intel

Mavericks Forever?

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Happy New Year!

While this isn’t a post related to my PowerMac G5, still sitting close by waiting to be booted in a day or two, I have been intrigued to give Mac OS X Mavericks a try recently on an older Mac mini (2014).

Why Mavericks? The author of the excellently put together Mavericks Forever website makes a case that he simply wasn’t interested in what the modern MacOS experience was providing and found Mavericks a cozy balance between past and future:

  • Speed. Mountain Lion was noticably slower than Mavericks on the same hardware, particularly in memory-constrained environments. Mavericks supports memory compression, and it makes a big difference! 
  • Aesthetics. Mountain Lion borrows many visual elements from early iOS, such as its linen-clad Notification Center and leather-bound Contacts app. I wanted a computer, not an iPhone. The Contacts app in Mavericks is actually closer to the one in Snow Leopard.
  • App Compatibility. Mavericks supports more recent versions of apps like Affinity Photo and VMWare Fusion. iMessage works on Mavericks, as does Zoom. By contrast, I’m not aware of any software that works on Mountain Lion but not Mavericks.

The website provides a detailed process to prepare, install, slim down, and stock your older Mac with everything it needs to get on the net and enjoy a more austere Mac OS X experience.

While it took a small amount of finagling, I decided to take the plunge and turn my old Mac mini with 16GB of RAM and 2TB SSD into a Mavericks server. Instant reaction? It’s fast. Very fast. With a legacy version of Firefox, recently updated, I can browse the web with speed. There is little clutter – it feels good.

What are the downsides? Theoretically, just like our G5s, security holes that have not been patched will remain unpatched. Using older software brings those same risks.

The only major disappointment I encountered is rediscovering that Mavericks will simply not recognize a non-Apple SSD on an old MacBook Air. I forgot that High Sierra was the inflection point that opened up wider SSDs and TRIM support on many laptops with proprietary connections. However, I like this setup enough that I may install the original SSD and see if my MacBook Air running Mavericks can make a small but capable daily driver in 2026.

Anyway, enjoy!

And yes, planning to hit VCFSocal in February.

— Nathan

Intel -> Arm Transition Is Official

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I suppose I am old enough to have endured two big transitions in the Apple world. The first, of course, was Apple jumping ship from the PowerPC line of chips, ending with the G5 as its last hurrah in that space, to more competitive Intel chips. Today, at WWDC, Apple announced its next transition, promising to release the first Apple Silicone powered Macs by the end of the year.

A Mac Mini style developer’s kit is already being primed and made available to developers to take a look at what this new era will look like.

Already, we are being shown glimpses of new Apple Universal Binaries. (Blast from the past!)

I am always in a wait and see mode, but with the advances that its own chips have given it in the phone and tablet world, this makes sense for Apple. Their chips are excellent and are probably especially ideal for laptops. A MacBook with an Apple chip is going to be fast, efficient, and small, truly fanless without settling for an underpowered mobile Intel chip. It’s kind of exciting. Right now, you can mock up your own experience if you pair a decent iPad with an Apple Keyboard.

What will be especially interesting is the desktop end of it. Will someone really use a Mac desktop with an Apple chip to do their video editing? How will it stack up against the more serious and beefy options in the Intel/AMD world? Is this Apple giving up after recently redesigning the Mac Pro? Apple has committed to continue to support and develop future Intel Macs, and I could see a scenario where Apple’s ARM chips go into the consumer side of things like Mac Minis, MacBooks, and MacBook Pros but everything else remains in the Intel world. However, it’s probably unlikely. We’ll just have to see.

On the other hand, is this the end of any customizability in future Apple Silicone chip-based machines? Will we see, for example, a future Mac mini with upgradable RAM slots? I doubt it. Maybe these future Macs won’t need upgradeability, being far more efficient than current hardware. Maybe their form factors will be simpler, and their price tag a bit cheaper too. Who knows?

Once again, Apple is taking some risks, but in this case, it’s proven. They aren’t dependent on IBM to design and push the limits of its chips. They aren’t going to be tied to Intel either. Their chips are in their hands now. Of course, this could put pressure on Intel to step up and make a case for Apple to remain a customer, working hard to develop processors to fit future products. We’ll see.

Already, Mac users with long memories are wondering when their Intel Macs will be excluded from future Mac updates. Will it be a fast transition like Leopard to Snow Leopard? Or will it take a few cycles?

What a day for the Mac.

— Nathan