Was waiting to see all different colors of iMac G3 in the high resolution device icons, but alas.
I believe those icons are used in Network places if a device with a known model is on the local network. The BSOD device would represent Windows PCs with network shares, of course! I also recall seeing the Xserve icon for a qnap NAS on our network.
That blue-screen icon is used for network shares that happen to be running Windows. I'd imagine a bunch of the other icons are also used for other types of network shares.
How does the Finder determine the model of the remote host? This is metadata in the _device-info._tcp Bonjour service record that is the server advertises. My Synology helpfully shows up as an Xserve, in fact:
$ dns-sd -L "synology" _device-info._tcp local
Lookup synology._device-info._tcp.local
DATE: ---Thu 07 Aug 2025---
0:24:28.117 ...STARTING...
0:24:28.378 synology._device-info._tcp.local. can be reached at synology.local.:0 (interface 14)
model=Xserve
I encountered this when setting up a Time Machine volume for my wife. In samba shares you can set that value in smb.conf by adding
fruit:model=ModelX,Y
MacOS will accept plenty of device names that perhaps don't make sense for file servers (I have mine set to Watch6,18), but it makes sense realizing that Bonjour is used for a lot more than just network volumes.
Not sure why this is so remarkable. You can find similar assets on Windows buried in explorer.exe or shell32.dll. Hell just poking around my win10 install and I see winhlp32.exe and write.exe sporting their original Windows 3.x icons (though the programs themselves do not function)
My guess is that it's cheapest and lowest-risk to leave them in. It's not like most users are going to encounter them anyway.
Re: Apple Symbols – the symbols aren't _too_ anachronistic: the font dates from Panther (10.3), which ran on all New World Macs (IIRC) – and indeed the B&W Power Mac G3 did have ADB (the "branch" icon at location (2, 2)), external SCSI (the icon at (10, 2)); while the "Lombard" PowerBook G3 had a reset interrupt switch (icon at (6, 7).
That being said, if you know why there are icons for the "programmer's switch" icon (6, 6) and LocalTalk (at (2, 8)), which died out with the Old World Macs, send answers on a postcard...
> Mac history echoes in current Mac operating systems
Echoes like, if you look really closely, how window management without third-party tools is as garbage in 2025 as it was in 1984. Never change, love you Mac.
I'm not sure why the blogger thinks it's weird that macOS has an icon for the iPhone 3G in it. It's for when I plug my iPhone 3G into my M4 Mac to sync my music, as I did just this past weekend.
I also synced one of my iPod Shuffles over the weekend, and can tell you there's also still icons for all of the Shuffles back to the original gum stick ones, and all of the various colors of the other models, plus all of the regular iPods.
Shuffles are great for listening to music in bed because you don't have to worry about rolling over on them.
I used Macs from the 1980s up to 2000 or so, and I was very familiar with that icon of a hand with a tray and some files, but it wasn’t until today that I realised that it was a pun on ‘server’ used to mean what my dialect of English terms a ‘waiter.’
There’s probably a lesson about i18n in there somewhere!
What’s funny to me is how characterless I thought the half-volleyball iMac was at the time, compared to the classic Bondi blue iMac (and its awesome color variations too), but now when I compare it to Apple’s current offerings it has so very much more character. I miss the days of shape and colour and texture.
Apple devices still autocorrect "Emacs" (text editor) to "eMacs" (more than one early 2000s Apple educational-market all-in-one computer). I see the latter frequently on Hackernews and Reddit.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] threadI believe those icons are used in Network places if a device with a known model is on the local network. The BSOD device would represent Windows PCs with network shares, of course! I also recall seeing the Xserve icon for a qnap NAS on our network.
I don't suppose someone can stick them up somewhere?
The Finder shows these icons for network volumes.
How does the Finder determine the model of the remote host? This is metadata in the _device-info._tcp Bonjour service record that is the server advertises. My Synology helpfully shows up as an Xserve, in fact:
While the normal file server showed up as a CRT with the legally distinct windows blue screen
My guess is that it's cheapest and lowest-risk to leave them in. It's not like most users are going to encounter them anyway.
That being said, if you know why there are icons for the "programmer's switch" icon (6, 6) and LocalTalk (at (2, 8)), which died out with the Old World Macs, send answers on a postcard...
Why not the simpler version that they care less about maintenance and cleaning up obscure corners of the OS?
Echoes like, if you look really closely, how window management without third-party tools is as garbage in 2025 as it was in 1984. Never change, love you Mac.
I also synced one of my iPod Shuffles over the weekend, and can tell you there's also still icons for all of the Shuffles back to the original gum stick ones, and all of the various colors of the other models, plus all of the regular iPods.
Shuffles are great for listening to music in bed because you don't have to worry about rolling over on them.
I used Macs from the 1980s up to 2000 or so, and I was very familiar with that icon of a hand with a tray and some files, but it wasn’t until today that I realised that it was a pun on ‘server’ used to mean what my dialect of English terms a ‘waiter.’
There’s probably a lesson about i18n in there somewhere!
What’s funny to me is how characterless I thought the half-volleyball iMac was at the time, compared to the classic Bondi blue iMac (and its awesome color variations too), but now when I compare it to Apple’s current offerings it has so very much more character. I miss the days of shape and colour and texture.