[rconti]

I reinstalled MacOS on a 2011 MacBook Air and it was actually shockingly hard. Thankfully, my machine booted and worked fine, so I didn't need to create a bootable USB stick. From memory:

  - Network recovery boot cannot connect to your wifi because reasons. It'll see the SSID, but won't even prompt for password. It's totally unclear why nothing is working.
  - Fall back to old IOT SSID with ancient protocols
  - You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember. 
  - I can't remember how, but somehow you can install Lion
  - Launch beautiful Mac desktop. App store won't work because the certs are too old, or something. Safari won't work, because the supported SSL protocols are too old. 
  - Use a modern Mac to download a DMG installer for a slightly newer OS
  - Copy it to a USB stick
  - Find a USB stick big enough to hold it, try again
  - Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it
  - Now you have a more modern OS that can actually connect to websites
  - Also teh app store works, so you can upgrade to High Sierra using the app store.

But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.

[AnotherGoodName]

>You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember.

This one’s a doozy because i hit it last month.

The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.

I had an elderly relative (who disabled updates because they were scared of the computer changing) really upset everything was broken. Gmail app gave obscure can’t connect messages, almost all websites failed to load. When i went there of course the os wouldn’t update as well. We use https for everything now.

The keychain system is so hidden from users it was hard to even get to for myself. Took a usb key of a set of certificate updates. Harder than you think because when you look in keychain you’re not sure of which certificate is used for which and it’s a pain to find what you need. In the end a transfer from a healthy mac worked enough to get a manually downloaded os update running and from there it was fine.

What a doozy though! If you know of people with old macs that stopped working at the start of this year this is why

[eleveriven]

How modern computing quietly depends on this constantly-maintained layer of trust infrastructure

[JadeNB]

> The keychain system is so hidden from users it was hard to even get to for myself.

These days, keychain access is under /System/Library/Core Services/Applications/Keychain Access.app. That's not intuitive, but, once you know it's there, it's not hard to navigate to it. Was it different under older versions?

[easyThrowaway]

> The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.

I wish I knew this last week while trying to restore a 2010 21" iMac.

Apart from this, I encountered another annoyance mid-way; the official download urls for Sierra and High Sierra were nowhere to be found. I somewhat remember being able to download the official dmg/disk image from some official repository, probably some App store public url?

[nonamenoslogan]

If you have High Sierra on USB, it installs just fine. You need a High Sierra machine to make the USB stick, but once you have one, its simple to reinstall.

[cosmic_cheese]

> Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.

I get the same feeling when doing a fresh install+boot of both OS X 10.9 Mavericks and Windows 7. They're just so much more pleasant than what we have now.

It'd be nice if modern desktop operating systems took a lesson or two from their past selves.

[jcgrillo]

I feel the same way about Unix desktops. The newer stuff just.. looks gross? And it's difficult to use. I'm very thankful for Mate, especially the Alt+F2 behavior, but also the simple menu layout vs some horrible combination of search and popups.

[user432678]

Installed and activated Windows 7 yesterday on the laptop I was preparing to sell. Surprised to learn something my brain offloaded long time ago. We had Apple Glass in 2008 on Windows!

[jama211]

I feel the average HN user though might be a bad representation of the general population. Personally I prefer the aesthetic of windows 11 over 7, it’s about the ONLY thing I prefer about windows 11, but windows 7 looks extremely dated to me now.

[CharlesW]

OpenCore and MIST are two great tools for fans of obsolete Macs. https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist

[aa-jv]

Yes .. in case its not obvious, you can use MIST to get all the old MacOS installers for offline use ..

[jamesy0ung]

Apple’s EFI embeds an older version of wpa supplicant, possibly you are trying to connect to a network with a newer encryption standard like WPA3. I don’t that’s too unreasonable for a 15 year old computer

[muhaccount]

Thanks for the explanation! Makes sense. Unreasonable? To me, no. Makes complete sense given the age. BUT it doesn't support, IMO, "Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence". Yes, tech nerds can do tech nerd things to make it work...that's not a "plan".

I apologize if that came off harsh. I feel like your comment had a different angle/context than where I took it. Apologies if so.

Microsoft hate is easy to come by on HN (I get it), so I don't like seeing a Apple's coincidental victories magnified in one of the few areas Microsoft does well as a feature.

[rconti]

I can't remember now -- I have a WPA3 network, and I also have a WPA2 network, and an IOT network. I agree it would be reasonable for WPA3 to not work, but I'm pretty sure I was trying WPA2. Regardless, it's something I ran into.

[Svoka]

Downgrading network to 2.4G is probably all they needed.

[wolfhumble]

> But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.

". . . that new user interface builds on Apple's Legacy and carries it into the next century and we call that new user interface Aqua because it's liquid. One of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it . . ."

Steve Job, Macworld San Francisco 2000: https://youtu.be/Ko4V3G4NqII?t=405

[skhr0680]

I did this and considered it the easy way of installing an OS on a Mac circa 2011 vs. DVD then messing around updating that ...

> Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it

Apple has a whole page on making a bootable USB, it can save you a step: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101578

[FireBeyond]

If the bootable USB even works. Monterey won't, or any out of support OS.

[FireBeyond]

LOL, yes.

I just tried to put Monterey on a 2021 MBP and holy hell.

USB installer. "Not supported OS, you can quit, or install in reduced security mode". Reduced security is fine for me.

"Installation of Reduced Security failed." Cool.

"Get the IPSW and do a DFU install". Nah, you can't do that. "Drag the IPSW onto the target Mac where it says DFU in Apple Configurator". Nope. No error, just nope.

Dig dig dig. "You might need to do this from an older computer. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura". Hey look, I have one!

Alright, install Apple Configurator.

"Nope. You need Sequoia to install Configurator."

Jesus wept. This is an OS that is 4 years old, on a 5 year old laptop. Apple, "It just works".

Find an old version of Configurator from some guy on Reddit that zipped one up.

Now we can do an IPSW install.

Good luck, mortals.

[morsch]

Helped an aqaintance set up a new computer with pre installed Windows 11 a while ago. As in Windows was already on there. How hard could it be?

Just getting past the mandatory online account ID took us half an hour, and only worked because she was diligent in writing down her password for Skype 10 years ago which somehow (I realize why but it's insane) now is her Microsoft account and involved in logging in to Windows. Then we stared at a non-interactive initial update screen for another half an hour before it offered the option to postpone updates. I assume if you ship your new computer somewhere without Internet, you simply cannot use it?! And of course all the dumb dark patterns, as if designed by a scumbag pick-up artist.

Then I had to deal with Windows file sharing to copy stuff from the old PC which was exactly as intuitive as it was in LAN parties around 2000 (used mostly the same UI, as well); but at least unlike the new quick share features worked eventually.

Don't get me started on how we got her old printer to work. It's still a miracle to me and involved multiple reinstalls of multiple drivers and finally digging through to a Windows 2000 era dialog listing various printer interfaces and manually selecting the right one that at some point popped up. I was all but convinced she'd need to buy a new one.

[pndy]

The road is bit longer when you decide to use Open Core Legacy Patcher.

I managed to install Sonoma or Sequoia on my 2011 mbp but it was barely usable - nearly every Apple application was broken due to lack of Metal support. So I've pick Manjaro and while every now and then Wifi stops working, it's bit more capable but nothing crazy tho since it's nearly 15 yo machine.

[qingcharles]

I bought one of those old Apple brand USB Ethernet adapters for pennies on eBay which can help to have on hand in situations like this.

[yieldcrv]

Yeah LOTS of devices are iced out of wifi because wifi devices started combining the 2.4ghz and 5ghz SSIDs to the same name

and for whatever reason 2.4ghz only devices cant find the SSID unless you if there is a name conflict on the 5ghz frequency

its also less likely that you have access to the router now to change the SSID

[Wowfunhappy]

> and for whatever reason 2.4ghz only devices cant find the SSID unless you if there is a name conflict on the 5ghz frequency

Huh? Is this true? It doesn’t make intuitive sense to me—if the device doesn’t have a 5ghz radio I would expect it to be physically impossible for the 5ghz network to interfere.

[Gigachad]

My best guess is the macbook is freaking out over the combined 2.4 + 5ghz network. It used to be standard to have these with two different SSIDs. Or you have WPA3 required, though I'd think you'd experience issues with many devices doing that.

[dylan604]

My first thought was incompatible version of 802.11[a-z] as well.

[lebuin]

I had to do a fresh install on a 2015 iMac. Same problems with the SSL certificates. I found it rather shocking that a 10 year old computer cannot be booted anymore, and as far as I understand it it's mostly because apple chooses to serve certificates with poor backwards compatibility on a domain that is used for updates, which is just lazy.

[Angostura]

Temporarily disable dual-band wifi and go to 2.4. Temporarly open the network with no WPA - should be good to go

[greenavocado]

Or you can do things the easy way and install a Kubuntu 25.10 and have all good modern amenities without a fight.

[rconti]

I started as a desktop Linux user in 1994 and I can guarantee you it would have been more work for me to install Kubuntu for the first time :)

Regardless, this one is going on eBay, so it's probably best for it to be running the latest Apple OS. Whether the $60-or-whatever I get for it is worth the hassle is another story.

[wodenokoto]

I have an old iPad and a not that old MacBook Pro maybe 2017?) which both are almost useless as they cannot connect to many WiFi routers.

Any work arounds?

[clairegraham]

What issues did you have? I have a 2016 (catalina) and a 2017 MBP (ventura) and they connect to my ubiquiti AP (5G / WPA3) at least. Haven’t tried others in a long time. I do have completely separate 2.4 and 5 GHz SSIDs so that may be related.

I did have issues with these machines running Linux due to driver support (broadcom BCM43xx) but USB to ethernet worked fine.

[eleveriven]

That era of macOS had a kind of clarity and restraint that’s hard to describe

[pidgeon_lover]

I had to reinstall MacOS Lion manually recently, as Macs do not have a BIOS and require a MacOS environment to begin installing Windows. I was installing Windows on legacy Macs, because it gives me 30+ years of software and performs well, unlike MacOS (5 years software if lucky, unusably slow performance on older hardware). I intentionally did it all the hard way offline from a Windows host, so that I could replicate it without depending on someone else's flakey servers (which incidentally refused to serve me OS installer images)

I detest crummy Unix-style online stub installers and package managers, because the original downloads are always down when you need them, and it's much harder than it should be to force offline replicable reinstallation.

[Tsiklon]

To my recollection on the machines that shipped with Lion (circa 2011) you’ll want to set up a protective MBR with the appropriate drive dimensions on the GPT, to get it to install windows like with boot camp.

To my recollection on machines with discrete GPUs this is what triggers the appropriate hardware configuration (BIOS boot, disabling the internal GPU and switching the MUX to only route via the AMD card)

But I do recall getting the internal GPU working with this trick https://github.com/0xbb/apple_set_os.efi

[andai]

It was designed to hydrate the soul.