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Unsupported OS Recommendations for MacBook 4,1

KingCornWallis

KingCornWallis

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 7, 2018
86
18
United States
Hello,

I have an older Black MacBook 4,1 that my sister uses for YouTube and school work that I would really like to get Disney Plus running on.

The browser/OS requirements are:
  • Safari 11+ is supported on macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and later
  • Chrome 75+ is supported on macOS 10.10 and later
  • Firefox 68+ is supported on macOS 10.9 and later
Currently 10.7.5 is installed, and I have put in an SSD and 6GB of RAM.

I have managed to install either 10.10 or 10.11 before (can't remember which) but the UI was dog slow. Didn't realize you could disable most of the HW Acceleration enhancements at the time, so I am very curious now.

With that being said, what OS (minimum being 10.9) could I install that will offer the least amount of problems and still provide an enjoyable experience?

Thanks!
 
I would go for 10.9 myself, still use that one on my Late 2009 iMac and do not miss anything. However, I bet the MacBook will have quite a few things not working on that OS.
As a sidenote, how did you manage to install the unsupported OS on the MacBook? Which patch did you use?
 
Jack Neill said:
If Disney+ is all your after, a SSD and Windows 10 is the best thing for a 4,1. ML was the highest that could go and still get HW acceleration.
Click to expand...
There is no hardware h.264 video acceleration on that machine. Dunno how well Disney Plus would work. What resolution of YouTube was she using? 360p or 480p? How is her fan noise and battery life?

FWIW, I retired my MacBook4,1 back in 2017 because back then it was too much of a problem to use with modern browsers and for video playback. I tried installing ChromeOS on it, but that caused its own set of issues.

BTW, video playback turned my MacBook4,1 (4 GB RAM, SSD) into a vacuum cleaner in terms of fan noise, so I took it apart and cleaned out the fan, removed the CPU thermal pad, and applied fresh thermal paste. Runs much quieter now, but it's still too slow overall. I replaced it with an aluminum MacBook5,1 (8 GB RAM, SSD) which has full hardware 1080p video decode acceleration, and that runs better, but overall that's too slow too for enjoyable modern browsing.
 
Last edited:
Hrududu said:
Your only real option here is Windows 10 for what you're trying to do. Maybe you could get away with FireFox Legacy under Mountain Lion or even your existing Lion install.
Click to expand...
That would probably run better, but Windows 10 won't have video playback acceleration either, and Apple doesn't provide Windows 10 Bootcamp drivers for that model. What drivers are you running on those old machines for Windows 10, and how well do they work?
 
EugW said:
That would probably run better, but Windows 10 won't have video playback acceleration either, and Apple doesn't provide Windows 10 Bootcamp drivers for that model. What drivers are you running on those old machines for Windows 10, and how well do they work?
Click to expand...
I have a bunch of 4,1 and 3,1 machines. I just did a Win 10 install on one 2 weeks ago and then gave the machine away. Ran really well, but still had a spin drive, so I think you'll see better results than me. I'll try and run another Win 10 install on one this week.
 
Hrududu said:
I have a bunch of 4,1 and 3,1 machines. I just did a Win 10 install on one 2 weeks ago and then gave the machine away. Ran really well, but still had a spin drive, so I think you'll see better results than me. I'll try and run another Win 10 install on one this week.
Click to expand...
Thanks but I've long since retired that machine. I have too many Macs anyway. ;) Currently for Mac laptops in this house we have a MacBookPro5,5, MacBook5,1, and MacBook10,1. And a couple of iMacs as well as a bunch of iPads.

Our go-to Disney Plus portable devices are actually an iPad Pro 10.5 and iPad 7, but it works fine on iPad Air 2 as well.
 
Hey guys, really appreciate all the input. To be clear, my sister is happy with just about anything, which is why she has this laptop. Probably just 480p on YouTube. But Windows may be a bit of a burden for her. It only needs to last her another year anyhow. Is the consensus that even if I install a new macOS and disable HW Acceleration (that would slow the whole machine down), it still wouldn't run that well?
 
Use Mavericks (10.9). Last good version of OS X. It has better performance than anything that came afterwards, and it's compatible with mainline Firefox.

I'm currently typing this on Mavericks. Actually, I'm stuck working at home all day every day due to Covid, and Mavericks is powering my life right now.

KingCornWallis said:
Didn't realize you could disable most of the HW Acceleration enhancements at the time, so I am very curious now.
Click to expand...
Just so we don't confuse future readers, you mean Yosemite's transparency effects. Actually turning of Hardware Acceleration would make everything much slower, not faster.
 
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Wowfunhappy said:
Use Mavericks (10.9). Last good version of OS X. It has better performance than anything that came afterwards, and it's compatible with mainline Firefox.

I'm currently typing this on Mavericks. Actually, I'm stuck working at home all day every day due to Covid, and Mavericks is powering my life right now.


Just so we don't confuse future readers, you mean Yosemite's transparency effects. Actually turning of Hardware Acceleration would make everything much slower, not faster.
Click to expand...

Mavericks it is. I read in another post on here that because older Macs do not support Hardware Acceleration, it is advised to turn the feature off in Terminal so the entire UI doesn't slow down. I have tried Yosemite on this MacBook 4,1 and everything was dog slow. I thought this would alleviate some of those problems.
 
Mavericks - Yosemite saw slowdown on supported machines as well. I think that Mavericks with some tweaks could be close to ML, if just a bit slower/buggier.
 
retta283 said:
Mavericks - Yosemite saw slowdown on supported machines as well. I think that Mavericks with some tweaks could be close to ML, if just a bit slower/buggier.
Click to expand...
I did a lot of side-by-side testing of the final versions of Mountain Lion and Mavericks earlier this year inside of VMs. I'd officially decided I was fed up with modern macOS, and I was deciding which version to downgrade to as a daily driver. (Snow Leopard was also in the running.)

I could not find any compelling reason to use Mountain Lion over Mavericks. Both were extremely stable and predictable coming from Catalina, and the only performance difference was in memory-constrained situations, where Mavericks actually came out ahead of Mountain Lion due to the fact it can use memory compression. It's possible the situation was different when Mavericks was new, but not in their final iterations.

Truth be told, there just isn't much different between the two releases—Apple was likely focused on getting iOS 7 out the door that year. It also wouldn't surprise me if they were actually working on (and focused on) Yosemite already, and just backported certain features and libraries to Mavericks to hit their yearly release cycle.

The one big advantage to Mountain Lion IMO is Perian compatibility—Mountain Lion's QuickTime used an extensible plugin system that allowed other programs (namely Perian) to add support for additional codecs, and Mavericks does not. But the codecs this adds support for are pretty rare in 2020 anyway.

And for whatever reason, app compatibility under Mavericks, while far from great, is much better than Mountain Lion. A lot of apps support 10.9 as their minimum version: Firefox, Zoom, the Affinity Suite, etc.
 
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Hello!

I recently re-released my Macbook 4.1 from the box.
And I did a hell of a good backwards step when I came across mac os Lion (10.7.5), so I set out to try to switch to a newer bone unofficially and so I fell here!

I make this little post to confirm you that yes, it's possible to make this little macbook 4.1 under el capitan thanks to the wonderful work of the rmc team:

By using first of all : macOs Downloader, it is imperative to go through their tools to have the right version of mac os (I chose el capitan here)

Then using OS X Patcher following their readme :


The proof in pictures:

IMG_20210128_151104.jpg




We can upgrade the macbook 4.1 to 4GB of RAM + SSD and it becomes fully usable for basic tasks, even Netflix works:

IMG_20210128_151318.jpg




PS: Netflix is more fluid on Firefox than chrome on this upgraded macbook 4.1!

Enjoy !!!!!
 
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0Napster said:
Hello!

I recently re-released my Macbook 4.1 from the box.
And I did a hell of a good backwards step when I came across mac os Lion (10.7.5), so I set out to try to switch to a newer bone unofficially and so I fell here!

I make this little post to confirm you that yes, it's possible to make this little macbook 4.1 under el capitan thanks to the wonderful work of the rmc team:

By using first of all : macOs Downloader, it is imperative to go through their tools to have the right version of mac os (I chose el capitan here)

Then using OS X Patcher following their readme :


The proof in pictures:

View attachment 1723818



We can upgrade the macbook 4.1 to 4GB of RAM + SSD and it becomes fully usable for basic tasks, even Netflix works:

View attachment 1723815



PS: Netflix is more fluid on Firefox than chrome on this upgraded macbook 4.1!

Enjoy !!!!!
Click to expand...
Good work! I might try this next week as a little project.
 
If you're willing to go a little off the beaten path (and if you're willing to leave behind Safari), I'd also suggest Linux Mint or Ubuntu - with the RAM maxed out and an SSD, it's very usuable and quite spry.
 
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No, i want to keep MacOS in my Macbook 4,1 (i already have installed bootcamp but when i booting in Windows 10 my MacBook is heating up faster than MacOS)

For the moment I have MacOS X Mountain Lion installed with the kexts, no browsing issues with Firefox legacy 71.0p2 (ParrotGeek). I have also tried Yosemite, it works but the graphics was laggy and i did not find a solution.

PS: my MacBook was filled with 4Go Ram and 240Go SSD split in half for the bootcamp partition
 
my MacBook 2,1 will not update past 10.7 -- but 64bit Ubuntu 2104 works 100% wonderfully well on it. In case you get stuck again.
 
Hello,
I also have a Macbook 4,1 that brought up from the past.
I have already upgraded to 4GB which I think it's maximum. @KingCornWallis mentions 6GB, is it supported?
Whatever, in the RAM I won't mess, it is good enough.

I had Mac OS installed there, don't remmeber which because I felt it was unsuported and unsafe for that.
So I have Windows 10 there. It was very slow, i thought it was the hard drive. Wasn't the 160GB stock, it was an 500GB upgrade, but i changed it to a brande new Kingston 240GB SSD and was expecting it to fly.

Unfortunately it wasn't so.

There are some strange symptoms I would like your help to diagnose. I made a clane isntall of Windows 10 without anything more. Installed the Bootcamp 4 (the last version for this Macbook from what I found online, at least installs the drivers for my trackpad and the version 5 don't).

The clock speed never passes 1,18GhZ even with the fans at maximum power with Macfans, which keeps it cool at 40º C (65º C with minimum speed). It can gow lower the clock speed but not higher than that. And windows display the CPU usage top at 49%.
All is panfully slow, a simples zip extract of bootcamp zip files somethings locks and 20-40KB/s.

So the hard drive is not the problem.
I suspect the following:
-Bad cooling: I alread open it and cleaned it in the past. How can I diagnose if this is the problem? Some app I can install to help diagnose?
-Bad SATA cable: because I read this in the past, it might be the problem.
-Battery: the battery died long time ago, it got bigger and didn't work, so i got rid of it. But windows might detect a problem because the battery doesn't exist?
-Some bad driver in windows that doens't allow the clock to go up. I am willing to install some Mac OS just for that, but where can I find the clock speed in Mac OS to get to know the clock speed?

Can you guys help me on this?

Thank you very much.
 
Thank you very much for your quick response.
I confirmed your information doing a quick google, into various sites.
I didn't know that. This is just stupid...

The computer is almost unusable. I thought it was a degrading hard drive, because the computer simply locks.
instead I should have buy a battery.

I don't feel like investing more money on this, besides it seems it is a probability the 3rd party battery doesn't work Ok from what I read.

Is there a workaround? :)
 
Hello,
Just came here to lew you know.
I bought a 3rd party new battery and it's night and day. The compuer is slow of course, but now it doesn't freeze as it did.

Unfortunately mac OS is not supported anymore for this model, but with the battery, an SSD and with 4GB of RAM that I upgraded in the past, both Windows 11 and Ubuntu 20.04 fly!!

Well, it does not fly but you get the point :D

Now it is usable, my backup laptop.

Thank you very much for your help.
If I knew before, it could have save me a lot of frustrations with this beloved mac :)
 
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fmnamado said:
Hello,
I also have a Macbook 4,1 that brought up from the past.
I have already upgraded to 4GB which I think it's maximum. @KingCornWallis mentions 6GB, is it supported?
Whatever, in the RAM I won't mess, it is good enough.

I had Mac OS installed there, don't remmeber which because I felt it was unsuported and unsafe for that.
So I have Windows 10 there. It was very slow, i thought it was the hard drive. Wasn't the 160GB stock, it was an 500GB upgrade, but i changed it to a brande new Kingston 240GB SSD and was expecting it to fly.

Unfortunately it wasn't so.

There are some strange symptoms I would like your help to diagnose. I made a clane isntall of Windows 10 without anything more. Installed the Bootcamp 4 (the last version for this Macbook from what I found online, at least installs the drivers for my trackpad and the version 5 don't).

The clock speed never passes 1,18GhZ even with the fans at maximum power with Macfans, which keeps it cool at 40º C (65º C with minimum speed). It can gow lower the clock speed but not higher than that. And windows display the CPU usage top at 49%.
All is panfully slow, a simples zip extract of bootcamp zip files somethings locks and 20-40KB/s.

So the hard drive is not the problem.
I suspect the following:
-Bad cooling: I alread open it and cleaned it in the past. How can I diagnose if this is the problem? Some app I can install to help diagnose?
-Bad SATA cable: because I read this in the past, it might be the problem.
-Battery: the battery died long time ago, it got bigger and didn't work, so i got rid of it. But windows might detect a problem because the battery doesn't exist?
-Some bad driver in windows that doens't allow the clock to go up. I am willing to install some Mac OS just for that, but where can I find the clock speed in Mac OS to get to know the clock speed?

Can you guys help me on this?

Thank you very much.
Click to expand...
Yes, 6GB is the max supported. However, these 4GB DDR2 SODIMM Sticks are expensive.
 
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