Reflections on an iBook G4

I had an item in OmniFocus to “write on why I wish I was still using my 2006 iBook”, and then Tim Sneath’s tweet on unboxing a G4 iMac sealed the deal. I wish I was still using my 2006 iBook. I had been using NeXTSTEP for a while, and Mac OS X for a short amount of time, by this point, but on borrowed hardware, mostly spares from the University computing lab.

My “up-to-date” setup was my then-girlfriend’s PowerBook G3 “Wall Street” model, which upon being handed down to me usually ran OpenDarwin, Rhapsody, or Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, which was the last release to boot properly on it. When I went to WWDC for the first time in 2005 I set up X Post Facto, a tool that would let me (precariously) install and run 10.3 Panther on it, so that I could ask about Cocoa Bindings in the labs. I didn’t get to run the Tiger developer seed we were given.

When the dizzying salary of my entry-level sysadmin job in the Uni finally made a dent in my graduate-level debts, I scraped together enough money for the entry-level 12” iBook G4 (which did run Tiger, and Leopard). I think it lasted four years until I finally switched to Intel, with an equivalent white acrylic 13” MacBook model. Not because I needed an upgrade, but because Apple forced my hand by making Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) Intel-only. By this time I was working as a Mac developer so had bought in to the platform lock-in, to some extent.

The treadmill turns: the white MacBook was replaced by a mid-decade MacBook Air (for 64-bit support), which developed a case of “fruit juice on the GPU” so finally got replaced by the 2018 15” MacBook Pro I use to this day. Along the way, a couple of iMacs (both Intel, both aluminium, the second being an opportunistic upgrade: another hand-me-down) came and went, though the second is still used by a friend.

Had it not been for the CPU changes and my need to keep up, could I still use that iBook in 2020? Yes, absolutely. Its replaceable battery could be improved, its browser could be the modern TenFourFox, the hard drive could be replaced with an SSD, and then I’d have a fast, quiet computer that can compile my code and browse the modern Web.

Would that be a great 2020 computer? Not really. As Steven Baker pointed out when we discussed this, computers have got better in incremental ways that eventually add up: hardware AES support for transparent disk encryption. Better memory controllers and more RAM. HiDPI displays. If I replaced the 2018 MBP with the 2006 iBook today, I’d notice those things get worse way before I noticed that the software lacked features I needed.

On the other hand, the hardware lacks a certain emotional playfulness: the backlight shining through the Apple logo. The sighing LED indicating that the laptop is asleep. The reassuring clack of the keys.

Are those the reasons this 2006 computer speaks to me through the decades? They’re charming, but they aren’t the whole reason. Most of it comes down to an impression that that computer was mine and I understood it, whereas the MBP is Apple’s and I get to use it.

A significant input into that is my own mental health. Around 2014 I got into a big burnout, and stopped paying attention to the updates. As a developer, that was a bad time because it was when Apple introduced, and started rapidly iterating on, the Swift programming language. As an Objective-C and Python expert (I’ve published books on both), with limited emotional capacity, I didn’t feel the need to become an expert on yet another language. To this day, I feel like a foreign tourist in Swift and SwiftUI, able to communicate intent but not to fully immerse in the culture and understand its nuances.

A significant part of that is the change in Apple’s stance from “this is how these things work” to “this is how you use these things”. I don’t begrudge them that at all (I did in the Dark Times), because they are selling useful things that people want to use. But there is decidedly a change in tone, from the “Come in it’s open” logo on the front page of the developer website of yore to the limited, late open source drops of today. From the knowledge oriented programming guides of the “blue and white” documentation archive to the task oriented articles of today.

Again, I don’t begrudge this. Developers have work to do, and so want to complete their tasks. Task-oriented support is entirely expected and desirable. I might formulate an argument that it hinders “solutions architects” who need to understand the system in depth to design a sympathetic system for their clients’ needs, but modern software teams don’t have solutions architects. They have their choice of UI framework and a race to an MVP.

Of course, Apple’s adoption of machine learning and cloud systems also means that in many cases, the thing isn’t available to learn. What used to be an open source software component is now an XPC service that calls into a black box that makes a network request. If I wanted to understand why the spell checker on modern macOS or iOS is so weird, Apple would wave their figurative hands and say “neural engine”.

And a massive contribution is the increase in scale of Apple’s products in the intervening time. Bear in mind that at the time of the 2006 iBook, I had one of Apple’s four Mac models, access to an XServe and Airport base station, and a friend who had an iPod, and felt like I knew the whole widget. Now, I have the MBP (one of six models), an iPhone (not the latest model), an iPad (not latest, not Pro), the TV doohickey, no watch, no speaker, no home doohickey, no auto-unlock car, and I’m barely treading water.

Understanding a G4-vintage Mac meant understanding PPC, Mach, BSD Unix, launchd, a couple of directory services, Objective-C, Cocoa, I/O Kit, Carbon, AppleScript, the GNU tool chain and Jam, sqlite3, WebKit, and a few ancillary things like the Keychain and HFS+. You could throw in Perl, Python, and the server stuff like XSAN and XGrid, because why not?

Understanding a modern Mac means understanding that, minus PPC, plus x86_64, the LLVM tool chain, sandbox/seatbelt, Scheme, Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, “modern” AppKit (with its combination of layer-backed, layer-hosting, cell-based and view-based views), APFS, JavaScript and its hellscape of ancillary tools, geocoding, machine learning, the T2, BridgeOS…

I’m trying to trust a computer I can’t mentally lift.