Mac history echoes in current Mac operating systems

Ars Technica mentioned that in macOS Tahoe the venerable old hard disk icons will be replaced with new, more generic, relatively less interesting equivalents. This process also apparently happens with Apple CEOs from time to time. If you are on Sequoia and want to keep them for posterity, you can get them out of /System/Library/Extensions/IOStorageFamily.kext/Contents/Resources. I'm still impressed to this day that someone not only took the time to write actually plausible text copy for the label, but also gave it Torx screws. Get out your T8 MacCracker for this drive:

This isn't the only echo of Macs past in the operating system. The Spacebar also noticed that Apple Symbols still has many old, nay, "obsolete" icons that are only of use to people who still use web browsers on Power Macs.

That's not the half of it, though. There's a bunch more in that file than the ones he spotted. Here's what I saw; perhaps you can find more.

In order: PowerPC logo, composite video out and in, S-video out and in (such as seen on some later PowerBooks), modem port, combined modem/printer port (like on the Duo 2300), printer port, SCSI, Ethernet (also AAUI), three glyphs for Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) ports, a server, rainbow outline Apple, Balloon Help (from System 7), Apple Guide (7.5), 5.25" floppy (I guess mostly for the Apple II folks), two Newton lightbulbs, Newton undo, Newton extras, Newton dates, Newton names, high-density 3.5" disk icon, a confused Compact Mac (possibly to evoke the flashing question mark when it can't find a bootable volume), classic QuickTime logo, busy watch, Apple Pro Speakers port (such as on the iMac G4 or the MDD G4), FireWire, programmer's key icon, and two versions of the reset icon, though these three do have Unicode equivalents or you can also use regular geometric shapes, and sometimes those faced the other way.

(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.)

But that's not all! Feast your eyes on what's still in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources!

macOS Tahoe

It's WWDC again, and Apple has turned the volume knob to add 11, jumping from 15 to 26 with macOS Tahoe. Meanwhile, Tahoe keeps Intel Mac owners blue by eliminating support for all but four models — and Intel MacBook Airs and minis are SOL. In fact, assuming macOS 27 Earlimart Ceres Lathrop drops Intel Macs completely (which seems most likely), that would have been six years of legacy support since Apple silicon was first surfaced in 2020, right up to seven for critical updates with Apple's typical year-over-year support history. Power Macs got from 2006 during Tiger to 2011 when Lion came out and Leopard updates ceased. Rosetta may have been a factor in Steve Jobs dropping the PowerPC like a bad habit, but it seems like Rosetta 2 (or at least the lack of Apple Intelligence) is making Tim Cook kick Intel to the curb nearly as quickly.

And Liquid Glass? Translucency? Transparency? Isn't that ... Aqua? The invisible menu bar and control centre is an interesting touch but sounds like a step backwards in accessibility (or at least visual contrast). I also look forward to the enhanced Spotlight actually finding anything in a way Sequoia on this M1 Air doesn't. Which will probably not make it to macOS 28 either.

[UPDATE: Apple has made it official — 27 will drop all Intel Macs, though 26 will get support until fall 2028, so Power Macs really did get screwed. Simultaneously, in or around macOS 28 Stockton, Rosetta 2 will become limited to only a subset of apps and the virtualization framework. Hope you didn't buy one of the new cheesegrater Intel Mac Pros, because you just got the Tim Cook version of IIvxed.]

A PowerBook G4 reporting the news

The San Francisco Chronicle had an article today on the retirement of KCBS political reporter Doug Sovern. I'm an all-news-radio junkie and I happen to enjoy his pieces when I'm in the Bay Area, but that wouldn't merit a mention here except for this photo:

This is a KCBS photo of Sovern filing a report, or something, at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. (No politics in the comment section, please.) Although the camera's white balance was displeasingly set somewhere between lemon and urine sample, or there was an inopportune incandescent bulb in the way, he's quite clearly typing on a late-model 15" PowerBook G4 — besides the dead-on match for the ports and power supply, the MacBooks of the era have a different keyboard and an iSight in the screen bezel which this one doesn't. The screen is difficult to see clearly but looks like Safari viewing Sovern's own site ("Sovern Nation") on KCBS, and the menu bar seems consistent with Tiger. While it would have been only a couple years into the Intel transition at this point, it's nice to see it still being used.

Other points of interest include all the good old analogue equipment (probably for pool audio), an ugly PC laptop with what looks like a Designed for Windows XP sticker being used by somebody with a bandanna, and in the foreground a touch-tone landline phone, which might as well be an alien artifact to anyone younger than a certain age. Enjoy your retirement, Doug.

February patch set for TenFourFox

I was slack on doing the Firefox 128ESR platform rebase for TenFourFox, but I finally got around tuit, mostly because I've been doing a little more work on the Quad G5 and put some additional patches in to scratch my own itches. (See, this is what I mean by "hobby mode.")

The big upgrade is a substantial overhaul of Reader Mode to pick up interval improvements in Readability. I remind folks that I went all-in on Reader Mode for a reason: it's lightweight, it makes little demands of our now antiquated machines (and TenFourFox's antiquated JavaScript runtime), and it renders very, very fast. That's why, for example, you can open a link directly in Reader Mode (right-click, it's there in the menu), the browser defaults to "sticky" Reader Mode where links you click in an article in Reader Mode stay in Reader Mode (like Las Vegas) until you turn it off from the book icon in the address bar, and you can designate certain sites to always open in Reader Mode, either every page or just subpages in case the front page doesn't render well — though that's improved too. (You can configure that from the TenFourFox preference pane. All of these features are unique to TenFourFox.) I also made some subtle changes to the CSS so that it lays out wider, which was really my only personal complaint; otherwise I'm an avid user. The improvements largely relate to better byline and "fluff" text detection as well as improved selection of article inline images. Try it. You'll like it.

I should note that Readability as written no longer works directly on TenFourFox due to syntactic changes and I had to do some backporting. If a page suddenly snaps to the non-Reader view, there was an error. Look in the Browser console for the message and report it; it's possible there is some corner I didn't hit with my own testing.

In addition, there are updates to the ATSUI font blacklist (and a tweak to CFF font table support) and a few low-risk security patches that likely apply to us, as well as refreshed HSTS pins, TLS root certificates, EV roots, timezone data and TLDs. I have also started adding certain AI-related code to the nuisance JavaScript block list as well as some new adbot host aliases I found. Those probably can't run on TenFourFox anyway (properly if at all), but now they won't even be loaded or parsed.

The source code can be downloaded from Github (at the command line you can also just do git clone https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox.git) and built in the usual way. Remember that these platform updates require a clobber, so you must build from scratch. I was asked about making TenFourFox a bit friendlier with Github; that's a tall order and I'm still thinking about how, but at least the wiki is readable currently even if it isn't very pretty.

CHRP removal shouldn't affect Linux Power Macs

A recent patch removed support for the PowerPC Common Hardware Reference Platform from the Linux kernel. [UPDATE: Looks like this has been retracted.] However, Power Macs, even New World systems, were never "pure" CHRP, and there were very few true CHRP systems ever made (Amiga users may encounter the Pegasos and Pegasos II, but few others existed, even from IBM). While Mac OS 8 had some support for CHRP, New World Macs are a combination of CHRP and PReP (the earlier standard), and the patch specifically states that it should not regress Apple hardware. That said, if you're not running MacOS or Mac OS X, you may be better served by one of the BSDs — I always recommend NetBSD, my personal preference — or maybe even think about MorphOS, if you're willing to buy a license and have supported hardware.

macOS Sequoia

Do you like your computers to be big, fire-prone and inflexible? Then you'll love macOS Sequoia, another missed naming opportunity from the company that should have brought you macOS Mettler, macOS Bolinas (now with no support for mail), or macOS Weed. Plus, now you'll have to deal with pervasive ChatGPT integration, meaning you won't have to watch the next Mission: Impossible to find out what the Entity AI will do to you.

Now that I've had my cup of snark, though, Intel Mac users beware: this one almost uniformly requires a T2 chip, the Apple A10 derivative used as a security controller in the last generation of Intel Macs, and even at least one Mac that does have one isn't supported (the 2018 MacBook Air, presumably because of its lower-powered CPU-GPU, which is likely why the more powerful 2019 iMac without one is supported, albeit incompletely). It would not be a stretch to conclude that this is the final macOS for Intel Macs, though Rosetta 2's integration to support x86_64 in VMs means Intel Mac software will likely stay supported on Apple silicon for awhile. But that shouldn't be particularly surprising. What I did find a little more ominous is that only the 2020 MacBook Air and up is supported in their price segment, and since those Macs are about four years old now, it's possible some M1 Macs might not make the jump to macOS 16 either — whatever Apple ends up calling it.

Donnie Darko uses OS X

I think it's been previously commented upon, but we were watching Donnie Darko over the weekend (controversial opinion: we prefer the director's cut, we think it's an improvement) and noticed that Donnie's reality is powered by a familiar processor and operating system. These are direct grabs from the Blu-ray.

The entirety of the crash dump can't be seen and the scenes in which it/they appear are likely a composite of several unrelated traces, but the first two shots have a backtrace showing symbols from Unsanity Application Enhancer (APE), used for adding extra functionality to the OS like altering the mouse cursor and system menus. However, its infamous in-memory monkeypatching technique could sometimes make victim applications unstable and was unsurprisingly a source of some early crash reports in TenFourFox. (I never supported it for that reason, refused to even use it on principle, and still won't.) As a result, it wouldn't have been difficult for the art department to gin up a genuine crash backtrace as an insert. The second set of grabs appears when the Artifact returns to the Primary Universe and the Tangent Universe is purged (not a spoiler because it will make no sense to anyone who hasn't seen the movie).

All four are specific to the director's cut that premiered theatrically in May 2004. While APE was available at least as far back as Puma, i.e., OS X 10.1, Puma didn't come out until September 2001, months after the movie premiered in January of that year. In fact, the original movie is too early even for the release of Cheetah (10.0) in March. The first two images don't give an obvious version number but the second set shows a Darwin kernel version of 6.1, which corresponds to Jaguar 10.2.1 from September 2002. Although Panther 10.3 came out in October 2003, the recut movie would have moved to post-production (in its fashion) by then, and the shots may well have been done near the beginning of production when early versions of Jag remained current.

I'm waiting on the next Firefox ESR (128) in July, and there will be at least some maintenance updates then, so watch for that.