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The MacBook Pro is a line of Macintosh portable computers introduced in January 2006 by Apple Inc. It is the higher-end model of the MacBook family, sitting above the consumer-focused MacBook Air, and is sold with 13- and 16-inch screens. 17-inch and 15-inch version were sold from April 2006 to June 2012 and January 2006 to January 2020, respectively. Feb 11, 2009 If you’re not down with the lingo, a Hackint0sh is a non-Apple computer that runs Mac OS X. Since Apple made the switch to Intel processors, build a computer that can run OS X has been increasingly easier. I said to myself “Hey! I have this board, and nothing to do with it! I’ll make it a Mac” and then “Hey!
- This is one snappy little Cube! Surfing the web is a breeze. The OS is very responsive. I have to say, my 2009 Mac mini might have some competition! As with my other PPC machines, I always like to do some simple video playback tests just to see how it handles it. Web sites love spouting off Geekbench stats and numbers, but that never does me.
- Explore the world of Mac. Check out MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, Mac mini, and more. Visit the Apple site to learn, buy, and get support.
- Jun 11, 2013 The old Mac Cube had a couple of FireWire 400 ports and a modestly upgradable video card as well as a disk drive and some memory that could be changed. The new Mac Pro can add a dozen external PCIe.
I had purchased a brand new Pentium II 350 back in 1998 along with a 17” monitor, printer, scanner, and an external 4X CD-RW. I also picked up an extra 128MB of RAM. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but back in 1998 that 128MB of RAM was $100 on sale. The burner alone cost $450. All together I spent close to $3,000 bucks. I was working retail at the time and was making about $13 bucks an hour. Needless to say, that all went on a credit card. Soon after, the Pentium IIIs were released. Since I just dropped $3 grand on my PII system, I wasn’t ready to buy a new computer. Instead, I opted to pick up a new case and a PIII CPU/motherboard combo. I built my own machine. It probably cost me a good $800. That probably went on a credit card too.
As you might expect, come 2001, I was probably still paying it all off. There’s no way I could have afforded a new G4 Cube and Cinema Display.
The sales staff at CompUSA were useless. Half of the employees couldn’t tell you the difference between a computer and an espresso maker, let alone give a convincing sales pitch or an in-depth product demo for the Mac.
Me: “Hey man, I’m hearing a lot of chatter about this whole ‘Mac thing’. Talk to me.”
CompUSA guy: “Uh, sorry man, I don’t know about that stuff, I just stock the shelves man.”
Thanks. Thanks a lot.
Without knowing another Mac User, and there being no Apple Stores, I had no one to talk to about the Mac. No one to convince me how awesome they were. I had heard that some of your stuff wouldn’t work on a Mac, and that you’d have to buy new apps, etc, but I had no one to talk to about it. No one to explain it. I couldn’t see myself dropping another $3,000 on a computer without knowing what it can and can’t do. Where do you buy apps for the Mac? CompUSA only had a small section of Mac software. Was that it? Can you play games? What’s a SuperDrive?
It was frustrating. I continued to use PCs for several more years, but I’ve always longed for one of those iconic Cubes!
The prices of the Cubes have come down in recent years. Far from the original $1,799 price tag, although they sill fetch a hefty price for an “old” computer. Cubes, and just the Cubes - no power supply, keyboard, or mouse - regularly fetch upwards of $100 - $200 on eBay. A Studio Display will fetch close to $100 with shipping, maybe even higher. Then there’s the speakers, the keyboard, and the mouse. Assembling a full setup could easily cost you $400. That’s not even taking the condition into consideration.
My wife knows my passion for vintage Apple hardware, as well as the wish list posted on the back of my computer room door. However, I can’t expect her to hop on eBay and buy my anything on that list. That would be impossible. Instead, she threw me some “eBay money” as an extra Christmas present.
As luck would have it, timing was on my side. One seller posted a complete G4 Cube system in the box in excellent condition for only $210. Another posted a 17” Studio Display in the box for only $50 bucks. Both were a steal! I could have a full G4 Cube setup in mint condition for only $260, at the same time sparing myself the agony of piecing together the perfect system of the course of a year.
The box is a little beat up, but it’s a box nonetheless. Boxes: good!
It still has the original $1,799 price tag on it. Man, someone was lucky! The bar code was cut out. Probably for a printer rebate.
This G4 Cube is the base 450MHz model that shipped with 64MB of RAM, a 20G hard drive and DVD Combo Drive. The previous owner had made some upgrades. It now sports
• Hard drive upgrade to 80GB
• RAM upgraded to 512MB
• Stock ATI Rage 128 Pro (16MB) - max resolution of 1280 x 1024
• Stock DVD Combo Drive (DVD ROM / CD-RW)
Everything is included.
The keyboard and mouse are in excellent condition. This user really took care of his Mac.
That has to be the cleanest power cord I have ever seen on a 10+ year old computer.
VGA adapter: nice and clean.
The original software bundle is also included. That AppleCare/TechTool CD is still sealed.
And there it is, in all its acrylic splendor!
And I thought the power cord was clean! This power supply looks like it’s never been out of the box!
It’s absolutely spotless!
Since the G4 Cube does not have any internal speakers, it needs an external USB-powered audio card, or “digital amplifier” as Apple calls it. The Harman Kardon speakers are connected directly to the digital amplifier.
The speaker are in very nice condition too. I’ve seen these sold separately on eBay. Some of them look pretty nasty.
These are really clean and don’t have any scratches or scuffs on them.
Finally! The Cube. Spotless!
Absolutly amazing.
This is the first time in over 10 years that I’ve seen one in person and I do have to admit that it is a little bigger than I remember. I guess pictures of it don’t give you good sense of scale. I guess I’ve seen so many turned into aquariums and tissue holders that I assumed it was smaller than it really is. Not that I’m complaining. It’s a marvel of engineering and a true work of art. Jonathan Ive really outdid himself.
I’ve seen so many Cube on eBay with chipped, cracked, and smashed corners. They’re still asking for close to $100 for a beat up Cube! All 4 corners on this Cube are pristine.
All the I/O looks great. No smashed or dinged up ports. Very clean.
I’ve always loved the way the internals pull right out of the Cube. Apple really made it super easy to take it apart without any tools. I remember when Jobs unveiled the Cube at MacWorld in 2000. When he pulled the core out of the enclosure, the crowd was like “What???”. Pretty amazing.
You just press down on the latch. It pops up…
…and you simply lift the whole core out.
You can also remove the interior chassis by removing the screws at the bottom.
Four screws secure the grill while the 2 on the sides secure the chassis to the acrylic enclosure.
After you remove those, you can pull the chassis out. You’ll have to do that if you want to wipe out the dust between the chassis and the enclosure.
The G4 Cube sports 3 RAM slots that can take up to 512MB of PC100 each for a total of 1.5GB of RAM. That definitely sounds like something I’m going to have to upgrade since my Cube has 2x256MB installed. It has OS X 10.3 installed too. It would be nice to install 10.4 on it and I don’t know how the performance will be with only 512MB of RAM.
Look, the previous owner never opted for AirPort. True, I’ll take wired Ethernet over AirPort any day of the week, but cards are so cheap nowadays, it’s worth it to upgrade it.
That’s why I always keep a few AirPort cards lying around. You never know when you’re going to need one. Having the machine open now was the perfect opportunity to pop a card in.
I checked my box of RAM sticks for some PC100. Alas, no 168 pin sticks. For the first time in my life, I seem to have more SODIMMs than full sticks. I’ll have to look on eBay for some RAM. With that, I put everything back together.
Lets check out that 17” Studio Display.
The box is in pretty good shape, despite the fact that someone thought it would be a good idea to put the UPS tag right on the front of the box instead of the side or top. You’d think by now that people on eBay would know that we buy this stuff in the boxes because we’re collectors. The box also has value to us. This seller didn’t even wrap it up in brown paper. They shipped it just like that. I’m lucky UPS didn’t just steal it.
No paperwork or anything was included with this one. I was just happy to get one in the box that looks like it’s never been used.
There’s plenty on eBay with broken stands, chips, cracks and dings in the screen. This one is in great shape.
I had to move some Macs around to fit it in. I moved my 128K and my 512K to a shelf for now. I never have those powered up anyway, so they don’t need to be front and center any more. I can always take one down off the shelf and plug it in if need be. I like the way the iMacs complement the Cube. They look really good together.
I powered the Cube up and it booted right into OS X 10.3.9. As soon as I entered the Network pane of System Preferences, OS X notified me that it had detected the AirPort card.
I hopped on my Wi-Fi and I was off to the races. It just works.
Yuk. I couldn’t take that gray background any more. I changed it to something more reminiscent of Panther. I fired up Quicktime and it proved that I was indeed connected to my Wi-Fi.
iTunes 4. Gotta love it. The iTunes Music Store no longer works, but that’s to be expected.
I popped a CD in the drive to see how the speakers sounded. It’s a little distorted when they’re cranked, but not bad. I’d never have it that loud anyway. I’m sure they sounded better 10 years go, but I’m a little spoiled with the $300 speakers on my Mac Pro. Those sound ridiculous. Everything else just sounds like tin cans to me.
OK, let’s see how the Cube fairs with OS X 10.4 Tiger.
I popped in my install DVD...
...and let ‘er rip.
Once I was in the installer, the first thing I did was fire up Disk Utility and blow away those two 40G partitions on favor of a single one.
Once I configured the installer with my options, I let it do its thing.
I then set up my new account…
…and logged in.
My install DVD is version 10.4.6.
I hit up Software Update to bring me up to 10.4.11.
After that, there were a few more updates to be done. Safari, QuickTime, Java, etc. It’s a good thing I threw that AirPort card inside or else I’d have to run a wire. AirPort isn’t the fastest way to download data, but it’s good for casual surfing and light downloading. Even with the large 186MB download for 10.4.11, it was done in just a few minutes.
iTunes 6. The Music Store is still hands off.
I hopped on the internet and headed over to Apple’s site to see if I could play a commercial or something. Just like my other 10.4 machines, they’re no match for the requirements of the modern day web browser.
The video and audio was choppy, sometimes as choppy as 1 frame about every 30 seconds. I don’t know if it’s the G4, the lack or RAM, or the slow Wi-Fi. In any case, it’s unwatchable. I even tried YouTube. That was just as bad.
I ran an Ethernet wire over to the Cube and tried that. The audio streamed a little better, but the video was still unwatchable. Even when I dropped the quality down to 240p.
I figured at that point, I’d try Camino. Camino is popular with older Macs. I also updated Flash to see if that would help.
Still, the results weren’t that much better. It’s a little better at playing some YouTube videos, but videos like iPhone commercials, etc on Apple’s site are unwatchable.
Despite the lack of multimedia, I’m so happy with the Cube. It’s just like I always imagined it. It’s just an amazing little machine. The design is like nothing else you’ve ever seen. It’s not going to be a workhorse or anything. It’s more for display. Other than the lack of good video playback, it’s a snappy little machine even with only 512MB of RAM. Hopefully with an upgrade to 1.5GB, it’ll be that much better.
Two decades ago this week, the first version of Mac OS X hit shelves. We're not talking figuratively. The software was sold direct to consumers on disk, with a suggested retail price of $129 (roughly $190 today, adjusted for inflation).
Back in 2001, Mac OS X 10.00 Cheetah was a rough-around-the-edges break from the ageing Classic Mac OS, which had much of its origins in the original Macintosh’s System 1 software. In the years since, the platform has undergone two architecture shifts (PowerPC to Intel, and now Arm) and matured to the point where it commands nearly 10 per cent of desktop market share globally.
Getting there, however, wasn’t easy.
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From big problems to big cats
The story of Mac OS X didn’t start in 2001, but rather in 1985, when Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple following a failed boardroom coup, and multiple product flops. The Apple Lisa project was a dismal failure, selling just 10,000 units. The Macintosh, although infinitely more successful by comparison, failed to slow the ascent of IBM in the PC market, and didn’t meet the company’s lofty sales goals.
Although Jobs was no longer part of Apple, he remained involved in the computer industry, later founding NeXT Inc, which aimed to build workstation-class machines for the higher education market. Its first computer, revealed in 1988, was a powerful (albeit excruciatingly expensive) cube of black aluminium based on a 25MHz Motorola 68030 CPU and 68882 FPU, with 8MB RAM and an optional 330MB or 660MB hard disk. It came with a bespoke UNIX-based operating system called NeXTSTEP that was founded on the Mach and BSD kernels, with object oriented programming principles throughout.
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It was revolutionary, but that wasn’t enough to overcome its steep $6,500 ($14,500 in today’s money) asking price. Universities didn’t bite – although the hardware was used to develop the first web browser and server, as well as id Software’s Doom and Quake. By 1993, NeXT had left the hardware business to focus on porting NeXTSTEP to IBM-compatible PC, as well as PA-RISC, SPARC, and the Motorola 68k architectures.
Apple had its own problems, too. The Macintosh was stagnating. Windows 95 – which combined the previously separate DOS and Windows software – proved to be a roaring success, helping Microsoft expand its market share. When it arrived in 1995, Windows 95 was highly usable for first-time computer owners, and had features Mac OS 7 simply lacked, like preemptive multitasking. Separately, a disastrous decision by then-CEO Michael Spindler to license Mac OS 7 to third-party manufacturers resulted in the company’s high-margin hardware sales shrinking further.
The Next Step
By 1997, Apple was mere weeks away from bankruptcy. As a Hail Mary, CEO Gil Amelio (who replaced Spindler in 1996) acquired NeXT, bringing Jobs back to the company he founded from a Los Altos garage. While Jobs (who would assume the top role the following year) would ultimately nurse the company back to health, Apple was most interested in the NeXTSTEP operating system.
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READ MOREYou see, Mac OS was, at the time, stagnant. Whereas Windows had made leaps and bounds in terms of things like peripheral support and the internet, Apple had yet to implement basic system-level features like pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, and protected memory. During the Amelio years, Apple had attempted to create a new operating system on a clean-sheet kernel called Nukernel, but it died in the fiery pits of development hell.
With Jobs at the helm, work started on a new operating system based on NeXTSTEP. The old Mac OS 9 nanokernel was replaced with Darwin, itself a direct descendant of the NeXTSTEP kernel. Other NeXT features - like the use of object-oriented programming, the Objective-C language, and the Dock - also made an appearance. It was a clean break with the past, with a brand new interface dubbed Aqua, and APIs that would allow developers to port their existing software.
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The full release version of Mac OS X 10.0's UI (click to enlarge)
This, ultimately, became Mac OS X 10.00 Cheetah. And while its legacy continues to this day, the initial launch was somewhat underwhelming. It lacked feature parity with Mac OS 9, with DVD playback and CD burning unavailable at launch. Despite the release of a public beta, many developers (including Microsoft and Adobe) hadn’t updated their software to use the Aqua APIs. And it was dog slow, particularly when running applications using the backwards-compatible Classic APIs.
Worse, while many had hoped the Unix foundations and protected memory of Mac OS X would improve stability when compared to its predecessors, the software was rife with fatal bugs, which frequently presented themselves when using external peripherals.
The road since travelled
Teething problems with Mac OS X Cheetah didn’t stop Apple’s upward trajectory, and many of these issues were resolved in later releases. The next release, Mac OS X 10.1 Puma focused on performance improvements and improving feature parity with the Classic Mac OS, and was offered as a free update to existing users.
The next major update came in 2002. Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar fixed the long-standing issues with printer support through the release of CUPS – the Common Unix Printing System – which was subsequently open-sourced and is now widely used across the Linux sphere. By that point, Apple was so confident in Mac OS X, Jobs performed a mock funeral for the Classic Mac OS X on stage at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
At the time, Mac OS X was exclusively available for the PowerPC platform. By the decade’s halfway point, it was struggling to compete with chips from Intel in key metrics like power consumption. IBM, which built PowerPC chips on behalf of Apple, was manufacturing on larger nodes than those used by Intel, which was already transitioning to 65nm. Whereas it once enjoyed a competitive edge in processing power, Apple was faced with the prospect of losing that advantage.
And so, in 2005, Apple announced the transition to Intel, starting with Mac OS X 10.4.4 Tiger. This had been on the cards for some time. For each version of Mac OS X released, Apple had secretly created an x86 port, so there wasn’t much re-architecting required internally.
Apple had flirted with a move to Intel in the past. Rhapsody OS, which later became Mac OS X Server 1.0, was released for both PowerPC and x86, with versions for IBM RISC System/6000 and DEC Alpha architectures considered. Additionally, the foundational basis of Mac OS X, NeXTSTEP, was also available for Intel processors. This preparation and experience allowed Apple to recognise the writing on the wall and pivot.
As transitions go, the shift to Intel was as painless as could be, especially compared to the jarring leap from Mac OS Classic to Mac OS X. Legacy apps were able to run via the Rosetta compatibility mode (which was later discontinued in 2012). Developers could target both PowerPC and Intel platforms with universal binaries. And Apple offered developers a rental “transition kit” ahead of the public launch, giving them a head start.
In retrospect, this experience informed Apple’s next platform shift, with the company moving from Intel to its own Arm-based Apple Silicon processors in 2020. It has used the same playbook, down to the developer tools and pre-release transition hardware.
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Plus ça change
In the two decades since the launch of Mac OS X, a few things have changed. Objective-C is declining in popularity, with Apple’s syntactically nicer Swift programming language gathering pace. The name changed a few times too, with Apple re-branding the system OS X in 2012, and finally macOS with the launch of version 10.12 Sierra. We’ve seen the launch of the Metal graphics API, which provided better rendering performance for games and other visually-intensive apps, as well as the inclusion of iOS and iPadOS features, like Siri.
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But the foundations first introduced in 2001 are still there, from the UNIX underpinnings to the NeXTSTEP Dock. While Windows has undergone multiple UI changes, macOS has largely remained mutually intelligible with its predecessors. As a collector of retro Apple kit (your correspondent has around 30 machines, ranging from a Mac OS 7-era Performa, to various post-Jobs PowerBooks and iBooks), it’s amazing to see how little has changed. I can use an iBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.3 Jaguar and feel just at home as I would with a latest generation M1 MacBook Air.
And that is the story of Mac OS X. It didn't seem like it would make it, but getting the fundamentals right – dare we say it even more than the cult of Steve Jobs – matters. ®