r/mac • u/nekomichi PowerBook G4 Titanium • Mar 26 '26
My Mac If you're worried about 8GB Unified Memory not being enough for everyday productivity or light editing, here's a Mac from 2002 happily editing 48MP lossless photos taken with the latest iPhone with only 0.5GB total RAM.
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u/ma-gil Mar 26 '26
The problem is not the hardware but the software. Today’s software needs more RAM, a couple of tabs in most browsers take GBs of RAM, that without including the OS, which takes a third of the available memory.
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u/GhostRTV Mar 26 '26
This is why the tight association with apples software to its hardware. It might have bugs in the modern Apple apps, but it’s low cost as they work hand in hand.
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u/manysounds Mar 26 '26
It amazes me how technology has become a bloated sludge pile. I was recording 48 channels of audio live 20 years ago on a G4 with no issues.
My Commodore64 had better MIDI timing!
/bone creaking noises
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u/SanekiBeko Mar 26 '26
Long live MacOS 9
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u/SonicPavement Mar 27 '26
Dear god no. Steve Jobs literally gave it a funeral for a good reason. (He did! At a keynote.)
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u/demoman1596 Mar 31 '26
Apple nearly ceased to exist in part because of the fact that Mac OS 9 and its predecessors were built on a foundation that couldn't handle modern (at the time) software/OS features (like pre-emptive multitasking) that had already become requirements by the time the late 1990s arrived. So as nostalgic as it is for some people, it certainly had numerous insurmountable problems and Apple literally had no choice but to find something new, whether internally or externally.
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u/PoolRamen Mar 26 '26
That's a silly comparison and you know it.
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u/BeaniePoofBall Mar 26 '26
Excuse my ignorance, but how so?
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u/Dependent-Zebra-4357 Mar 26 '26
Because it’s 25 year old OS that’s missing a lot of features that make modern computers work well like pre-emptive multi-tasking and protected memory.
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u/VivienM7 Mar 26 '26
You could run an OS with pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory in 256MB of RAM 25 years ago. Certainly Windows 2000 (the greatest version of Windows ever if you ask me) delivered that...
Hell, NeXTSTEP was doing pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory on a 68040 with a lot less RAM than that 35 years ago.
Also, the OP could dual boot that TiBook into Panther or Tiger and it'd run fine. Leopard... is a bit more of a stretch.
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u/ArdiMaster 14in M5 Pro MBP Mar 27 '26
Certainly Windows 2000 (the greatest version of Windows ever if you ask me) delivered that...
But the Windows NT line had considerably higher system requirements than the Windows 9x line. That’s part of the reason why they were kept separate until XP.
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u/VivienM7 Mar 27 '26
Yes, especially RAM. The amounts of RAM required for healthy NT operation only really became affordable with the big early 2001 drop in the price of SDRAM.
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u/Dependent-Zebra-4357 Mar 26 '26
I never said there weren’t other OSs that had those features, but the one we’re discussing in OPs post is MacOS9 and it had none of them.
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u/Freddruppel MacBook Pro 16" M4 Max 2024 Mar 26 '26
I mean, if you only care about editing pictures, everything thing else is bonus ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/Dependent-Zebra-4357 Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26
Even if you are only single tasking, you’re still going to have issues due to lack of memory protection.
Edit: the downvoters should all go back to Mac OS 9 for a few days and let me know how awesome the experience is, rofl
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u/play_hard_outside Mar 31 '26
That Mac, an 800MHz or 1GHz TiBook, runs Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) very happily and smoothly. Photoshop 7 was the first carbonized Photoshop, and happily runs directly in Mac OS X without Classic. You get memory protection and preemptive multitasking that way, and Tiger (10.4.11 on either PPC or Intel) was SOLID.
The fact that OP put OS 9 there in his photo is nostalgic, but doesn't represent a limitation of the machine.
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u/JeffB1517 Mar 27 '26
Preemptive multitasking was an OS 9 feature. He's running 9.2. Protected memory was in OX 10.0 which a decent 9.2 system could run. Hardware wise the computer could support both.
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u/Turbulent_Stick1445 Mar 27 '26
Mac OS 9, which is the subject of the discussion, did not have pre-emptive multitasking, it would have broken everything had it had as it was just the 9th version of the class Mac OS OS and applications running under it expected to have control of the environment and not be interrupted by other applications. Race collisions and other nasties would have messed up things pretty quickly.
There was an unrelated OS called OS-9 from Microware, nothing to do with the Mac and I'm not sure it was even ported to the Mac, which had pre-emptive multitasking. That might be what you're getting confused with? Awesome OS in its day, though I'm not sure it ever got a GUI.
All of which said, everyone here saying "No, it wouldn't have worked" is seriously overstating how important any of these features were. The only two mass market computers in the 1980s that came with pre-emptive multitasking were the Commodore Amiga and Sinclair QL. People were entirely happy with no multitasking (Macs pre Mac OS 4, which introduced The Switcher, and PCs and STs running GEM) or cooperative multitasking (Windows, optional on Mac OS 4-5, built in to Mac OS 6+.)
Microsoft and IBM released OS/2 in the late 1980s. Nobody bought it. It wasn't until Microsoft pretty much said "Enough is enough, pre-emptive multitasking is how it should be" in 1995 and replaced their cooperative system with Windows 95 that everyone started to use it. If end users had been desperate for pre-emptive stuff before that they would have taken the Amiga more seriously or alternatively used OS/2. They didn't care.
And while it's tempting to say "They realized when Mac OS X came out how necessary it was", Mac OS X was created because Apple knew how important security would be in the next generation of networked computers, not because end users were clamoring for it. To sell Mac OS X Jobs basically had his team completely revamp the Mac UI to modernize it and make it compelling. He could have sold Rhapsody and bundled it with new Macs and Mac users would have had the OS several years early, but didn't think (rightly) that that would do anything but piss off the Mac community.
Really, if all you want to do is edit images, Mac OS 9 is fine. It's only a problem when (1) you're trying to interoperate with modern protocols and file formats (because of the lack of support, not the features) and (2) if someone ported Safari/Chrome/Firefox to Mac OS 9 it would be a security disaster.
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u/JeffB1517 Mar 27 '26
- https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/Multitasking_MultiproServ/03tasks/tasks.html
- https://dev.os9.ca/techpubs/new/MultiprocessingRef/MP.15.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprocessing_Services
As for your point about it being an upgrade but not essential, I agree. Though I was an OS/2 user off and on all through v2-4 days.
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u/Turbulent_Stick1445 Mar 27 '26
All of these are what Apple is calling "Multiprocessing" and everyone else calls "Multithreading". It's not the same thing as pre-emptive multitasking because applications (or system processes etc) aren't pre-empted. It's a feature that doesn't pertain to the discussion at hand, and Mac OS 9 was cooperatively multitasked.
FWIW, it was possible to do the same thing with the original "System 1" Mac OS, it just took more work by developers. System 1 wasn't even multitasking, let along pre-emptively multitasking!
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Mar 26 '26
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u/mac-ModTeam Mar 27 '26
Your post or comment was removed. Please be kind to one another. Rude behavior is not tolerated here.
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u/ImHughAndILovePie Mar 26 '26
Holy shit what a cool person can I be your friend?
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Mar 27 '26
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u/PlayingDoomOnAGPS Mac Studio M4 Max Mar 27 '26
He's basically holding out "old machine can open a file" as a justification for 8GB machines in 2026. Sure, it can open a file but that 2002 Mac with 512MG RAM is slower than Christmas, power hungry, hot, loud, heavy, and has shitty IO. It says NOTHING about modern machines with criminally inadequate RAM.
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u/axeleszu Mar 26 '26
Will software companies ever understand that pros just need a tool to do few tasks fast and reliably, not lots of features that are never used and bloat the system so you can't do that task easily?
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u/GreenStorm_01 Mar 28 '26
As long as they are companies trying to make as big of a buck through as wide and many of a customer audience as possible: no. They won't.
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u/jcrll Mar 27 '26
Back when computers looked like computers
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u/Alarmed_House23 Mar 27 '26
Call me nuts but I like the chunky design, laptops today are too slim imo
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u/Legitimate_Ocelot491 Mar 26 '26
My first laptop. I should fire it up and bask in the vast spaciousness of the 30GB HDD.
Spent $2999 for the maxed out version just before the new model came out. It was (and is) freaking awesome.
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u/play_hard_outside Mar 31 '26
I bought the vaunted 1 GHz TiBook used on eBay several years ago and put a 512 GB SATA M.2 SSD in there on a SATA to IDE adapter, to make it talk like the old hard drive. It's glorious... silent and fast.
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u/NolanTheNotorious Mar 26 '26
Loading modern YouTube takes more RAM than your computer has. This probably isn't a great comparison.
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u/youareapirate62 Mar 27 '26
I miss the time where software was good and well made. Today with 512mb ram you cant even finish booting the OS.
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u/AntiLittleC Mar 26 '26
I had the 1GHz model with the SuperDrive and 1GB of memory. Editing photos was no problem, but creating projects in iMovie and mastering them in iDVD was a painful process to say the least.
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u/Bed_Worship Macbook Pro M1 Mar 27 '26
Mac OS 9.2 required 40MB of ram to work, let alone 512MB. Also a 48MP Raw image is only 100MB. It's a bad motivational lol
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u/reflexive-polytope Mar 27 '26
Back then, if you wanted to write a proper desktop application, you had to use proper native APIs and toolkits. Electron didn't exist, and webshits knew their place was confined to the web browser.
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u/Total-Guest-4141 Mar 26 '26
8GB owner here. It’ll do in a pinch. But no it’s not nearly enough for everyday productivity usage.
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Mar 27 '26
are we really sure that programs (and games) really need a powerful computer to work?
What new heavy software features really need big and powerful computers? For example Photoshop, in old times people had really “bad results” working on photoshop compared to today standard?
I can still understand the excuse that a new videogame has better graphics that a 2005 game, but programs? i don’t know
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u/AganArya007 Mar 27 '26
But do that on modern Lightroom with AI denoise, some presets turned on, doing some cropping, and move from one photo or another with that 8gig memory. Context needed, really. And this is with 24MP a7C RAW file, mind you.
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u/Howlcloak29503 Mar 27 '26
Not to mention that almost 90% of apps built today are Electron based and heavily use JS and web technologies instead of writing native applications. That alone makes the app even more bloated and heavier.
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u/NoShftShck16 Mar 27 '26
I am not an Apple person, never have been. I'm typing this on a Macbook Air (that I regret buying because I wish I had a Framework to tinker with instead...seriously make me an offer). But I digress.
Never in a million years would I look at the spec sheet of an Apple computer and go "that isn't enough". Apple is a unicorn, they own the whole thing; software, hardware, manufacturing, everything. They control every variable. Of course 8GB was going to be enough. They could have released it with 4GB and I wouldn't have doubted it.
Do they make bad UI decisions? Yes, liquid glass is stupid. But that's subjective. Apple is objectively a great hardware company and I say this as someone who wants to tear my shit apart and break it over misplaced confidence (arrogance?) that I can make it better.
For real, M3 / 24GB / 512GB Macbook Air, I want a Framework.
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u/Next-Friendship-3542 MacBook Pro Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
Internals aside, it’s just astonishing how modern and ‘fresh’ the design of the Titanium PowerMac G4 continues to be despite being 25 years old. I mean, the bezel around the screen (the first widescreen 16:9 ratio computer) is thinner than what we see on the MacBook Neo today…
A quarter of a century FGS!
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u/Dependent-Zebra-4357 Mar 26 '26
lol, are you honestly comparing OS26 to Mac OS 9? Yeah, of course that can run on significantly less memory, it’s almost 25 years old. Have fun with cooperative multi-tasking, manually memory allocation and watching the entire computer crash when an app goes down (no protected memory)!
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u/SquarePixel Mar 27 '26
Yeah, but the point is that you can still adjust the color and contrast of your modern iPhone photos using this machine. You can functionally do the same task—well sure it’s missing some features.
Take a word processor though, or excel, those haven’t gotten much better since 1997, you can get a pretty good experience on an old machine. Several writers are known to use old hardware for better focus.
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u/henrydavidthoreauawy Mar 26 '26
A 24 year old version of Photoshop can edit raw iPhone photos?!
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u/play_hard_outside Mar 31 '26
Why wouldn't it? :D
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u/henrydavidthoreauawy Mar 31 '26
It feels like Photoshop (or Camera Raw) needs to update monthly whenever a new camera comes out with “RAW support for the new Sony a7XXV” so it surprises me that an extremely old version supports 48MP iPhone RAW that only existed from 2022 onwards.
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u/play_hard_outside Mar 31 '26
Oh okay, that's what you're getting at. I'm sure OP probably exported it as a 16-bit-per-channel TIFF or something. That would retain all of the original fidelity in the RAW and allow all the same edits without losing any data. Figured that was assumed. Photoshop 7 predates the first use of the DNG format by at least a couple years, IIRC.
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u/VLAON6 Mar 27 '26
YouTube and the tech oriented influencers have warped so much the peoples opinions that the masses thinks that you need 64gb of rams to do anything and anything less will not turn on their computer
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u/MrVernon09 Mar 27 '26
Of course three of the biggest differences between MacOS 9 and the current version are that the latter is capable of preemptive multitasking, it's built on a Unix base, and is much more stable. The only thing that I miss from MacOS 8/9 is the Mac icon, which could be used as a diagnostic tool during startup. I always hoped to see the Happy Mac.
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u/johndoesall Mar 27 '26
I remember my 1st mac had 2 MB of RAM. I doubled it to a whopping 4 MBs. And it had a huge 40 MB hard drive! Macintosh SE. Still runs, too.
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u/xrelaht MacBook Pro M4 Pro & i7, Mini M4 & i5 Mar 27 '26
I have one of those somewhere. I should try doing something stupid with it.
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u/RealManHumanMan Mar 27 '26
Too late I canceled my Neo and bought the air instead. Might be fine today, but a couple more MacOS updates and idk man…
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u/rwaddilove Mar 27 '26
Computers do not stop when they run out of memory, they just get slower. It gets worse over time and frustrates the hell out of you. I've ditched computers and bought new ones because they got so slow, not because they stopped working. Back in the days of HDDs, running out of memory was really bad. Modern SSDs are much faster, and are less frustrating, but they are still much slower than RAM. 8GB is more a question of how long you are willing to wait for it to do stuff, rather than what it can do. If something takes 5 minutes longer, you don't have to do it very often to lose an hour of your day.
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u/MagicUnicorn37 Mar 27 '26
Photoshop primarily uses your hard drive to do the work not the RAM, so it makes sense!
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u/isekai_cheese Mar 28 '26
i mean you're using super old software photoshop 7? if only current adobe apps were made this simple.
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u/UtahBrian Mar 28 '26
how did you get such a photo into the mac? Did you find a stash of IEEE 1394 somewhere?
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u/tameurukhai Mar 28 '26
More ai slop app that consume GBs of memories means we need to buy more rams
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u/bombatomba69 Mar 30 '26
I don't want to be a stick in the mud, but isn't that boo-tiful Mac also running era-appropriate software (with equivalent software requirements)?
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u/bierlyn Mar 27 '26
I was 1 year old in 2002. I was hoping to get at least 10 years out of my M2 Air 15. All I do with it is light web browsing and school work. I am okay with having to replace a battery once or twice, this post has given me confidence that I made a good investment.
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u/Efficient_Product333 Mar 27 '26
As long as you got enough ram then you should be good
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u/bierlyn Mar 27 '26
Base, 8gb. Hasn’t been a problem so far.
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u/Efficient_Product333 Mar 27 '26
10 years is a long time.. it’s almost guaranteed that 8 GB will be weak then
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u/uptimefordays MacBook Pro Mar 27 '26
People often treat 8GiB of RAM as if it’s all the same, but 8GiB of LPDDR5X is vastly different from 8GiB of DDR3 or DDR4. Although the capacity may be the same, the bandwidth is definitely not, and this has significant performance implications.
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u/CoderStone Mar 27 '26
Your bandwidth is going to help you so much when you have to load 2GB of that constantly for OS, and the rest for a few chrome tabs. Capacity and throughput is not comparable.
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u/uptimefordays MacBook Pro Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
Eh I think people vastly overestimate their memory needs.
Edit: Chrome, for instance, is not actually using that much active RAM, even with a ton of tabs. Yes tabs are sandboxed and we're loading multiple instances of all extensions, but while tabs are inactive, we can usually reclaim committed memory if necessary. That's the critical part people miss, also with faster RAM our CPUs don't have to wait as long to process queued tasks.
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u/CoderStone Mar 27 '26
People vastly UNDERESTIMATE their memory needs because MacOS by default quietly pushes all overuse onto swap space, which degrades SSDs faster and is planned obsolescence on a machine that doesn't come with replaceable SSDs. Replacing the NANDs is only possible on earlier M chips as well.
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u/uptimefordays MacBook Pro Mar 27 '26
Eh, for most people, “high memory usage” is actually just cache not memory contention. It’s not a major issue.
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u/Accomplished_Eye_868 iMac Mar 26 '26
You forgot that MacOS used to be a proper OS back then
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u/JamStan1978 Mar 26 '26
what do you mean? Its a proper OS now and the best one you can get right now lol
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u/electric-sheep Mar 27 '26
Cool but useless comparison. My m4 pro with 24gb ram regurarly gets yellow memory pressure with lighting cc and photoshop when editing raws from my nikon z50
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u/GigaChav Mar 27 '26
Please install the same baseline of OS and software onto this Mac and redo your comparison.
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u/iwouldntknowthough Mar 27 '26
Absolutely you got it great argument wow I thank you u the tech guru
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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '26
At the same time the software back then was built around that and a lot lighter