Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoxOfRain | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely wonderful, excellent concept and execution. I've been tempted to use a Power Mac G5 case for a modern build running helloSystem (a Tiger-ish skinned FreeBSD distribution) but this is far cooler!

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!

View on HN

My favorite iterations of early Aqua are those seen in 10.2 through 10.4, too. 10.4 would be on top, but I prefer the matte menubar used in 10.2 and 10.3.

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.

Strong agree about 10.9. I think that was my favorite appearance.

10.9 is my daily driver and I'm typing on it right now! I built a Hackintosh with a 4790K and a GTX 780, which more than fast enough for anything I need to do. Interface is great, apps are great, stability is great, and I can browse the web in modern Chromium.

Completely agree.

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.

I may have talked to you about this, but I feel the same, iOS 7 also absolutely marred the sustained & graphical performance of the OS via the over reliance on increasingly n-dimensional neon or parallax bullshit whereas skeuomorphic design needed a lift but was nominally perfect by way of consistency and hardware demands. I miss Forstall a lot. I even feel their hardware today is designed a bit more sloppily. Idk, people cheered the departure of Ive or Forstall.

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’m afraid that iOS release quality has always been terrible garbage for me even if I liked Scott Forstalls design aesthetics.

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.

I actually did an mATX retrofit on an old PowerMac G5 tower I picked up on Craigslist for $20. Took some Dremel work, an adapter motherboard tray, a front panel conversion kit, some Noctua NF-A9 fans, uh, an SFX-L power supply and a few sliced fingers - but I'm very happy with how it turned out!

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

agree entirely : also just want to mention the NeXTstation pizza boxes were just awesome magnesium cases, and, having had one 28 years ago, i sure wish i'd kept mine rather than sell it online....it would be a great case for anything modern.

Only thing I disliked was their keyboard layout, I can't think of a more awkward place for the power button than sandwiched between your brightness and volume controls.

The magnesium mass would be really fun to figure out how to use as a passive sink a-la-Noctua NH-P1.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com