 2005-era macs!
Tiger was the most pleasing OS I’ve used from a visual perspective. It was also peak skeuomorphic design. I miss Scott Forstall’s influence in every Apple product since he’s been gone.
Really other than Tim whom I don’t care for — Craig Federighi is cog incarnate. Software has only had one good fucking release on iOS since 7 — that being iOS 12. I can’t even imagine how pernicious the internal influence has been on a normative scale adjusted toward “Apple design and UX of Forstall”
I have had an iOS device since iPhone launched. October of 2012 my iPhone backups made locally and in iCloud could not be restored due to corruption. No one at Apple could help. I contacted Tim Cook’s office and they spent a short period of time confirming the inevitable.
I lost about a year of text messages that I thought were backed up. Everything else I could recover from other systems.
The airflow really can't be beat, it's a gorgeous case, and it's remarkably quiet.
There's a subreddit for this, r/G5mods
10.5 and 10.6's Aqua aren't bad and certainly better than the newer flat looks, but I was never a big fan of the darker metal look taken on by window chrome in those versions. Aqua in 10.2-10.4 was much more bright and cheery, and as strange as it may sound that reflected in my mood when using my Macs.
Out of the later iterations of Aqua I think the best is that of 10.9. It pulls back on the darkening brought by 10.5/10.6 while refining the rough edges that came with 10.7 and 10.8, and as a whole reminds me a lot of 10.2-10.4 Aqua minus the brushed metal.
I happen to have a spare M1 Mac mini and a G4 at home so this project has my interest. The biggest question for me is how to interface the monitor.
Writing a good blog post requires basically a rewrite vs the script, but it's worth it for me since I often prefer a good, concisely-written post.
It takes as much time as at least the script-writing portion of producing a video, but sometimes dozens of hours less if just acquiring some static images and a couple illustrations for the blog post.
But even then, the difficulty comes when people are enticed by popularity and/or monetization.
Since Google basically gave up on RSS, and Medium is an insular (albeit large) private platform, the ability to grow an audience blogging takes more time, requires more concentrated effort, and at best leads to very mild opportunities (overall).
(The number of people like me online blogging for the sake of blogging / sharing knowledge into the void is probably constant, but as a percentage has shrunk down to nothingness.)
Compare that to YouTube, where syndication and subscriptions are much less important and a little knowledge of how the algorithm works can lead to influence and/or monetization... and that's where we are today.
Blogging is not dead, but outside of a few communities it seems to be low on the relevance scale.
This version is really slick.
One thing that I do remember about those machines is that they were massively memory bandwidth limited though, and iirc took PC100 ram at a time when everyone else had PC166 at least...
You can go watch the annual videos where they show photoshop benchmarks running faster on the G3, G4 and G5s. But Intel did take the lead on occasion and kept up mostly. XP also felt faster in UI than early Mac OS X versions, although it did more and improved later on.
If you don't insist on retina for your 20" monitors, it wouldn't be remotely impractical.
Later on I decided to install a more spiritually-appropriate OS and threw OpenBSD on it. It sat on my kitchen bar and didn't see much use until I ended up tossing it during a move last year.
Great machine. My grandparents had a Mac catalog at the turn of the millennium that advertised these and boasted about how the processors outperformed P4s with double the clock speed. I didn't believe them back then but now I know better ;-)
As much as the asthetic doesn't appeal to me, I love that a lot of gamers mod their PCs with lights and other effects and really pimp them up. I like that people are having fun with the objects that fill their lives. Sometime all the sleek modernism just gets a bit soulless.
I'm kind of excited by what I've seen of the Pixel 6. The camera ridge seems to be getting a lot of jokes, but whether you like it or not it looks like someone actually thought about it and made a really conscious decision. Most camera bumps just look like they had to put the camera _somewhere_ so lets stick them in a corner cluster because of some internal engineering decision. The P6 is probably the first phone I've seen where the placement of the cameras looks like a visual design decision not just an engineering one.
It reminds me of when I've worked on stage sets and props. Whatever you do needs to look _intentional_, it has to look like you meant it to be like that, not that you aimed for one thing and ended up with whatever _this_ is, or whatever you had to hand.
I still remember this ad for the G4 which feels very similar to Luxo Jr. from Pixar. Really fun.
(Make sure to turn on subtitles when watching.)
Steve Jobs didn't strike me as the kind of person who'd be proud of a fan doing something like this.
*There Woz
Assuming you mean Wozniak, who left in 1985[1]. Then again, the company is big enough, I cannot exclude the existence of other Steves[2], some of whom might like this kind of tinkering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak#Final_departure_...
[2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSteveLimit
Edit: "Based on the last Apple organizational chart that he was aware of, Wozniak said that he still reported to Jobs."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/steve-wozniak-still-on-apple...
He said (and I'm paraphrasing of course) that there are people who really want to push computing forward, and there are people who want to be like Sony and make an integrated commodity. He said that there's a marriage between the two that could be had "but sadly the Sony guys are winning".
I'm not an apologist for Jobs, I don't really care for the man enough to love _or_ hate him the way most seem to, but I believe he was as much a product of the company values as anyone else was.
I'm considered to be very hard nosed and pushing the direction of my company forward and often I clash with people, and granted, I'm not at the top of the company, but the people around me still shape my mentality a lot.
That’s how I took it at least.
If customers were right we would have never had touchscreen phones.
Are you talking about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box:
> Blue box designed and built by Steve Wozniak and sold by Steve Jobs before they founded Apple. Displayed at the Powerhouse Museum, from the collection of the Computer History Museum[1]
Also: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-d...
If so, you might have your Apple Computer Steves mixed up.
/Former phreaker and cypherpunk
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2009-03-20-remembering-the-tam.html
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3066213/the-one-jony-ive-compute...