512 Pixels

Apple already experimented with this with the prototype Jonathan computer. It's very late 80's in its aesthetic, and I love it. https://512pixels.net/2024/03/apple-jonathan-modular-concept/

8 months (though I imagine sales may have tanked in June when they announced the transition to Apple Silicon, so Apple probably only got 3 months of sales.) But it was in fact the fastest intel MacBook Air - and it still is. What few people outside Apple (or even inside given Apple's notorious secrecy) probably realized in early to mid 2020, even after the WWDC announcement, was how great the Apple Silicon/M1 MacBook Air was actually going to be, and how it would transform expectations for performance and battery life in a fanless laptop. Perhaps Apple should have offered a trade-in scheme like they did for the Lisa/Macintosh XL. I wonder if they offered upgrades to the buyers of the October 1999 Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics) which was replaced by a better model only two months later. https://512pixels.net/2020/01/some-short-lived-macs/

The macOS screenshot library from Stephen is also excellent: https://512pixels.net/projects/aqua-screenshot-library/

I usually use some of the old OS X wallpapers. My favorite one is probably the one that came with 10.4 Tiger. All MacOS/OS X wallpapers are available in 5K and 6K resolutions here: https://512pixels.net/projects/default-mac-wallpapers-in-5k/

KDE in 1999: https://czechia.kde.org/screenshots/images/medium/matthiase1.jpg GNOME in 1999: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/GNOME_1.0_%281999%… Of course, it's a matter of taste, but GNOME and KDE looked pretty bad back then. If I had the money, I'd definitely preferred NeXTSTEP. It's just so much cleaner and better thought-out. This is what it looked like in the early 90ies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.pn… BTW, this is what NeXTSTEP looked like in 2000 (Mac OS X public beta): https://512pixels.net/projects/aqua-screenshot-library/mac-os-x-public… I love NeXTSTEP, because it was awesome for its time, but I greatly prefer the latest macOS :).

Recently I came across https://512pixels.net/2014/04/aqua-past-future/ and was overcome with nostalgia for System 7. Maybe it’s just that a Mac IIsi running System 7 was my first computer when I was seven years old, but I think there’s a timeless beauty to the operating system that no later release has really captured. Some more images here: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/classic-mac-os Those folder and control panel icons just slay me.

This review seems to indicate that the 2015 MacBook has similar issues to the original 2008-era MacBook air: lots of potential, but still worth waiting for a 2nd generation product to work out some of the issues. Personally, though, I'm just excited that Apple finally offers a laptop in multiple colors. (And without a price premium, for anyone who remembers the "black tax"[1]) [1] http://www.512pixels.net/blog/2015/2/future-classics-the-black-macbook

> this particular thing is not new. Article author here. I think the quoted claim is somewhat misleading. There are at least two different ways to interpret a UI feature as "not new": 1) The feature has been in the operating system all along. 2) Something analogous existed 40 years ago and then disappeared long ago. You're referring to 2, not 1. The only reason I chose Calculator app for my screenshot is that its window is very small, which allowed me to make a small screenshot, because people may be reading the blog post on small phone screens. In other ways, admittedly, Calculator is not a great example, because its window is not actually resizable, and thus it's not the type of window that you would normally place in the corners of your screen, like a resizable document window. Rounded corners on a "widget" type of app are not as objectionable. As other commenters have noted, the calculator in "classic" Mac was a special Desk Accessory. In contrast, on Tahoe, the varying corner radii affect ordinary document-based apps. Consider Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah. The top of the windows had rounded corners, but the bottom did not! https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-0-Cheetah-Applicat… TextEdit, for example, did not start to have rounded bottom corners until Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which was itself much maligned for bringing the iPhone UI to Mac.

Don't forget the OS 9 wallpapers: https://512pixels.net/projects/mac-os-9-5k-wallpapers My favorites among these are the gradient-rich desktops that dropped in Mac OS 8.5 back in '98, like those UFO ones. That's when the OS gained support for icons with 24-bit color and 8-bit masks, which are the direct ancestors to today's 1024x1024 32-bit app icons. Perhaps to commemorate this full leveling up of the classic Mac desktop to millions of colors, Apple hired a small team of designers to custom make the UFO, Capsule and Tub desktop pictures. Screen sized gradients between two relatively close colors almost always land in the sandbar of banding or dithering in order to quantize all those subtle variations to the limited color depth. But these desktops do a beautiful job at avoiding that. I'm not sure, but I think they achieved it by color grading a zero-to-255 3D render with a high bits/channel ratio in Photoshop, tuning the grade and quantizing to 8 bits per pixel from time to time as a sort of gamut warning. Any problematic areas could then be "buffed out" with careful blend mode shenanigans on the boundaries.

>Yeah, because it doesn’t exist. I probably remembered it wrong and conflated the Rosenbaum with being about Woz and Jobs. >That was not why Woz (and Jobs) were interested in them, which is my point. Woz and Jobs decided to learn about blue boxes because they read "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" [0], an article which covers people selling blue boxes to mafia bookies [1]. My understanding is that Woz thought that Blue Boxes were neat and that Jobs wanted to turn it into a business so they began mass producing them. They were looking for a market, they knew based on the article that got them excited about Blue Boxes in the first that Blue Boxes can be used to evade wiretaps and that also based on that article they knew organized crime was willing to pay for them. At the very least they must have talked about it as some point, perhaps just to say we are never selling these to the mob". If you ever get a chance to ask Woz about this, I'd love to hear his answer, who did they try to sell blue boxes to and if they didn't try to sell blue boxes to bookies what was their thinking at the time about why not? "And with Wozniak, of course, the story goes that he discovered the blue box via reading Ron Rosenbaum’s article, Secrets of the Little Blue Box" [0] "We [not Woz or Jobs] had this order for a thousand beeper boxes from a syndicate front man in Las Vegas. They use them to place bets coast to coast, keep lines open for hours, all of which can get expensive if you have to…

At least they remembered where the dark and light colors go this time around[1]. [1]: https://512pixels.net/2025/06/wwdc25-macos-tahoe-breaks-decades-of-fin…

Apple changed this in Tahoe Beta 2 https://512pixels.net/2025/06/finder-icon-fixed/

The original, updated version of the Finder icon alone should have been enough of a warning that the UX designers at Apple have lost their minds and any aesthetic sense, let alone an ability to design interfaces that are functional, efficient, and well thought-out. https://512pixels.net/2025/06/wwdc25-macos-tahoe-breaks-decades-of-fin…

Yes: https://512pixels.net/2025/05/original-macintosh-resolution/ There was a discussion here a couple of weeks ago (with a typo in the title): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44110219

The very first Mac really was 512x342 [0] 0. https://512pixels.net/2025/05/original-macintosh-resolution/ Edit: Sorry - I misread what you were saying and intended this as a correction, but you had it right all along.

Here: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-… Easter egg: The example is named dogcow, after a 90s Mac icon, designed by Susan Kare, which later became a small mascot: https://512pixels.net/dogcow/ Regarding .length: Effectly that is just the result of Unicode, there is no one-to-one equivalent between characters code points, the code units in an encoding and the resulting grapheme clusters. That is in effect a result of the complexity of the world's alphabets, including Emoji.

From https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/: the ad was based on the fact that Apple was forbidden to export the G4 to many countries due to its “supercomputer” classification by the US government.

That 10.8 wallpaper you linked looks original. 3200 x 2000 appears to be the original resolution for Lion and Mountain Lion (also note how the version on this site is cropped). 10.8 is less obvious so hard to say with 100% certainty, but if you look at, say 10.6 it's super obvious. Here's the original wallpaper shipped by Apple: https://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/defaultdesktop.jpg Here's the one from this site: https://512pixels.net/downloads/macos-wallpapers-6k/10-6-6k.jpg If you look at the bright star at the top left, in the original it has a clean lens flare. In the version from this site, the diagonal flare has a zebra stripe pattern. This is characteristic of AI upscaling of a very thin diagonal line.

Strong nostalgia for this one https://512pixels.net/downloads/macos-wallpapers-thumbs/10-2--thumb.pn… Takes me back to my dorm room on my 13-inch iBook.

I got one better https://512pixels.net/2009/01/early-macintosh-reviews-show-dvorak-clue… John Dvorak > Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.

One thing that I think makes System Settings much worse than it has to be is how indistinguishable its sidebar icons are. They all have the same shape, some share the same background color or have very similar background colors, their glyph shapes are thin, and the white glyph color has extremely bad contrast with some of the background colors. If the icons were more akin to 10.6 Snow Leopard sidebar icons[0] it'd give the sidebar items much more substantial visual anchors. Heck even the more muted sidebar icons of 10.7 Lion[1] would be a substantial improvement. [0]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/operating-systems/mac-os-x/mac-os… [1]: https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-8-Mountain-Lion-Fi…

Susan Kare is also the designer of Dogcow btw :D https://512pixels.net/dogcow/

Not sure I believe this. Instagram could’ve conceivably killed Facebook a decade ago if they’d chosen not to sell. Reminds me of Steve Jobs talking about Microsoft bringing about the dark ages of desktop computing: https://512pixels.net/2010/05/the-desktop-computer-industry-is-dead/.

The internals of the G4 MDD were beautiful (and functional) for both Apple as well as the users: https://512pixels.net/2016/11/lazarus-mac-mdd-g4/

Is this the Quantum Foam wallpaper you were talking about awhile ago? https://512pixels.net/downloads/os9-5k/Quantum-Foam.jpg

You can download the full installers from the command-line: https://512pixels.net/2019/10/download-macos-installers-with-terminal/ Wikipedia shows the exact version number of the latest releases for each.

Some of those death chimes were pretty ominous! Depending on the model, there there a few different dirges, breaking glass, car crashes, and others. You knew you were in for a bad time. https://512pixels.net/2021/04/mac-chimes-of-death/

People could have gotten rich investing in anything that Dvorak poo poo’d https://512pixels.net/2009/01/early-macintosh-reviews-show-dvorak-clue… Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.

I used the wallpaper that looked like this for years. I might give it a shot once again. Someone recently posted this archive of all past macOS wallpapers in 5K: https://512pixels.net/projects/default-mac-wallpapers-in-5k/

Other than the addition of Today widgets (aka Dashboard except worse), Notifications Center really hasn't changed much since it was released. Here's what it looked like in Mountain Lion, where it was first introduced: https://512pixels.net/projects/aqua-screenshot-library/os-x-10-8-mount… And here's Growl: http://growl.info/images/screenshots_images/RollupWhileAway.png