Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction Mac mini systems with Apple M1 chip, and production 3.6GHz quad‑core Intel Core i3‑based Mac mini systems, all configured with 16GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. Open source project built with prerelease Xcode 12.2 with Apple Clang 12.0.0, Ninja 1.10.0.git, and CMake 3.16.5.

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The first Mac with memory expansion and a hard drive bus was the Mac Plus, introduced way back in January 1986. It came with an impressive 1 MB of RAM, and memory could be expanded to a mind boggling 4 MB. The SCSI port on the back let you add up to 7 devices, including hard drives. The Plus was far more expandable in memory and number of drives than any PC of the era.

Prior to the Mac Plus, Macs had no expansion bus and were not designed for memory upgrades. What you bought was all Apple intended for you to have. Except for the Mac 512Ke, no Mac introduced after the Plus was not designed for memory and hard drive expansion until the first MacBook Air arrived in January 2008.

The MacBook Air marked the beginning of the end for built-in optical drives, memory upgrades, and, to a great extent, installing a faster or higher capacity hard drive or SSD. The forthcoming iMac Pro is configurable with 32, 64, or 128 GB of system memory and a 1, 2, or 4 TB SSD, but note that it is listed as configurable on Apple’s website, not upgradable.

• The revised interface in modern MacOS versions including macOS Big Sur, MacOS Catalina, macOS Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, OS X El Capitan, and OS X Yosemite makes heavy use of transparencies, flatness, white space, smaller and narrow fonts, and a dramatic lack of contrast with neutral shades of grey used for most text and many onscreen elements.
• More recently, he could be seen briefly during Apple's Back to Mac event, where the company first took the wraps off the upcoming point release of Mac OS X 10.7, dubbed 'Lion.'

The Olden Days

Back when I worked at Computerland of Grand Rapids, Apple still sold bare Macs. The dealership could order a 1 MB Mac SE, SE/30, IIcx, IIci, etc. and configure it with third party memory and hard drives, providing capacity and warranty options Apple didn’t at prices below what Apple would charge for a similar configuration. (We sold a lot of Microtech hard drives, which had a five year warranty, while Apple was still selling computers with a 90 day warranty!)

Over time the option of buying a Mac with no hard drive disappeared, but we could still get a faster, higher capacity, better value hard drive to swap in for customers who demanded more than Apple offered. And every Mac offered lots of memory expansion options.

The Bad Old Days

It was Steve Jobs who insisted that the original Macintosh have no internal expansion. No way to upgrade RAM. No room for an internal hard drive or a second built-in floppy. Any expansion was to be through the Mac’s serial bus, which was a lot slower than the pokey USB 1.1 that debuted with the iMac in 1998.

Jobs returned to Apple at the end of 1996, immediately killed any project that took attention away from the Macintosh, and began moving toward the original Mac model of no internal expandability. The 1998 iMac was a consumer computer with limited memory expansion, no floppy drive – which most of the tech press saw as its Achilles heel – and no expansion slots. Just one

The Power Mac G4 Cube, introduced in mid-2000, was a first step in that direction with just one card slot and one hard drive bay, but you could boost memory from 64 MB (a very useful amount with the Classic Mac OS) all the way to 1.5 GB. And that card slot wasn’t for a PCI card; it was for an AGP video card small enough to fit inside the Cube.

The Bad New Days

When I started in personal computing – in the era of the Apple II+, Commodore, Atari, Tandy Radio Shack, and the Osborn One barely portable – expandability was a given. Memory was expensive, so you only bought what you needed. You could always upgrade later. Floppy drives were expensive, so you only added another one if you had to.

Then came IBM with a computer that had as little as 16 KB of memory. Its video cards and floppy controller were options. Even the operating system was sold separately. For the rest of its days, the PC world had expansion options – usually lots of them with several expansion slots and several drive bays.

The iMac gave us the first Mac with no floppy drive. The Cube, the first Power Mac with no PCI expansion slots or extra drive bays. But we had to wait until 2008 for the first Mac without memory expansion. System memory was soldered to the system board in the MacBook Air, and your only choice was whether you wanted a horribly pokey iPod-style 1.8″ hard drive or an SSD. 2 GB of memory was not a choice, and it would be years before Apple offered a MacBook Air with 4 GB of RAM.

Kudos to Other World Computing and other vendors who came out with replacement drives for the MacBook Air, giving users a lot more capacity and speed than Apple included in those early Airs.

Losing Interest

I hate to say this, but a lot of us consider upgradability a standard feature of computing, and it irks us when Apple solders RAM in place. In the olden days we would buy a Mac with the memory we needed at the time and upgrade when (and if) there was a need to do so. And with the Mac OS gaining features, there usually was a good reason to expand memory and even install a bigger hard drive.

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With the Retina MacBook Pro models, Apple’s pro notebooks began the switch to fixed memory. And let’s not forget the unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro models that followed the MacBook Air in having a built-in battery that wasn’t easy to replace by the average user.

Apple really added insult to injury in 2013 with the new Mac Pro. No hard drive bays. None at all. If you wanted a hard drive, you needed an external device, just like the 1986 Mac Plus. And as with the Mac Plus, the 2013 Mac Pro does let you expand memory.

The Way We Like It

For a lot of us in the Low End Mac community, something is missing when you buy a computer that you can’t readily update. My 2007 Mac mini and Early 2008 iMac have each been upgraded to 3 GB of RAM, and my Aluminum MacBook to 4 GB (with 8 GB ready to install when I have time to tear it down again). I’ve replaced the hard drives in the Mini and MacBook with SSDs and plan to do so with the iMac as well. (It would also benefit from an upgrade to 6 GB total RAM.)

As nice as the newer Macs are – and with those Core i Intel CPUs, speedy SSDs, etc. they are very nice – they feel as disposable as iPhones. Once you replace the old with the new, the old one is soon forgotten because of the power and other features of the new one.

One More Thing

Ever since the first iMac, Apple has been shorting most users on expansion slots. With two USB port, the iMac only had one available to users after the keyboard and mouse were plugged in. The original iBook had only one USB port, which was a significant limitation. May Late 2008 MacBook only has two USB ports, almost requiring the addition of a USB hub for desktop use. (I prefer a full keyboard and a real mouse, and I also like a larger display than the MacBook’s 13″ when at home.)

With the 12″ MacBook, Apple returned to the bad old days of one USB port, but with the caveat that you have to use it to charge your MacBook as well. That means almost every user will need a hub so they can plug in a USB flash drive while charging their MacBook.

Cut us some slack, Apple. We need more built-in ports.

Looking Forward

The highly anticipated 2018 Mac Pro should have memory expansion plus drive bays and plenty of ports. Should being the operative word.

For those of us who value expansion options, older Macs that let us upgrade memory, swap out hard drives in favor of SSDs, and perhaps replace the CPU or add expansion cards are what we want. There is a solid market for old style Mac Pro models because of all the options they offer.

The other alternative is one I like more all the time, even though Apple doesn’t. It’s called Hackintosh, and it means building or buying a PC that will run the macOS nicely. Lots of upgrade options and the opportunity to build a machine as expandable as you want or need it to be. I’m not recommending the Hackintosh route, because there are often hardware issues and the possibility that they may not work with some future version of macOS, but for the adventurous, rise to the challenge!

I’m writing this on an Early 2007 20″ 2.4 GHZ iMac with 3 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, and it’s working very nicely for me. Surprisingly so, although I must say that El Capitan also runs very nicely on my 2.0 GHz Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook with 4 GB of memory and an SSD. I’d like more power, but this is what I’m used to, and I’m not complaining.

I am dreaming of an i5 or i7 21.5″ iMac. iMacs have a sufficient number of built-in ports, and with 8 GB of system memory and an SSD, one of these would positively scream in comparison to my aging Core 2 Duo machines. Then again, the good is the enemy of the best, and even these 2007 and 2008 iMacs are good enough for me.

Thanks, Apple, for all the expansion options they offer!

Searchwords: #hackintosh #expandability

keywords: expandability, hackintosh

short link: https://goo.gl/omSCdV

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Finding software for a vintage Mac is quite an undertaking. This starts with the operating system itself. Apple obviously doesn’t sell those outdated operating systems anymore. What you are left with are specialized dealers, craiglist or eBay. If you look at the prices at some good dealers like LowEndMac or Hardcoremac.com you’ll notice that we are talking serious money here. For popular PowerPC operating systems such as OS X Tiger or especially Leopard (the last OS X capable of running on PowerPC Macs) you are often looking at price tags above $200 or even $250. That in my personal opinion is just too much for an obsolete operating system, especially if you consider that unlike a PC, your old Mac initially came with an operating system that was included in its price.

If you are like me, you are left with eBay and Craiglist or their local equivalents in your country. That doesn’t mean you get your retail version of OS X or Mac OS there for cheap, but sometimes you can spot auctions or ads for far more reasonable prices like $50 or sometimes even less. You just have to spend a couple of weeks looking for a good find.

You also have to pay attention to what you are looking for. In general Apple operating systems are being offered as retail version, but also on gray disks that initially came with a Mac. These gray installation disks however do work with only a very limited selection of Macs, usually the ones they came with and maybe, just maybe and occasionally, other Macs from the same period.

I got myself OS X Leopard and Tiger (both retail) for $35 and $28 respectively, but it took close to 3 months to find them at these prices. I also snatched an old Mac OS 9 retail CD (unfortunately without the box) for mere $10 at a local store dealing in computer repairs and second hand hardware. Having both OS X Tiger and Mac OS 9 I felt I’m being covered in terms of my iMac G4. Wrong.

As it turned out, the Mac OS 9 (9.2.1) retail disk is basically too old for the iMac G4. It does boot, it even starts to launch Mac OS 9, but then the screen goes black and that’s it. Looks a lot like an issue with graphics drivers. What I would need is the original Mac OS 9 installation/restore disk that came with the iMac G4. Except I find it close to impossible to get one of those. Nobody seems to sell them and if they do, they are usually from a much never iMac G4.

If you think going to a forum and ask for help would be a good idea at this point, you are quite mistaken. I did spent some time looking into the problem and reading several related posts on various forums and what I usually found was: whenever someone came up with a problem like that rather than getting offered an image of a disk that would solve the problem he got told off followed by multiple posters telling in harsh words to not pirate software.

I am against software piracy even more than the next guy (I do make my living from creating software), but at least some common sense should be applied. Apple declared these operating systems obsolete, unsupported and doesn’t sell them anymore. At this point what I would expect is being able to download restoration disks for obsolete Macs in the support section. Unlike Windows, Mac OS and OS X are bound to Mac hardware and that’s where Apple makes its money.

What I am left with at this point with my Mac OS 9 installation is turning to torrents and hopefully find the disk I need there. Do I feel bad about? Not even a tiny bit, especially since I actually own a retail version of Mac OS 9.

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This brings me to another issue. I would love to try OS X Panther, Cheetah or Jaguar on my iMac G4 just to see how they looked and felt. I do however consider paying upwards of $300 for those systems and especially for that purpose madness. Unlike OS X Tiger or Leopard, the older versions of OS X rarely show up in classifieds or on auctions. And the situation gets even worse when it comes to old software. Check eBay for very popular software like let’s say Office 2001. As I am writing this, eBay.co.uk has tons of books for Microsoft Office 2001, but the only software is an Office 2001 update CD. Finding software that is more rare than Office or games is an exercise in futility. I should know as I am trying for a couple of months now.

This is where abandonware comes in. While from a legal standpoint it’s a gray area at best, when one applies common sense to the issue it is the only viable approach available today.

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I love abandonware and have been a big fan of sites offering old software and games to download. As a matter of fact, I was also professionally grateful for the service these sites provide whenever I needed to look at some of the software or games I did in the past. Even if I would find the original game somewhere in storage at the office I would still have to battle the stupid copy protection we shipped our games with. Considering I don’t have an optical drive in any of my notebooks for at least 5 years now, that would be a serious problem on its own.

The company I work at and that I am a majority owner of does not care about our old games or software. We don’t sell then, we don’t support them and many people in the team don’t even remember those products anymore. If there are sites that make those products available to fans, then we are glad about it. If there are gamers or users out there who can enjoy our old work, the better. Should we want to use one of those brands to release a sequel, we can just write those sites to take the old products down and from experience from another company I worked for I know they do it quite promptly. Everyone is happy.

Out of curiosity, over the past couple of years I asked a lot of friends in the gaming industry about their opinion on abandonware. To my surprise, most just didn’t give a damn about the subject. Some were fans of it like I am. Few didn’t like the idea, but couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it either. Very few were really glad those sites exists, because their company does not have the one or other game anymore. They never bothered to transfer their products to new storage medias and put them into their backups. These games would otherwise be lost forever.

With more and more companies taking their old games and developing remakes for mobile (iOS and Android), the situation in terms of abandonware might see a change in the future. Until this happens though, let’s just enjoy it.

Just google mac abandonware and you’ll find the major sites on the first result page.

If you have been using computers for a couple of decades or even longer, you are likely to re-discover software and games you used and played in the past. Chances are you payed for many of the ones you downloading today in your past. I know I do.

I slowly start to seriously regret junking my large game collection a decade ago when I moved from one country to another. I do believe games with their original disks and boxes will become proper collector items within the next decade. Maybe not as large as comics are today, but what comics were for the last generation, computer games are for the current one. On the other hand half of my games back then were already so old, the diskettes could not be read reliable anymore. I did keep the boxes in good condition though…

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My favorite site for mac software is Macintosh Garden. When it comes to old games, I usually look at My Abandonware and play those oldies on my modern Macs using Boxer. It is basically a Mac port of DOSBox wrapped into a beautifully made user interface making setting those games up and running them incredibly simple.

Now, some very popular oldies cannot be found on abandonware sites anymore, because they again can be bought. You can find them on Steam occasionally, but there is one site you want to put into your bookmarks: gog.com. What those guys do is they license old games, remove copy protections making these games DRM free and modify them to run on recent computers. Then they sell them at bargain prices, usually only for a couple of bucks. Like Steam, they often have great special offers. They currently offer more than 600 games for PC, but their Mac games section is growing nicely, too.