Back when Apple introduced Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, there was a bit of a minor controversy around the artificially implemented cut-off point; you could only install Leopard on machines with G4 processors of 867Mhz or more, leaving out capable machines like the dual 733Mhz or dual 800Mhz. The community soon found ways around this limitation, and recently, I found myself in a situation where I had to do the same.
About half a year ago, I bought a PowerMac Dual G4-450Mhz, with 1GB of RAM. It ran Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and it did so fairly well. The biggest issue was a lack of a Quartz Extreme capable video card, which meant that all the animations and window drawing and such were done by the processors, putting a lot of extra strain on the already ageing G4s.
So, ever since I bought the machine, I was on the look-out for a nice Mac graphics card that was Quartz Extreme capable, which should deliver a serious speed boost for the PowerMac. A few days ago, I finally spotted a decent offer on TweedehandsMac.nl, a website dedicated solely to selling/buying second hand Apple stuff. Someone had a Radeon 8500 with 64MB of video RAM on offer for just 30EUR, which in Mac land isn’t a whole lot. I went for it, and yesterday morning the card arrived in the mail.
The difference was simply mind-blowing. Replacing the Ati Rage card with this “new” Radeon turned the PowerMac into a very usable machine, multitasking and all. It’s no miracle worker, of course, and processor intensive unoptimised pieces of… things like Flash will still bring it to its knees, but apart from that, it’s an absolute joy.
But I wanted more: I wanted the latest Mac OS X. I don’t like running last year’s version, and always prefer the latest and greatest. So, I got out my retail copy of Leopard, and dove into the process of getting Leopard installed on my “unsupported” PowerMac. Turns out this is as easy as exploiting Safari on Mac OS X (that was a joke, I command you to laugh).
There are three ways to get Leopard on an “unsupported” machine. Since I don’t have another, more recent, supported Mac to install Leopard on, the option of using FireWire target mode was out of the question. I’d had to resort to hacking my Leopard installation DVD, and I wasn’t looking forward to that. Luckily, a bit of Googling was all it took to find a free little application called LeopardAssist, which makes installing Leopard on “unsupported” machines as easy as a few clicks.
LeopardAssist is a utility that automates the third method: using OpenFirmware to fool the Leopard installer into thinking you have a 867Mhz processor. You can do this manually, but why would you when LeopardAssist automates it in a nice graphical utility? It’s a small application that you run on your “unsupported” Mac, so you need Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.3 installed on it. The utility puts a little script in your PRAM that changes the CPU entry in the device tree to 867Mhz, allowing the Leopard installer to pass the processor check, and work without a hitch. When the installer is done, Leopard automatically restores your computer to its normal values.
The weird thing is, though, that Leopard seems to run a little faster than Tiger on these old Macs, further cementing my belief that this artificial cut-off point was put in place by Apple solely to sucker in more people to buy new Macs, even though their old ones are still capable enough. If my PowerMac Dual G4-450Mhz, with 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 8500 video card can run Leopard this well, what about the dual 733Mhz or dual 800Mhz machines? What about all those souls that use processor upgrade cards, and are also locked out?
If you have an “unsupported” G4, but were always a bit weary of installing Leopard, here’s your chance.
Turns out this is as easy as exploiting Safari on Mac OS X (that was a joke, I command you to laugh).
HA HA HA HA.
There you go.
On a more serious note, thanks for that report. I might give it a try on a 667 Mhz G4 here and see how it goes.
>> further cementing my belief that this artificial cut-off point was put in place by Apple solely to sucker in more people to buy new Macs, even though their old ones are still capable enough. <<
Apple has always done this. When OS X.0 came out, it required a non-beige G3 macintosh. Somebody came up with a hack program called XPostFacto that allowed users of PPC 604 Macs and beige G3 Macs to install OS X.
A later version of OS X refused to install unless your computer had a Firewire port. I think a later version of XPostFacto also allowed you to get around this artificial limitation.
The dumbest compatibility check I’ve seen from Apple was in Final Cut Express. We had an older version (4.0, I think) that my business partner wanted to move to his then-new Macbook – but it refused to run, with an error saying it only works with Macs containing an AGP graphics card. Despite the Macbook’s video hardware being significantly faster than the AGP card in the computer we’d previously used to run FCE (a G4 800).
Fortunately, a bit of Google’ing revealed a fix (manually edit the plist file to remove the AGP check). And, of course, it ran just fine.
That’s not right – 10.0 through 10.2 were compatible with my beige PowerMac G3/266.
The original PowerBook G3 was the only G3 Mac that Apple excluded.
Not ENTIRELY accurate either. G3 Macs are hit or miss on 10.2 and earlier… The division referred to as ‘old world’ or ‘new world’ – Some G3 iMacs are effected, all of the toilet seat iBooks, and most of the desktop form factor G3’s are also so afflicted.
Leopard assist is nice, but in a way I kind of wish it also ran on MacOS9 like XPostFacto does, since it’s a faster/easier install if working ‘clean’.
Clamshell dude, clamshell.
Now that you mention it, I think the beige G3 tower did work with earlier OS X; but the beige G3 desktop definitely didn’t, and some of the G3 Powerbooks didn’t.
I’ve got an old G4 733 running Tiger as my media server. i might give this a go.
for a ref… os x leopard server runs fine for what I use it for…
if anything its faster than tiger server..
this is on a g4 450mhz cube w/ 1.5GB
if you want to put in a bigger hdisk you can with a hack to turn on lba support 128GB> hdisks
I have an upgraded processor in my G4 (Sonnet 1.4 Ghz) and LeopardAssist won’t work, unfortunately – I have the feeling I will have to temporarily put the old processor back in, install, then go back to the upgrade, although I have seen reports out there that others have managed to do this with the same card without a hitch (I have a G4 Sawtooth model that is apparently of the revision to allow a dual processsor upgrade – Uni-North number has a value of 7 or above).
Thanks for the link though to TweedehandsMac.nl. At first I despaired to see it was a Dutch/Belgian site only (delivery thereto), but after a few clicks understood that the UK version is called: http://uk.secondhandmac.com/, which I wasn’t aware of.
If your upgrade card is over Apple’s number of 867 MHz, it will be fine. I’ve upgraded two machines with 10.5 that have cards added.
The first is an AGB 450 MHz upgraded to a 1 GHZ machine. No problem.
The second is an Audio 733 MHz machine that had been upgraded to a dual cpu 1.8 GHz machine. That worked well also.
Apple always states that its OS’s will not work (actually not be guaranteed to work) with third party upgrades. This is simply for liability issues. If Apple had control over the manufacture of those upgrades, it might be different.
But, over the years, I’ve upgraded many Macs, and never had a problem.
I’ve upgraded several Mac Pros last year with no problem either.
Their rationale is that it stops people from installing it on machines not capable of running Mac OS X Leopard and thus reduces their support calls. At the end of the day there was no need to deliberately castrate Leopard, all they had to do is put the minimum requirement (and state that Apple will only support those who meet or exceed the minimum requirements). If someone rings up needing help and they are running it on a machine outside minimum specifications then all the call centre has to inform the user is that their installation is unsupported and that they’re on their own.
It shouldn’t be Apple’s responsibility to ensure people with under powered hardware don’t install it on their machines; if end users want to take that risk and install Leopard on an underpowered machine then it is their own responsibility that it works and not Apple’s – “This is what we support – if your machine doesn’t meet those requirements then we don’t support you”.
Edited 2009-04-08 09:43 UTC
Yeah, maybe it is artificial, but it feels like a practical line in the sand to me.
I was running Leopard on G4 Quicksilver 867 Mhz, right on the line. And it was usable, but it quickly became apparent I needed to find a Core Image video card and a processor upgrade.
While Leopard can feel snappier than Tiger in some cases, if you check out the benchmarks that the people at Low End Mac do on Leopard, Tiger, and Panther on these older Macs, Tiger is always just a little faster. Leopard improves performance in some areas (like graphics), but overall processing power dips down a bit.
I run Tiger on my G4 Cube right now, but it is really starting to show its age.
I did this on my PowerBook G4 400 (yup, the original Titanium, still going strong) last year and have had no problems. I had upgraded it some time ago to 768 MB of RAM.
I think it seems slow only in comparison to newer macs, and that the performance is comparable to when I had only run 10.3 on it.
I’m glad Low End Mac could be of assistance. Most users who tried the hack we published had success, and that led to the development of LeopardAssistant, which we linked to right away.
I have run Leopard on a dual 450 MHz and dual 500 MHz Power Mac and have to agree that video performance really suffers with the ATI Rage card. I’ve since put a dual 1.6 GHz upgrade in my Digital Audio G4 (originally a single 533 MHz CPU), and I have to say that I’m quite impressed at video performance.
I am contemplating switching to one of these older Macs with that 1.6 GHz upgrade and the Radeon 9000 Pro video card from my Mirror Drive Door. It will be fun to see whether either of these “ancient” Macs can provide better overall performace than my dual 1 GHz G4 does thanks to that CPU ugprade.
Dan Knight, LowEndMac.com
I’ve got two older Macs. A G4 800mhz iMac “lamp” and a G4 800 mhz PowerBook. I want to upgrade both of them but they were just below the line and I didn’t really want to edit my plist and try it just in case it screwed things up. I didn’t really want to spend the time creating a carbon copy clone and restoring if it failed. Maybe I’ll do it now with the assist program that temporarily changes it and changes it back automatically. Obviously I still need to clone my hard drive just in case.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/FB138LL/A?mco=MjE0NDk5Mw
Just saying.
Tiger is much better for me, because of the one thing: Classic Compatibility Environment. It’s no good to have to reboot in OS 9 every time I need to run some “unported” to OS X application or game.
I have Leopard installed on other partition, but I boot into Debian much often than into Leopard.
Sorry, Leo, without Classic you’re useless for me, despite your cool 3D Dock and brand-new Cover Flow folder view.
i have a 12″ powerbook with 1.33ghz g4 and 768 RAM
i installed leopard when it first came out and was kinda surprised at how nice the overall system was. worked really nice though a couple of things frustrated me. (to this day i don’t use expose)
i started noticing a couple of issues with things a little while later. first the machine would get really hot and it took me a while to figure this one out. i was using quicklook a lot in the beginning and didn’t realize how had that little app is on an older laptop. the mac ran out of ram quickly because everything in the finder gets a preview when you touch it and it’s stored in ram. ram ran out which then had to go to HDD. luckily i had put in a larger hard drive a long time ago.
hdd would get hot and would overheat the little machine to the point that i would need to use an external fan on it.
then the wireless card started going from the heat and then the battery. to this day, if leopard is running the wireless works intermittently and the battery isn’t recognized properly. the final blow to the system came when i reinstalled tiger on it. all the problems vanished.
so after all this, my suggestion would be don’t install leopard on an older mac laptop (i refuse to install it on my dad’s ibook with the same specs) unless you’re prepared to turn off a lot of settings or at least not use them. it would also help to max out the ram of the machines, even though in most cases that’s not enough.
Is this morally any different than installing OS X on a beige box? Or jailbreaking an iPhone? Just wondering.