Mastodawn

DevKitsune 🦊 🏳️‍🌈1d ago

Steve Troughton-Smith

Before the 12" MacBook, before the 11" MacBook Air, there was the 9" ASUS Eee PC hackintosh, and there were a number of new-to-macOS developers in our community who learned how to develop for iPhone on this very setup, and started their careers from it.

The Eee PC 901 netbook was priced at, you guessed it, the same $599 as the brand-new incredibly-powerful MacBook Neo

Dave Klein Mar 13

@stroughtonsmith 2009 I had the Dell Mini 9! https://flickr.com/photos/tehdik/3469558956/in/photolist-6hAp11

Guillaume Ross Mar 13

@dk @stroughtonsmith MSI Wind Hackintosh checking in. Had to use an external monitor to go to system preferences cause some of the panes were too high for the crappy resolution.

Wasn't that young, but was at a point where I could not afford a proper Mac and yet still wanted to use macOS.

Monty Hayter 🇨🇦Mar 13

@dk @stroughtonsmith I was just about to mention the Mini 9, we had one as well, also running macOS.

Wonderful little device, I’m perpetually tempted to try and find one again.

matthewjn Mar 13

@montyhayter @dk @stroughtonsmith I might have to go look for mine. I'm sure its somewhere in my house. Mine just ran Windows. I think it had a Vodafone SIM in for a while, which was cool at the time.

@dk that looks better than Liquid Glass.

Wade McGillis Mar 13

@dk @stroughtonsmith same

Jeffrey Bergier Mar 15

@dk @stroughtonsmith ah! back then I had the same Dell Mini 9 running Snow Leopard! It's not on, but you can see it on my college-era desk https://jeffburg.social/@jeff/115183762935650631

Jeffrey Bergier (@[email protected])

Attached: 3 images I was going through old photos to find pictures of my old tech. I want to make a long blog post about this, but it will take a while. So for now I will share some highlights I found of my desk I had in college. It has: - Aluminum 20" iMac with external 24" monitor - Dell Mini 9 Netbook Snow Leopard Hackintosh - NeXT Cube Sorry in advance for blurry photos, but digital cameras sucked back then. #OpenStep 1/3

Jeff's Blog Space

Dave Klein Mar 15

@jeff @stroughtonsmith NeXT Cube!

Jeffrey Bergier 6d ago

@dk nice! Do you still have yours?? I dumped mine when I moved to Japan. I regret but at the same time don’t regret it haha.

Dave Klein 6d ago

@jeff yup that’s it on my desk. doesn’t boot unfortunately. someday I’ll have the courage to open it up and see why. Japan?!

Jeffrey Bergier 6d ago

@dk nice! Well feel free to join http://nextcommunity.net/forums/index.php if you want help doing that. We’re all pretty active when people have questions.

NeXTcommunity - Index

NeXTcommunity - Index

NeXTcommunity

Dave Klein 6d ago

@jeff wonderful! will do.

Jeffrey Bergier 6d ago

@dk and why Japan? I lived in San Francisco, but I wanted to live in a bigger city. I had job offers in New York and Tokyo. But I had forgotten how dirty and loud New York was until I visited for the interview. So I took a leap of faith.

Lucky for me I have grown to like it more and more. I don't think I could move back at this point. My personality is that I am just incredibly particular... and Tokyo is perfect for that 🤣

Dave Klein 6d ago

@jeff delighted to hear!

Alpacheez Mar 13

@stroughtonsmith I bought an eeePC 1001p on April 22, 2010 for USD 301.78 including shipping for use in Grad school. That would be ~$450 now

atomicangel Mar 13

@stroughtonsmith

I had an Acer netbook that took to Snow Leopard just fine and ran that until I could afford a full desktop #hackintosh. That’s what started me into liking Apple initially and I still keep coming back to Macs today despite my love for #Linux.

@stroughtonsmith man, I miss mine

@stroughtonsmith when the Neo was initially rumoured it was said to have white coloured bezels. I can see the cutout for the camera here and that’s why Apple probably dropped that idea!

Fantinel85 Mar 13

@stroughtonsmith Today with half the purchasing power. 🤡

John Wells Mar 13

@stroughtonsmith I suspect that a significant chunk of the strength of both Apple’s dev and user bases are owed to the hackintosh scene. More than Apple would ever dare to admit.

For example a lot of the more visible participants were pro audio people who had outgrown their old cheese grater towers but weren’t adequately served by the trash can Mac Pro. That’s a bunch of people who would’ve otherwise jumped ship.

@johnwells @stroughtonsmith The number of *Apple employees* who originate from the Hackintosh world is above zero. I personally know this, as I am sure Steve does as well.

@stroughtonsmith I miss the 901 still.
Now there's the GPD Pocket 4, but it's not the same.
Whould have loved some newer hardware in there.

@stroughtonsmith The Macbook Neo (2026) has the compute power of the iPhone 16 (2024) because it has literally the same SoC.

I wonder how the eeePC (2008) compares to the iPhone 1 (2007) in raw performance.

adamrice Mar 13

@Peetz0r @stroughtonsmith eeePC benchmark: https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/2743195
iphone 16 benchmark: https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-16

Asus EEE PC 701 - Geekbench

Benchmark results for an ASUSTeK Computer INC. 701 with an Intel Celeron M 900MHz processor.

@adamrice @stroughtonsmith Yes but how does that compare to the iPhone 1 (or any other smartphone from 2007-2008).

Steve Troughton-Smith Mar 13

@adamrice @Peetz0r you can't remotely compare a Geekbench 2 result to Geekbench 6, but just for fun I can convert it. The most recent Geekbench 2 result I have is an iPhone 6, which I have benchmarked on GB5. And I can bench the MacBook Neo on GB5 too.

Neo: 2394
iPhone 6: 327

For a 7.32x multiplier.

So the MacBook Neo would be 17,868 in GB2 numbers, or 22.6X the performance of the eeePC, per core

(Naturally, you can't directly convert between GB results, but fun experiment)

adamrice Mar 13

@stroughtonsmith @Peetz0r Thanks for that.

@stroughtonsmith the purchase power back then was a heck of a lot bigger.

Michael Engel Mar 13

@stroughtonsmith I used a Medion Akoya E1210 10" netbook with a single-core Intel Atom N450 and 2 GB of RAM to run Snow Leopard – I think this thing cost about 250€ in 2008 at my local Aldi supermarket. It was quite useable, the only problem was that some application windows were too tall for the 1024 x 600 display.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSI_Wind_Netbook

MSI Wind Netbook - Wikipedia

Raj 🇬🇧🇪🇺💻🖥(🌻🇺🇦;🇵🇸)Mar 13

@stroughtonsmith It was? I bought mine for something like 99 quid.

@stroughtonsmith The cool part about *early* Hackintosh was how much knowledge about OS X internals you had to gain in order for things to work well. A crash course in the operating system.

Kind of like early Linux, except the reward was 'Mac OS X, a thing that people want' instead of....Linux....

@stroughtonsmith super early Hackintosh sometimes began with 'build Darwin from source with this set of patches so that <your weird chipset/processor family that Apple never shipped> works right.

If you were on a P4 Prescott or an nForce chipset/Intel Core, glhf

@stroughtonsmith When I was in High School, I started learning iOS Development and using Xcode via a macOS virtual machine on a Windows 7 machine. It was so slow. 😭 😂

@stroughtonsmith Ooooh. I had one ! I think it’s still somewhere around…

@stroughtonsmith my first Mac was a hackintosh AMD notebook which was a worse experience than this in every way

Sassinake!Mar 13

@stroughtonsmith

netbooks!

until Windows killed the market

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦Mar 14

@stroughtonsmith i had one of those! miss it so much. it was a workhorse.

@stroughtonsmith Nice timing. I just unearthed my old eee PC when cleaning out my server cabinet last week. Cute, rugged little thing, with a pretty blue lid, but the keyboard was always quite cramped.

Mike Cane 2d ago

@stroughtonsmith These netbooks were generally ghastly.

[kai engelhardt];4h ago

@stroughtonsmith Yes, that’s how I got started! I installed 10.5 and then 10.6 on my EEE PC 1008ha. Later purchased the 2008 MacBook from my physics teacher.