Apple's history is hiding in a Mac font | Hacker News Reader

Apple's history is hiding in a Mac font

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158 pointsrbanffy31 comments

I'm assuming this came up in reference to this post from yesterday:

https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2025/08/mac-history-echoes-i...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44819962

I absolutely love the way Windows computers show up as a beige low-budget monitor with a BSOD. I wonder how they show up these days - I no longer have Windows boxes on my network.

They still show up that way, same with linux servers running Samba.

To be completely honest, the joke is getting a little bit old. They could at least update the graphic. But Windows has not been that crashy since Windows ME.

Maybe they could update it with something that pokes fun at how much Windows spies on you by default.

> Maybe they could update it with something that pokes fun at how much Windows spies on you by default.

The issue there is that Apple collects just about as much telemetry on end users. I'm unsure how much data either give or sell to third parties.

Something that has haunted me for many years is how much Apple has built a brand around "we don't let anyone touch your data!"

And I don't mean just as a branding that "normal people" (ones who aren't interested in or involved with tech) believe

They even manage to sell it to people who know how things work behind the curtain!

I have had people I once respected that are as deep into the weeds of technology as I am ask me, point blank to my face. "Can you prove it?" when I snark that things like iCloud in China are obviously backdoored. This was before they bent the knee to the UK as well [1]

Is there something in the water for Apple users?

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/122234

You have no proof Apple gives China a backdoor to encryption. The claim is as baseless as saying Google gives China a backdoor. Stop the FUD.

Chinese iCloud is hosted in domestic servers[0] with custom HSMs (Hardware Security Modules) installed[1] to geolocate E2EE keys for Chinese users in Chinese servers.

If Chinese authorities demanded physical access to the data there is nothing Apple can do to stop them. There is no proof that Apple provides credible security to these users and no historical audits that suggest they can.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/business/apple-china-data...

So when Microsoft responds to an American warrant (or NSL) requiring a copy of a customer's data stored on Microsoft servers, that is a "backdoor in Windows"?

That's a weird moving of the goal posts!

Two things can be bad, you know :)

Well, first off, I never called it a backdoor. I just laid out the pitiful security situation Apple created for their Chinese users. You're the one putting words in my mouth.

Secondly, yes, especially if it's OneDrive. Both iCloud and OneDrive are first-party software products, they are built-into their respective operating systems as native features. If BitLocker was compromised, it would be a "Windows backdoor" too.

> I just laid out the pitiful security situation Apple created for their Chinese users.

Which American companies do you imagine are immune to American warrants or National Security Letters?

> Windows has not been that crashy since Windows ME.

Windows was still crashy, most frequently due to poorly written drivers.

What changed was that Microsoft altered the default setting so that Windows silently rebooted the computer when it crashed instead of displaying the BSOD information on what caused the crash until the system was manually rebooted.

> They could at least update the graphic.

What does a BSOD look like these days? That one is from the pre-XP era. No NT-based OS used that screen.

> To be completely honest, the joke is getting a little bit old.

The real joke is Apple shipping a buggy, DIY'd version of SMB because they ditched Samba over some GPL3 quibble, and they abandoned AFP. Meanwhile, Microsoft is still the reference implementation of SMB...

I assume the icons are still there because there is nobody left at Apple that knows how they got there and where the code is that controls it.

There's a lot of nuance in there. From the way the beige is tinged yellow, to the loathed sliding mount.

The old text to speech voices are still around in Sequoia. Some have been changed to a generic "my name is x". But most still make their fun little jokes.

Found in the voice over utility app.

Accessibility > Voice Over > Voice Over Utility > Speech > Add Voice

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk

From a time when apple had soul

Don't be so harsh. There's a lot of great people working there, committed to make great computers and software. It's not an easy task.

They are probably talking about the company as a whole. Back when there were easter eggs and the UI was more raw, yet more "approachable".

I stopped using Apple Macintosh OS after Snow Leopard, aftger they started making it more difficult than necessary to access the full power of the Unix underpinnings. In some way, I miss Macintosh OS 7.5, 8, and 9 more than OS X.

You're mad about lack of Unix power, but pine for OS 7.5?

No it makes sense. MacOS is neither a good enough Unix nor is it a good enough Mac OS. There’s a lot to like about either Unix or System 7, many of which aren’t very well reflected in modern MacOS.

I don’t know what you’re talking about as modern macOS is fantastic for both of those things. I sense nostalgia and rose tinted glasses winning over the facts here.

Remember the NeXT OS didn't come with X support. Not being like mainstream UNIX has always been a core design principle.

They just brought back Clarus the Dogcow a couple years ago.

I'm sure there's lots of creative people there, but unfortunately they work for a company that seems to determined to just keep going back to the well over and over

This is such an old man shakes fist at cloud statement

> Apple released its final CRT monitor in 2000

Not a standalone monitor, but eMac. 2002, with the last revision first released in 2005.

How do I paste the gid* fonts into TextEdit, for example? Only UTF8 fonts seem to work.

As mentioned in yesterday's article [0], they can't be used because they haven't been mapped to a Unicode code point:

> (A note on most of these characters is that they don't actually map to any defined Unicode code point; they are unconnected glyphs. Font Book will show them but you can't really copy them anywhere. A tool like Ultra Character Map will let you at least grab a graphical representation and paste it somewhere, as I have done here.)

0: https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2025/08/mac-history-echoes-i...

You can open them in a tool such as FontForge and force an encoding. You might need to add some padding at the beginning so that you get the symbols on a usable range.

I was honestly surprised at how much older hardware is even in the newer SF Symbols library. When I saw my first iPod in there, I couldn't help but shout it out in my app... https://eph.me/pt-easter-egg.jpg

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