About Rosetta and the first MB air

[Rikintosh]

I have a completely useless macbook air here. His screen broke, the lvds connector on the motherboard was ripped off, I basically have an "iKeyboard" here. The big problem is that it is the first model of macbook air, a launch model, it does not even have an nvidia card, it uses a 32-bit core2duo processor, and an intel x3100 graphics card, which makes even a youtube video extremely slow .

I was thinking of making sense of his existence, perhaps with rosetta? I've tried installing more modern systems on it, but I think as of 10.6 it's only 64-bit, so it's stuck on systems that can barely browse the web but have rosetta.

I have never used rosetta, is the performance good? I know it can run anything from osx ppc but what about os9? Is it possible to start classic with it or something?

 

[mectojic]

Rosetta can't run Classic / OS9 at all, only OSX PPC apps.
The original MacBook Air, being really quite on the slow end, may benefit more from running Intel Tiger rather than Snow Leopard. I believe Tiger is possible, though unsupported.

 

[Hrududu]

So the issue here isn't 32 vs 64 bit (The Core 2 Duo is a 64 bit CPU) or Rosetta. The original Air was just a strange & unrefined machine. The CPU was a special low power chip to start with. It was made to run cool and use little power. The original Air was also still using DDR2 5300 RAM which was already outdated in 2008, and with only 2GB, very limiting. The late 2008 and 2009 still only had 2GB, but Apple made the move to PC3 8500 for those. Naturally, 2GB of RAM is really a back breaker. In the Leopard, Snow Leopard, and even Lion days, 2GB was serviceable, but when you consider the GPU is sharing that 2GB, you really start feeling the pinch. The X3100 wasn't a very good GPU, and Apple basically gave it the axe with Mountain Lion. You can patch the kexts to run Yosemite pretty easily, and that isn't a bad OS. I've done it myself on white 2008 MacBooks that share the X3100. Lastly, the drive is really bizarre. The little ZIF connector looks simple enough, but the original Air was actually using a PATA bus to run the drive which makes upgrades very hard to find compared to their Late 2008/09 MacBook Air lookalikes which were upgraded to a SATA bus. If your Air has a spinning HDD vs the SSD, that is really the ultimate weak point. 1.8" drive spinning at 4200rpm is just bad. With an SSD, you can do quite a bit more with these. I've never had an original Air, but I have had 3 of the late 2008 and a 2009 ranging from 1.6 - 2.13GHz. With the factory spin drives, anything after Snow Leopard was really tough to stomach. It would take many minutes to boot El Capitain and the machine was basically unusable. With 2GB of RAM, you end up swapping off your storage really early, and swapping off that slow drive brought it to its knees. I did SSDs in them, and Mojave runs pleasantly and even Big Sur is possible.

SO what should you do? Probably not much. It really just isn't a good computer to try and "use" in 2023. If you've got the SSD, I'd take a crack at patched Yosemite with X3100 kexts. Hard to say what you might see with Linux Mint XFCE or similar, but just for the heck of it you could try.

 

[Amethyst1]

I have never used rosetta, is the performance good?

That strongly depends on the application you're running. On my 1.4 GHz 2010 MBA which is very similar to the original MBA in terms of performance (see the bit about throttling though), MS Office is quite usable but Adobe Photoshop CS2 is unusably sluggish.

Is it possible to start classic with it or something?

No. If you want to run the "classic" Mac OS on an Intel Mac, you have to use e.g. Basilisk II, QEMU or SheepShaver.

I believe Tiger is possible, though unsupported.

You can run Tiger on an original MBA, but without graphics acceleration. I've done it, and this possibility is actually something unique to the original MBA, if you care for Tiger. How big of an issue no acceleration is depends on what you want to do with it.

The CPU was a special low power chip to start with. It was made to run cool and use little power.

The problem with that custom chip is that it isn't low-power and cool-running enough. Its TDP is 20W, and it runs hot (> 80°C) and throttles pretty badly in the MBA. Initially, it even disabled one of the cores IIRC but that behaviour was changed at some point. Of course, Apple could have gone with an ultra low voltage Core 2 Duo that had a TDP of only 10W like everyone else did for an ultraportable... but didn't, maybe because it only ran at 1.33 GHz at that time and that was deemed too slow? But what's the point of a 1.6 or 1.8 GHz CPU that throttles?

Lastly, the drive is really bizarre. The little ZIF connector looks simple enough, but the original Air was actually using a PATA bus to run the drive which makes upgrades very hard to find compared to their Late 2008/09 MacBook Air lookalikes which were upgraded to a SATA bus. If your Air has a spinning HDD vs the SSD, that is really the ultimate weak point. 1.8" drive spinning at 4200rpm is just bad. With an SSD, you can do quite a bit more with these.

I had a RunCore Pro IV (Indilinx Barefoot + MLC) SSD in my original 1.8 GHz MBA. It was better than with the original HDD, but it wasn't anywhere near as fast as any of my other machines with an SSD, even my 1.4 GHz 2010 MBA felt faster. In a nutshell, it was underwhelming.

 

[Rikintosh]

My air has a 4200rpm hd, and I realize that even my pendrive on the usb 2.0 port is faster than this crap. But unfortunately it is PATA, so an SSD would not be a great reward, given the price I would have to pay (I am outside the US, and my currency is worth 5.5x less than the dollar)

I want to give meaning to the life of this thing, as I deeply hate throwing electronics away, or killing them (by selling the parts). I think I'm going to install windows xp on it and use it as an old game machine. I had an acer aspire in 2009 that had this gma x3100, and although it sucked, it ran games well until 2006. At that time I chose GMA over nvidia because laptops were having a lot of problems with those BGA solders, and I'm glad for having chosen intel because it works until today

Overheating is due to apple's stupid way of designing their heatsinks and coolers, especially to avoid noise. In the past I simply replaced that thing with a good quality piece of polished copper, and padded the bottom of the case with washers to create a bigger ventilation gap, my temperatures dropped by 20 degrees.

On my sister's macbook white 2009 I also did this, and the temperatures improved a lot

 

[GMShadow]

I used one as a daily from 2015-2016, when it was still more 'possible' as 10.6 still had browser support - and 10.6 was definitely preferable to 10.7 for performance, IME - I started with 10.7 and downgraded back to 10.6 after a few months.

That said, in 2023? There's really not much that can be done with it. It's parts. I keep mine for sentimental reasons only, not because it's a viable machine - when the battery died again in 2016 I retired it rather than waste money on another one.

 

[Rikintosh]

I used one as a daily from 2015-2016, when it was still more 'possible' as 10.6 still had browser support - and 10.6 was definitely preferable to 10.7 for performance, IME - I started with 10.7 and downgraded back to 10.6 after a few months.

That said, in 2023? There's really not much that can be done with it. It's parts. I keep mine for sentimental reasons only, not because it's a viable machine - when the battery died again in 2016 I retired it rather than waste money on another one.

Yes, but I don't want it for daily use, nor for the internet, I was just looking for a utility so that it wouldn't sit on a shelf in the basement I'm installing xp on it right now

update: I installed winxp without bootcamp, I installed the bootcamp drivers, and the performance is above my expectations, I haven't tested games yet. I have a problem with resolutions, I can't use my monitor's native full hd resolution, and lower resolutions have black bars and incorrect aspect ratio scaling, but other than that, everything is fine.

I think Windows XP will save this computer

edit 2: i tried to use my ppc programs and games on 10.6 through rosetta but the performance was terrible even jazz jackrabbit was horrible so i gave up os x on it I know there are UB versions and ports, but I don't see the point in keeping os x for that, compared to xp's fantastic performance and modded and more up-to-date drivers

 

[mectojic]

My air has a 4200rpm hd, and I realize that even my pendrive on the usb 2.0 port is faster than this crap

This is actually a really interesting and crucial point. Perhaps on the your MBA, you might as well install the OS on the USB stick, and just use the internal HD for extra storage (or ignore it entirely). Running XP off the USB 2.0 stick would probably work nicely; you'd lose the single USB port though, if that were important.

 

[TheShortTimer]

This is actually a really interesting and crucial point. Perhaps on the your MBA, you might as well install the OS on the USB stick, and just use the internal HD for extra storage (or ignore it entirely). Running XP off the USB 2.0 stick would probably work nicely; you'd lose the single USB port though, if that were important.

Use a USB splitter?

I bought this one for £1 GBP and its been faultless.

 

[mectojic]

Use a USB splitter?

I bought this one for £1 GBP and its been faultless.

I would've suggested that, but wasn't sure if you can still boot an OS from a USB splitter, and expect the same results in terms of speed.

 

[TheShortTimer]

I would've suggested that, but wasn't sure if you can still boot an OS from a USB splitter, and expect the same results in terms of speed.

Perhaps this should be tested?

 

[barracuda156]

I have never used rosetta, is the performance good? I know it can run anything from osx ppc but what about os9?

I am using Rosetta pretty much daily, but for testing and development only. It is decently fast, but I have somewhat newer cpu to run it on (2.3 GHz Quad i7).
(Nowadays I use it in VM, but I used it natively too. It is okay in VM too, but not needed for your use case.)