The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

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overclockedmind
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The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

One of them is a Power Mac 1,1.
One of them is a PM 3,1. Both cheese graters.

What would you give? I'm thinking the first one I should be able to find on the side of the road somewhere (which never happens) and the second, well, I dunno.

I'll list specs as I have them, but I just got POed IDing the machines. Wait, and I'll give you those before we render any opinions.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

MAC PRO 2.8_8CX/2x1GB/2600GT/320/SD/AP/M/K - Model A1186, EMC 2180
MAC PRO 3.0QX/2X512/7300GT/500/SD Model A1186, EMC 2113

He hasn't brought up price, or told me if they have the specs that they had, changed. I plan to run the last version of of Mac OS X that runs both 32 and 64 bit apps on it, which I have written down somewhere, but I'm hoping someone will just "know." I can't find it at the moment.

His FB is https://www.facebook.com/douglas.clark.545 . I asked him for his eBay ID in case he had one (I'm an old LEM Swap Lister, ) and if I could be his friend, he has that blocked for anyone who isn't already.

For reference, my eBay ID is https://www.ebay.com/fdbk/feedback_prof ... pcomputing .
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by tperry2x »

Mac OS Mojave (10.14) was the last version to support 32bit apps.
But those cheese graters can't run that.
You can probably go to El Capitan (10.11) on the A1186 which would be the maximum version it supports.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by richmond62 »

As I grate cheese with a PPV Mac Mini I am not sure what you are maoning about.
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Poking about on British eBay [ebay.co.uk] I found this which will run MacOS 13 beta.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

richmond62 wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 7:36 am As I grate cheese with a PPV Mac Mini I am not sure what you are maoning about.
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Poking about on British eBay [ebay.co.uk] I found this which will run MacOS 13 beta.
True, but is that an m1 mini? No, so... it's up to Apple to decide how far they allow duality. We've been here before... 2 versions, maybe 3 if they're feeling nice. I doubt they are.

Though your post does interest me. Perhaps I should just forget about grating cheese, and go this way. Does this deal you've found work for USAers?
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

The problem, I'll admit, is me wanting one of the dumb things. The machine you saw, got feet away from and never had. The Unicorn. But it makes more numerical sense for me, I know, to just give the idea up until someone just hands me one and goes "this is so old, you can have it."
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

richmond62 wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 7:36 am As I grate cheese with a PPV Mac Mini I am not sure what you are maoning about.
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SShot 2022-09-17 at 10.36.00.png
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Poking about on British eBay [ebay.co.uk] I found this which will run MacOS 13 beta.
Entertain me; do you know what the model number of that Mac is? I'd like to run some searches against the model number in the US.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by richmond62 »

What? My PPC Mac Mini?

It runs MacOS 10.4 and you don't want to know.

My Intel Mac Mini?
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

richmond62 wrote: Sun Sep 18, 2022 8:29 am What? My PPC Mac Mini?

It runs MacOS 10.4 and you don't want to know.

My Intel Mac Mini?
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You're quite astute; and correct to boot.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

@richmond62 this look about right?

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_ ... specs.html

Was wondering what the identifiers are, this shows A1993 and EMC 3213 but that may be incorrect.

As far as the T2 chip goes, will the machine run macOS that *isn't* on the SSDish drive, to prepare in the event it were to expire?
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by richmond62 »

As far as the T2 chip goes, will the machine run macOS that *isn't* on the SSDish drive
To be honest, I don't know.

And I am not sure how, by running an OS on an external drive that would be of any great help.

At the moment I am running MacOS 13 beta something, and I suspect, looking at trends over the last few years, that
MacOS 13 will be the last version of MacOS that my 2018 Intel Mac Mini will run. This does not fuss me unduly as I am not an
obsessive type who feels the need to be at the cutting edge all the time.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

richmond62 wrote: Sun Sep 18, 2022 9:34 am
As far as the T2 chip goes, will the machine run macOS that *isn't* on the SSDish drive
To be honest, I don't know.

And I am not sure how, by running an OS on an external drive that would be of any great help.

At the moment I am running MacOS 13 beta something, and I suspect, looking at trends over the last few years, that
MacOS 13 will be the last version of MacOS that my 2018 Intel Mac Mini will run. This does not fuss me unduly as I am not an
obsessive type who feels the need to be at the cutting edge all the time.
Quite like you, I don't have to be cutting edge. SSD memory supposedly has a life-span of five to seven years. The idea (with USB-C) would be the ability to still use the machine.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by richmond62 »

Well, my wife had a G4 PPC Mac laptop and:

1. The internal HD went 'west'.

2. I could NOT find a way to fit a new HD inside
the laptop.

3. I glued a container with a HD inside it to the underside
of the laptop, used a USB cable and the thing lasted another 6 years.

So, as far as I can see, the 50,000 dollar question is in 2 parts:

1. Will the 2018 Mac Mini boot from an external HD?

2. What sort of connexion is needed: USB 2 or 3?
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... hard+drive

Early suggestions indicate "yes." I will want to look into it more though, and if I find out no instead, I will comment back.

Hehe your example though was the exact sort of thing I was thinking of. The SSD is going to be fastest, as long as it works, I haven't got a speed readout on its many connections, but if the internal drive packed up, I wouldn't want to be without a machine.

I'm actually on a Linux box right now with an SSD for the main drive and my entire home folder on spinning disk. Nobody's gotta tell me the speed difference, for shure, dude.

Thanks for "getting it."
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

Wow, though:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252658125

What in the name of $DEITY are they thinking? I would now rather have the mini you have vis a vis a brand new one, even if my choice were handed to me free of charge.

https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/37294-t ... n-for-you/
Real-world talk about the speed of Mac interfaces

Pick the fastest one that's OS X capable, connect things, off to the races.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by richmond62 »

That is horrible.

Apple may give one reason why they are doing that, but I believe the reason is another: so many rich folk are now buying Macs and will play 'pitch and toss' when their SSD goes phut, and Apple can rake in the shekels while landfills spill over with M1 Macs and Apple keep talking utter crap about their commitment to the environment.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by overclockedmind »

richmond62 wrote: Sun Sep 18, 2022 11:48 am That is horrible.

Apple may give one reason why they are doing that, but I believe the reason is another: so many rich folk are now buying Macs and will play 'pitch and toss' when their SSD goes phut, and Apple can rake in the shekels while landfills spill over with M1 Macs and Apple jeep talking utter crap about their commitment to the environment.
Next to all the Atari copies of ET, and maybe a few Lisas... probably not, but I agree.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by richmond62 »

Personally I have a 3 TB USB-2 HD connected to my Mac Mini (which only has a 125 GB internal drive) for storing all my 'crap'
(and there's a hell of a lot of it: both 'crap' and crap), but my Home partition and OS is on the inbuilt drive.

When I am feeling bored, clever and have the time (ouch) I may try to clone my internal drive onto an external
USB-2 (I have buckets of the things lying around), and see what that results it.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by tperry2x »

I had some success with doing the same thing with an iMac. The drive inside had died, and of course it's a sealed unit pretty much (the screens are bonded in with Apple Glue - or iGlue as we used to call it).
Anyway, I found the fastest method was to take a firewire to Sata connector to an SSD, and install the OS on that SSD (or a HDD if you can put up with slightly slower response times with the benefit of longevity).
Because it went through the Firewire bus at boot, I had to use rEFIt to select the external boot drive at power on, but it worked a treat and speed was no different. (I ended up gaffer-taping it to the back of the mac). Out of sight, out of mind.

A bit easier on the Mac Minis, but watch out for the temperature sensor cable, right next to the small apple-only sata ribbon cable. They are very delicate.

A cheese grater tower is suprisingly still capable of running a build of Mac OS X that is 64bit and has the benefit of testing for 10.9 upwards. If we build OpenXTalk for Mac OS X, how far back do we support? - are there enough people running 10.9 up to 10.15 as this is the x64 OS X target market I imagine. Technically x64 support started in 10.4.1 (as I have a rare copy of it here), but it really wasn't until snow leopard 10.6 that it started to gain traction - do we go back that far and support that? - genuine question by the way.
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Re: The Tale of Two Cheese Graters

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

overclockedmind wrote: Mon Sep 12, 2022 12:07 am MAC PRO 2.8_8CX/2x1GB/2600GT/320/SD/AP/M/K - Model A1186, EMC 2180
MAC PRO 3.0QX/2X512/7300GT/500/SD Model A1186, EMC 2113
Personally I wouldn't pay more than a few ($400 or so depending on what's in it) bucks USD for an Intel Mac Pro 2008-2012, and that's only if I had time and the will to shop eBay for server parts to max it out. You can actually mod those things into monster beast machines, fill those trays of ram slots, add in much newer (via a very simple mod) XEON CPUs, add in a newer beefy video card and maybe some OpenCore boot-loader tricks and you can be rocking the latest macOS versions!

You'd need to at least replace those video cards. 7300GT I don't think even has a 64bit KEXT, so I think the most you could hack/update to is macOS 10.11(?) if the GPU isn't replaced. The 2600GTs I think wouldn't work either because you need 'Metal' compatible video cards for newer macOS versions. Something to consider cost wise.
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