macOS Sequoia’s Macintosh screen saver is one of the strongest hits of nostalgia Apple has ever produced. If for some reason you haven’t seen it, Mr. Macintosh has you covered:
When this showed up last year, a little birdie told me that it was dynamically generated based on the user’s preferences, which explained why I couldn’t find it as a movie anywhere in the filesystem.
The Mac community has lost a giant. From a Facebook post from the Atkinson family:
We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home in Portola Valley in his bed, surrounded by family. We will miss him greatly, and he will be missed by many of you, too. He was a remarkable person, and the world will be forever different because he lived in it. He was fascinated by consciousness, and as he has passed on to a different level of consciousness, we wish him a journey as meaningful as the one it has been to have him in our lives. He is survived by his wife, two daughters, stepson, stepdaughter, two brothers, four sisters, and dog, Poppy.
First released in June 2003, the Power Mac G5 marked a huge step forward for Apple’s Mac desktop line. Here’s a bit from the press release:
Apple today unleashed the world’s fastest personal computer — the Power Mac G5 — featuring the world’s first 64-bit desktop processor and the industry’s first 1 GHz front-side bus. Powered by the revolutionary PowerPC G5 processor designed by IBM and Apple, the Power Mac G5 is the first personal computer to utilize 64-bit processing technology for unprecedented memory expansion (up to 8GB) and advanced 64-bit computation, while running existing 32-bit applications natively.
With strong rumours that Apple intends changing its version numbering system for the next major release of macOS and its other operating systems, it’s a good time to see how we got to macOS 15.
Cameron Kaiser writing at Old VCR:
Of course you can run Doom on a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now.
Now, let’s go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander’s AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substantial technical differences. (As it happens, the very fact it won’t run on an ANS was what prompted me to embark on this port in the first place.) And no, this is not merely an exercise in flogging a geriatric compiler into building Doom Generic, though we’ll necessarily do that as part of the conversion. There’s no AIX sound driver for ANS audio, so this port is mute, but at the end we’ll have a Doom executable that runs well on the ANS console under CDE and has no other system prerequisites. We’ll even test it on one of IBM’s PowerPC AIX laptops as well. Because we should.
Jason Snell has written a great piece on the Mac clone program:
The mid-’90s were a weird time for Apple. Microsoft and Intel dominated the computer industry so much that Apple’s tiny market share just kept shrinking, and Apple struggled to make money. You might think that allowing other companies to compete with Apple would just make things worse, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and Apple CEO Michael Spindler (who had taken over for the deposed longtime CEO John Sculley) decided to take those measures.
Many classic Macs came with — or supported — displays running at 512x384 pixels, but many compact Macs, ranging from the original 1984 machine up through 1991’s Macintosh Classic II had built-in CRTs running at 512x342 pixels. That covers all black-and-white compact Macs with a 9-inch screen. The later Color Classic and Color Classic II used a 10-inch CRT at a full 512x384.
This came up when I joined John Gruber on The Talk Show. At one point in the show, I rattled off the original Mac’s resolution as being 512x384.
I love this confession:
One of the Macs my local CompUSA had out on display in its Apple ghetto was a G4 Cube. I had read somewhere that they ran hot, so one day I put my hand a few inches over the Cube to feel the convective flow rising out of the top grille. The machine immediately overheated and shut down to protect itself.
Let me be clear (as clear as the Cube). I didn’t put my hand on the grille—it was at least 3–4 inches above it. But that was enough. And from that day forward, every time I passed that Cube, I put my hand above it and caused a crash.
Pierre Dandumont has saved a long-lost bit of Macintosh history:
If you look for information about the Macintosh Plus and its ROM, you’ll usually find that the ROM has a capacity of 128 KB and that it exists in three revisions. But that’s incorrect: there’s a fourth ROM, 256 KB in size, which includes fonts for kanji (Japanese characters). And I found (and preserved) this ROM.
I had talked about this mysterious ROM a few years ago. It’s documented by Apple in some old documents, but without much detail. According to Apple, the ROM contains fonts for kanji in 12 and 18 points, and they are loaded at startup by KanjiTalk. On a regular Macintosh Plus, you need a floppy disk with the files, which slows down startup and uses some RAM, whereas on a Japanese Macintosh Plus, the font is in ROM and doesn’t take up RAM. You also avoid loading files from a floppy disk, theoretically saving 6 seconds during startup. That’s a conservative estimate, as we’ll see—it assumes you’re not switching disks manually.
macOS Sequoia supports these Intel-based Macs:
What’s more important than the model year is when these Macs stopped being sold:
Model:Removed from Sale:2017 iMac ProMarch 20212018 Mac miniJanuary 20232019 Mac ProJune 20232020 MacBook ProOctober 20212020 iMacMarch 20222020 MacBook AirNovember 2020
As you can see, the Intel Mac mini and Intel Mac Pro lasted all the way until 2023, with the 2019 Mac Pro being removed from sale less than two years ago, when its Apple silicon-powered replacement was announced at WWDC.
Rich Trouton spotted something in the release notes for macOS Sequoia 15.5, released earlier this week: that AFP is now deprecated and will be removed in a future version of the operating system. He writes:
This announcement is providing a end-of-the-road notification for AFP, which has been included in Apple’s operating systems for the Mac since System 6 in 1988. The ability to run an AFP server was removed from macOS as part of macOS Big Sur and it is not possible to host AFP shares from APFS formatted drives, so the AFP client has been the final functional part of AFP left as of macOS Sequoia.
Today marks ten years since the original Apple Watch shipped. In that decade, it’s gone from a slow and constrained device that was trying to do far too much to something that I wear every day and night to track my fitness and get a very select number of notifications.
Basic Apple Guy has put together a great blog post to mark the occasion:
What follows is me meandering through the past decade of the Apple Watch, covering some of its history, my thoughts, uses, and my impressions on a decade of this unassuming yet increasingly vital product in Apple’s lineup.