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Debating between getting a PowerBook G4 DLSD or a 2006 MacBook Pro

Amethyst1 said:
The latest Firefox still works on Mavericks as of today, and I could hook you up with a clean Mavericks image (straight from my MBP's recovery partition) if necessary.
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If I recall correctly, the Mavericks installer required the user / pass of the Apple ID that downloaded that particular installer. Otherwise it wouldn't install.

@MacFoxG4 Mountain Lion can still be bought from Apple here:

www.apple.com

Certified Refurbished Products

We test and certify all Apple refurbished products and include a one-year warranty.
www.apple.com

Waterfox still supports Mountain Lion. You could also try lowering the minimum OS version from 10.9.0 to 10.8.0 in the latest Firefox's plist file. See what happens.
 
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z970mp said:
If I recall correctly, the Mavericks installer required the user / pass of the Apple ID that downloaded that particular installer. Otherwise it wouldn't install.
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Thanks for the hint, I'll have to check that. In any case, what I have is not the App Store installer, but the contents of the recovery partition of a 2013 MBP that shipped with (and has never been upgraded past) Mavericks.
 
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MacFoxG4 said:
Speaking of RAM, how much RAM does Snow Leopard need to be comfortable?
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SL hardware launched with 2GB of RAM, like my MacBook Air 2010. It's certainly usable with that but 3-4GB is much better if you want to use contemporary applications that will run on it, multitask in any meaningful way or surf the web.
 
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MacFoxG4 said:
Hello all,

So for a while I have been thinking about getting an Apple laptop that has similar capabilities to my upgraded Sawtooth. I love the Sawtooth, but sometimes I feel the need for the convenience of a laptop. It would also be nice to have a backup Mac in case the Sawtooth dies. I would love to have an Apple laptop that can run Leopard/Snow Leopard and be able to do the same things on it that I can do on the Sawtooth. What I mainly do on the Sawtooth is web browsing along with writing via Word 2004. I also use PPCMC a lot. For reference, here's some of the Sawtooth's specs:

1.5 ghz G4 7455 CPU
2 GB of RAM
128 MB of VRAM

The only PPC Apple laptops that match or exceed all of these specs is the 1.67 ghz 17'' non-DLSD and the PowerBook G4 DLSD, which seems to be highly sought after. The non-DLSD 1.67ghz 17'' doesn't seem to be that common either. There is also the option of early Intel. The 2006 MacBook Pro has the same aesthetics as the PBG4 DLSD, but seems to be easier to find (it is often cheaper as well, though prices on old Apple Macs seems to be rising lately). My concern with the MacBook Pro is that PPC native apps are emulated.

So, on the one hand I love PPC and the DLSD would be the best for native PPC app compatibility. On the other hand, the 2006 MacBook Pro seems to be easier (and occasionally cheaper) to find.

Which laptop should I go with? Any other models I should consider?

Thanks in advance.
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Honestly a MacBook pro. It’s more capable of doing things with a tad of nostalgia. I, personally, desire those.
 
Well, after looking around on eBay, I found a great deal that I just couldn't pass up. I bought a 2006 MacBook Pro for less than $60. My first Intel Mac. It's a 15'' 2.16ghz C2D with 3 GB of RAM, 128 MB of VRAM and a 120 GB SSD. It works great! It looks great too, absolutely love this design. Typing this post on the latest Arctic Fox and it's great! Browsing is definitely faster on here and I can watch 480p YouTube in browser. One downside to this Mac though, is that Rosetta does seem to slow PPC apps down a little bit. There is a bit of typing lag in Word 2004, for example. For comparison, I installed iWork '09, which is a universal app, and there's no lag at all in Pages. PPCMC takes a bit longer to launch Terminal and QuickTime, but it still works and I'm still going to keep using it on this Mac. Word 2004 and PPCMC are the only PPC native apps I use under OS X (aside from TFF, but I only run that on my PPCs).

I still love PPC and I will continue to keep using, and buying, PPC Macs.

@Amethyst1 @z970mp Thanks for your advice on later Mac OS versions. I will keep what you said in mind should I decide to buy another Intel Mac in the future.
 
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If you get at least a mid-2007 MacBook Pro, you can run all OS versions up to and including 10.11 (instead of just 10.6/10.7), and much more up-to-date applications.
 
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MacFoxG4 said:
Well, after looking around on eBay, I found a great deal that I just couldn't pass up. I bought a 2006 MacBook Pro for less than $60. My first Intel Mac. It's a 15'' 2.16ghz C2D with 3 GB of RAM, 128 MB of VRAM and a 120 GB SSD. It works great! It looks great too, absolutely love this design. Typing this post on the latest Arctic Fox and it's great! Browsing is definitely faster on here and I can watch 480p YouTube in browser. One downside to this Mac though, is that Rosetta does seem to slow PPC apps down a little bit. There is a bit of typing lag in Word 2004, for example. For comparison, I installed iWork '09, which is a universal app, and there's no lag at all in Pages. PPCMC takes a bit longer to launch Terminal and QuickTime, but it still works and I'm still going to keep using it on this Mac. Word 2004 and PPCMC are the only PPC native apps I use under OS X (aside from TFF, but I only run that on my PPCs).

I still love PPC and I will continue to keep using, and buying, PPC Macs.

@Amethyst1 @z970mp Thanks for your advice on later Mac OS versions. I will keep what you said in mind should I decide to buy another Intel Mac in the future.
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You could always use a patcher (like @dosdude1 or RMCs.) to upgrade to OS X Yosemite/El Capitan or use the RMC macOS Patcher too so you can have modern functionality
 
christiann said:
You could always use a patcher (like @dosdude1 or RMCs.) to upgrade to OS X Yosemite/El Capitan or use the RMC macOS Patcher too so you can have modern functionality
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There's no graphics acceleration for the X1600 past Mountain Lion (and even that requires a patch), rendering newer versions virtually useless on a 2006 MBP.
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JPNMac said:
If you get at least a mid-2007 MacBook Pro
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you can participate in the "Will the GPU fail?" lottery. Sorry, just had to. :)
 
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Amethyst1 said:
you can participate in the "Will the GPU fail?" lottery. Sorry, just had to. :)
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Sadly, it's one of those games where even if you win, you still lose...

But seriously, mad props to the people out there who have been able to get their Late-2007/2008 MacBook Pros working reliably. In addition to the equipment, they've got far more skill and patience than I'll ever have in dealing with GPU failures.
 
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z970mp said:
Waterfox still supports Mountain Lion. You could also try lowering the minimum OS version from 10.9.0 to 10.8.0 in the latest Firefox's plist file. See what happens.
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Looked into Waterfox and it looks like there are two versions: Modern and Classic. Modern requires 10.9 and higher and Classic requires 10.7 and higher. I have Lion installed on an external drive, so I might give Waterfox a try on that.
 
MacFoxG4 said:
Looked into Waterfox and it looks like there are two versions: Modern and Classic. Modern requires 10.9 and higher and Classic requires 10.7 and higher. I have Lion installed on an external drive, so I might give Waterfox a try on that.
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I used Google Chrome 49 on Lion.
 
Amethyst1 said:
My 2007 has the revised GPU and been fine.
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I was actually watching dosdude1's video about swapping the faulty GeForce 8600M GPU on a dead 2007 MacBook Pro, and I actually had no idea that the later revisions of the chip were perfectly fine. I'm guessing that for people buying used MacBook Pros, you wouldn't be able to know if you had a later revision of the chip unless you looked at the motherboard itself.
 
rampancy said:
I'm guessing that for people buying used MacBook Pros, you wouldn't be able to know if you had a later revision of the chip unless you looked at the motherboard itself.
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If there's a green dot sticker on the RAM slots, the logic board has been replaced by Apple and has a revised GPU. It's how I determined mine to be good before purchasing. :)
 
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After playing around with Lion and Snow Leopard, I prefer Snow Leopard more. I find Snow Leopard to boot up faster than Lion and I like having Rosetta there when I need it. I attempted to launch Waterfox, but it turns out that despite having a 64-bit CPU, this Mac can only boot up in 32-bit mode, so Waterfox won't work. Oh well.

For browsers under Snow Leopard, Arctic Fox and TFF Intel have become my main browsers. Safari is still useful for getting YouTube links for PPCMC, but that's about all I use it for.
 
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MacFoxG4 said:
I attempted to launch Waterfox, but it turns out that despite having a 64-bit CPU, this Mac can only boot up in 32-bit mode, so Waterfox won't work. Oh well.
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If you're talking about Waterfox Classic, there have been some persistent problems with it on 10.7 (since it doesn't run on 10.6) ever since 56.2.11; first it was crashing on launch, then it was crashing on completion of downloads, and now it seems to be crashing on hiding, crashing on changing preferences, and crashing on opening a new tab. On my Macs running 10.7, I've largely abandoned it for Firefox Legacy and TFF Intel.
 
Raging Dufus said:
Haven't read your whole thread, so may have missed something. But I've had great experiences with my 2006 C2D MBP running Mountain Lion from one of dosdude1's patches. On my machine it's just as fast as Snow Leopard (way, way better than Lion), and opens up some more browser options like the latest builds of Pale Moon for Mac and ParrotGeek's Firefox Legacy. FWIW.
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Hmm...might have to give Mountain Lion a try on this Mac. I watched dosdude1's video and the patch seems pretty easy to do.

rampancy said:
If you're talking about Waterfox Classic, there have been some persistent problems with it on 10.7 (since it doesn't run on 10.6) ever since 56.2.11; first it was crashing on launch, then it was crashing on completion of downloads, and now it seems to be crashing on hiding, crashing on changing preferences, and crashing on opening a new tab. On my Macs running 10.7, I've largely abandoned it for Firefox Legacy and TFF Intel.
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I see. Yes, I was using Waterfox Classic.
 
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There exists the chance this could be some kind of fluke, but more than likely is a sign of things to come as well -

Recently, I installed Firefox instead of Firefox ESR by mistake on my Pentium !!! IntelliStation running Debian 10, which downloaded the latest iteration, version 78.

I go to open it, and nothing ever comes up. So I open it via CLI to look for any error messages, and what I got was "Illegal instruction"; meaning this release, and possibly those prior, is no longer compiled for i686 compatibility. If the Debian repositories are doing this now, then it's not out of the question that the source code now requires SSE2 (Pentium 4) and up.

Therefore, Firefox 68 might be the last release compatible with SSE platforms and below. And the fact that it seems to have 12 point updates instead of the usual 9 may have something to do with this, as well.
 
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