Author: buzz gong

Apple gives away an astonishing amount of its development environment for free. So what exactly does $99 a year buy—and when does it begin to matter? In 2005 or 2006, I walked into the Apple Store on Third Street Promenade, bought myself a Mac, brought it home and plugged it in. Then something unexpected happened.…

Google stopped building software for PowerPC Macs a long time ago. That doesn’t mean Google disappeared from them. Fire up a PowerPC Mac running Tiger today and one fact becomes obvious very quickly: The modern internet has moved on. Open an old browser and websites complain. Security standards have changed. Video may refuse to play.…

There is something wonderfully strange about gaming on an older Mac. A machine that Apple stopped selling decades ago can still open a game, hand you the controls and quietly ask: Would you like to play? No subscription screen. No monthly fee. No season pass. Sometimes not even an installer. At Apple Retro, we’ve been…

A native Tiger application connects vintage Apple hardware with today’s AI services—and Apple Retro has begun putting it through its paces. Artificial intelligence on a PowerPC Mac? Yes. That’s the wonderfully improbable premise behind Pantheon 1.0, a new native AI client created specifically for PowerPC Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or later. And…

You don’t have to put your face on camera to make an iSight useful. Apple’s original iSight camera is easy to look at today as a relic from an earlier age of video conferencing. Plug one into a vintage Mac, point it toward yourself and—if the old software and services cooperate—you have a webcam. But…