Download these 20 Mac OS 9 wallpapers and party like it's 1999

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Mac Os 9 Screenshot
Mac Os 9 Screenshot (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

  • You can download 20 glorious Mac OS 9 wallpapers and the world will be a little bit better.

Sometimes life's all about the little joys that we can find and picking a great new wallpaper for your computer is one of those joys. Now you can relive the Mac OS 9 days by using one of its wallpapers – but with a very 2020 twist.

Apple's unofficial historical Stephen Hackett has been able to get hold of the Mac OS 9 wallpapers and then upscale them using the magic of machine learning. The results are pretty amazing, making some of the most fabulous wallpapers you're going to see any time soon.

I pulled the originals out of an OS 9 installer then used Pixelmator Pro's ML Super Resolution tool, running on a new M1 MacBook Air … which gave my 2019 Mac Pro a run for its money rendering these.

Mac Os 9 Wallpaper Grid

Mac Os 9 Wallpaper Grid (Image credit: Stephen Hackett)

Here's how Pixelmator's ML magic was described last year.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty technical stuff, let's get right to the point and take a look at some examples of what ML Super Resolution can do. Until now, if you had opened up the Image menu and chosen Image Size, you would've found three image scaling algorithms — Bilinear, Lanczos (lan-tsosh, for anyone curious), and Nearest Neighbor, so we'll compare our new algorithm to those three.

"Computer, enhance!"

Go get the wallpapers direct from 512Pixels they're absolutely gorgeous.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.