This is the perfect 'retro' Mac

I grew up using Mac computers, and for a long time, I've wanted something that would allow me to use all those old applications and games in a more convenient setup. I now have the perfect 'retro' Mac, at least for me: an upgraded Mid-2010 Mac Mini.

This compact low-power computer can run most Mac software from roughly 2001 to 2015 with excellent performance, older apps and games through unofficial emulation, and more modern software at slower speeds with a hacked macOS Sonoma installation. I couldn't be happier with it.

The hardware and upgrades

I bought this Mac Mini on eBay for a grand total of $85, complete with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a 320GB hard drive, and 8GB RAM upgraded from the base 2GB. There were a few minor scuffs on the case, but the computer was in perfect working order.

The mid-2010 Mac Mini still looks surprisingly modern, and it's using the same aluminum unibody design that Apple continued to use until the 2024 M4 Mac Mini. This older model has a slot-loading DVD drive in the front, while later unibody models have no optical drive. I was surprised to find out it still worked, as the disc drives in Mac computers are well known for failing after a few years.

The connectivity on this Mac Mini is a fun mix of old and new technology. There are four USB Type-A ports, but all of them are USB 2.0. There's Mini DisplayPort and HDMI for connecting a display, and the built-in NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics is powerful enough to support two displays at once. It supports resolutions of up to 1920x1200 on HDMI, and up to 2560x1600 on DisplayPort, but I haven't tested that. For wireless connectivity, there's Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 2.1, and Gigabit Ethernet is another option for networking.

The most interesting port here might be the FireWire 800 connector, which serves as the fastest data connection on the Mac Mini. It has blazing speeds of up to 800 Mbps and backwards compatibility with the original FireWire 400. It's difficult and expensive to connect legacy FireWire devices to more modern Macs, so even though I'll probably never use that port, I appreciate that it's there. I did try it out once by connecting my original iPod, and it showed up in iTunes as expected.

The Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor in this computer was intended for laptops, with just two cores, no hyperthreading, and a 25W TDP. My Geekbench 6 test came back with a single-core score of 312 and a multi-core score of 541. That's about 8% as fast as the latest base model M4 Mac Mini in single-core performance, and 4.1% as fast in multi-core performance.

After buying the Mac, I opened it up and replaced the 320GB hard drive with a 500GB Samsung 870 EVO SSD. Unlike modern Mac Minis, this has a standard SATA connection for storage, so you can easily put any 2.5" HDD or SSD in there. Thanks to Garage Maxed Out for the excellent video tutorial.

The software is the key

Apple handles backwards compatibility much differently than Microsoft and the PC ecosystem. While you can run many legacy applications and games on the latest version of Windows 11, going back to software from the 1990s, the same is not true on Mac.

Since the first Macintosh in 1984, Apple has gone through three major hardware architecture transitions (68k to PowerPC, PowerPC to Intel, and Intel to Apple Silicon) and one major software transition (classic Mac OS to Mac OS X/macOS). Each of those migrations included some level of backwards compatibility, but only for a few years. For example, Mac OS X was released in 2001, and included the Classic environment for running older Mac OS 9 software. The Classic environment was ripped out with the release of Mac OS X 10.5 in 2007, and it was never ported to Intel Macs, which started shipping in 2006.

I chose this specific Mac Mini model because this is the last model that supported the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system—the next 2011 Mac Mini shipped with OS X 10.7 Lion and cannot be downgraded. Snow Leopard was the last version of Mac OS X to support the Rosetta compatibility layer, which allowed PowerPC Mac OS X applications and games to run on Intel Macs through an invisible emulation layer.

With Mac OS X Snow Leopard installed, this Mac Mini can run most Mac apps and games released from around 2001 to roughly the mid-2010s, when most software started dropping support for Snow Leopard. The earliest software runs in the Rosetta compatibility layer, and later Intel-based Mac software runs natively. That's roughly 15 years of Mac software accessible in one shared environment. No copying files back and forth between virtual hard drives required.

I can also use SheepShaver or Basilisk II to emulate the classic Mac operating system, but there's not much software exclusive to the classic Mac OS that I want to run, and those emulators run just as well on a modern PC or Mac. Installing a newer version of Mac OS X/macOS on another partition or drive would also allow the Mini to run newer software—more on that later.

It's worth noting that a Hackintosh running Mac OS X Snow Leopard would have the same application support, but I didn't have a spare PC with the right hardware for that. Turning a PC into a Hackintosh means finding the hardware drivers, which is even harder with older macOS versions. It didn't make sense for me to buy a PC that might be compatible when I could just get an officially-supported Mac Mini for under $100.

Hello, Snow Leopard

This Mac Mini arrived with a newer version of macOS installed, so I had to downgrade it to Snow Leopard. This would normally require the recovery discs that shipped with the Mac Mini, but I don't have those. I couldn't use the standard Snow Leopard DVD either, because that was 10.6.0, and support for this model was only added in 10.6.4. Intel Macs have an internet-based recovery, but the earliest available version from Apple's servers was 10.7 Lion.

Thankfully, Internet Archive came to the rescue. I downloaded a Mac OS X 10.6.4 Install DVD intended for a different iMac model, and wrote it to a USB drive. The Mac Mini had no complaints booting from the USB drive and going through the installation process. The built-in Software Update brought me up to 10.6.8 and updated some system components.

I used Snow Leopard a lot back when it was new, and it's been a lot of fun to revisit. It still feels remarkably modern, with many of the same core applications and system features that you'd find in modern Mac computers today: the Finder, Spotlight search, TextEdit, Preview, and so on. One notable exception is that the Dashboard with its customizable widgets is still present—Apple ripped that out in macOS 10.15. Also, this still has the System Preferences instead of the later System Settings app.

I'm still a big fan of Snow Leopard's design, where Apple had started to phase out the "Aqua" design language of early Mac OS X with a more gray-and-white aesthetic. For the most part, this predated Apple's skeuomorphism era, though elements of that philosophy are visible in applications like GarageBand. It might be the nostalgia talking, but I think Snow Leopard looks better visually than modern versions of macOS, with more distinctive and visible UI elements that don't blend into window backgrounds.

Snow Leopard is lightning fast on this computer. It only takes nine seconds to get from the OpenCore bootloader to the desktop, and most apps open in under a few seconds.

Finally, Mac OS X Snow Leopard is still somewhat compatible with modern technology. I can connect to my regular home network with the Mini's integrated Wi-Fi 4 chip, and use pretty much any flash drive or USB device (as long as it supports USB 2.0). I can turn on File Sharing and connect to it from a modern Mac over AFP. However, it can't connect to my NAS with SMB, because Snow Leopard doesn't have SMB 2.0 support.

Living the iLife

Apple used to bundle iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, GarageBand, and other creative apps together in the 'iLife' software bundle, which was pre-installed on new Macs and available as paid packages. I don't remember exactly what versions I used back in the day, so I just downloaded iLife '09. It's a Universal binary, so it runs natively on this Intel Mac with excellent performance.

I probably won't be making any home movies in iMovie or managing my photo library through iPhoto, but I do plan on making a website with iWeb and hosting it somewhere with GitHub Pages. I missed out on the Geocities era of the early internet, but I did make a few sites with iWeb when it was new, before I switched to Adobe GoLive and Dreamweaver.

My next nostalgia trip was installing Microsoft Office 2004 and 2011, with Office 2004 running in emulation under Rosetta, and Office 2011 being an Intel-native package. I made a lot of school papers and presentations with these versions. The icons for Office 2011 were also the best Office icons of all time.

All the apps seem to run well, and Office 2004 also included a Mac version of Windows Media Player. Finally, I can watch all my .WMV movies.

I have installed a few more apps and games, but nothing I've spent more than a few hours with so far. I have Civilization III, the last-supported version of Firefox for Snow Leopard (v48.0.2), Quake III, and some I SPY puzzle games.

Bonus objective: macOS Sonoma

I occasionally need an Intel-based Mac for testing software, so I wanted to see if I could dual-boot a more modern macOS on the 2010 Mini, alongside the existing Snow Leopard installation. I have a mid-2014 Mini that I've been using for that purpose, but the hard drive is dying and it doesn't have much RAM.

The mid-2010 Mac Mini can officially run up to macOS High Sierra 10.13, but that's still seven years out of date. Thankfully, the OpenCore Legacy Patcher project allows newer versions to be installed on old Macs. It can create a bootable USB image for the macOS installer, then install patches and additional drivers as needed for a given model. As Gene Kranz would say, "I don't care what anything was designed to do. I care about what it can do."

The mid-2010 Mac Mini is supported, but keyboards and mice have to go through a USB 2.0 hub, and graphics acceleration uses a custom driver that might have some issues. I decided to try installing macOS Sonoma, which was the newest version supported at the time—the latest version can do macOS Sequoia.

I could not get OpenCore Legacy Patcher to work from my modern M1 Mac, even when making the initial USB drive manually and only using Legacy Patcher to install drivers. I'm not sure if it was because I was using a computer on a different architecture than the install target, or some other issue. I finally pulled my 2014 Mini out of my closet, and set up OpenCore Legacy Patcher on there—thankfully, the app can run on OS X Yosemite 10.10 and later. It worked on the first try.

I finally had my USB drive with patched macOS Sonoma ready for the Mac Mini. I booted it up, and... more problems. The installer didn't detect my Mini's internal drive at all. A forum thread suggested resetting the Mac's PRAM, and that worked. The installer could finally start, but it stopped on "one minute remaining." Another PRAM reset and reboot fixed that, and I finally got to the post-install setup screen. It stopped again at the language selection.

I continued through the setup process, rebooting and resetting the PRAM each time something got stuck. Every reboot brought me one step closer, until at long last, my epic journey was complete: I reached the desktop. I now had two versions of macOS released 14 years apart running on the same 14 year-old Mac.

The macOS Sonoma experience isn't great on this ancient hardware, but the modern SSD and maxed-out 8GB of RAM is helping. Safari takes around three seconds to open, and browsing the web is slow but usable, as long as I stick to one or two tabs. I have no problems chatting in the native Discord application, outside of the short delay when switching channels, and web apps like Spotify and Google Maps work fine through Safari.

The Activity Monitor confirms the ancient Intel CPU is the main bottleneck here: it's close to 100% utilization as soon as I try do any multitasking or load a complex web app. I wouldn't want to use this for everyday work, but it's enough to test Intel builds of my Nexus Tools installer without digging out another computer.

There are some interesting side effects to dual-booting Mac OS X Snow Leopard and macOS Sonoma. The Snow Leopard partition uses the HFS+ file system, while Sonoma partition uses the Apple File System (APFS), which wasn't added to Mac computers until macOS 10.13 High Sierra. I can see Snow Leopard's files in Sonoma, but I can't see Sonoma's files in Snow Leopard. I also have to reset the PRAM once or twice when switching from Snow Leopard to Sonoma, otherwise I get a startup error.

The perfect retro Mac

I now have a computer that can run just about all the old Mac software I could want, from early 2000s games and productivity software to mid-2010s creative apps. It's nearly silent, incredibly power-efficient, and super fast. I can connect new and old accessories, and moving files back and forth is as simple as clicking the Mac in my network devices list. Even better, it can be a modern Mac when needed—just a very slow one.

I know some people see spinning hard disk noises, translucent plastic, CRT monitors, and era-appropriate accessories as required components for retro computing. All that stuff can be fun, but for this project, I wanted a fast and accessible way to revisit my computing past in a way emulators or my older PowerMac G3 can't handle well.

I hope some of this may be useful to other people creating their own 'retro' Mac setups. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to finish the last puzzles in I SPY Spooky Mansion Deluxe.