PPC in Lion (and 10.8, kinda)

I was experimenting with the SMBIOS values while installing Lion and discovered an interesting quirk in Mac OS X that was actually super fun for me. I'm using MacPro5,1 as my system definition, installed from MultiBeast. I thought it would be nice to feed the original Power Mac G4's serial number to the system, just because, and manually entered it into SMBIOS.plist. To my surprise, after doing this, selecting About This Mac/More Info from the Apple menu yields the following screen:

I was amazed by several things with this. First, that Lion apparently bases this screen on the serial number rather than the model identifier, and second that Lion is even capable of decoding the serial number of a 10-year-old PowerPC G4 machine that can't run anything higher than Leopard. Third, that the high-res graphics for the G4 Macs are still included in the OS. Opening System Profiler still identifies it as a MacPro5,1, but I thought this was a neat quirk and a perfect finishing touch for the project. Also, I've never seen this documented anywhere else, and it could be useful for others modding older cases. That's it for today!

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I did a clean installation of Mountain Lion the weekend it launched. I didn't run into any unexpected issues and it seems faster than Lion, although my serial number/model hack no longer works as I can't get the OS to read the serial number from smbios.plist after installing the AppleACPIPlatform rollback needed for the Asus X58 boards. I had the same issue using this fix under 10.7.4... it just identifies as generic Mac Pro and lists the serial number as "System Serial Number." It's purely cosmetic, so I've tabled it for now.

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