Tiger: Great new UI. Spotlight. Dashboard. Leopard: Quick Look. Time Machine. I hated it from a functional perspective, but wow it looked amazing. Snow Leopard: They just cleaned up everything.
10.6.8 was pretty good, but I've had similar stability on Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9). I think Snow Leopard has developed a legacy partly because Lion (10.7) was pretty bad, and partly because Snow Leopard was the last release to support Rosetta.
Then again, Yosemite (10.10) was also really bad, and I seem to be the only one who thinks Mavericks was the actual pinnacle. *Shrug*
I have a neice who was born in 96. When she was 10 or so I found out she was listening to both Green Day and Patsy Kline with essentially equal interest.
That's when I got this idea.
She was born entirely after not only the existense of recordings that go back at least a few generations, not only after the existense of the internet, but after the mass adoption of the internet, digital copies of recordings, and countless distribution means, both centralized and peer to peer. The essential nature was not that different from today, the day she was born, let alone 10 years later.
For me, Patsy Kline was only on the oldies station at my grandmas house and the barber shop and which actually called itself the oldies station, and my parents wouldn't be caught dead listening to Green Day.
For my neice they are both just content.
I can go from Yes, to Twenty One Pilots, to Kansas, to TheFatRat, to Johnny Cash, to random youtuber, to Linkin Park, to Guns 'n Roses, to Elvis, and so on.
They're all just there, there's good stuff from every time period - why would you limit yourself?
Oh and don’t forget auto-tune ;) Although there are a few examples of it being used for pitch correction before 2000 (+ that Cher song), it wasn’t until the 2000’s that it got ratcheted up to T-Pain levels.
As if we lived in the Matrix.
As I recall, per the HIG, the official line on brushed metal was that it was for apps that interacted with physical hardware in some direct way: portable music players, synch. managers, optical drives, disks, something. Now if you think that’s vague, you’re not wrong; most apps could at least print something, and it wasn’t applied consistently even within the iLife suite which up until the inclusion of iWeb consisted entirely of apps that were intended to bring the Mac and peripheral devices together (CDs, digital cameras, MP3 Players/iPods, DV cameras, SuperDrives, MIDI). This vagueness and the low popularity of brushed metal Safari in particular was one of the reasons the brushed metal theming was retired after Tiger.
Anyway, I used Firefox and Camino around that time.
The aluminum stuff all came about just immediately prior to (about one or two month’s prior) or after Leopard’s release, but Tiger’s era (and Brushed Metal didn’t start on Tiger) was dominated by plastic input devices.
Tiger was solid - Leopard was where it was at. Snow Leopard may be my favourite, but as I can’t run it on any of my PPC systems I have no excuse to run it anymore.
There were hacks for absolutely everything. Simpler times...
When they moved them into a row and changed the way multi-screen worked it completely lost its usefulness for me. Before that I always used a 3x3 grid. It was one of the many ways macOS evolved against the grain for me.
Other major regressions: LaunchPad (cool for iPad users I guess but completely ridiculous on a 24" screen - Even Microsoft moved back from this). The incessant power saving tricks imposed that are all but impossible to switch off (I use mainly desktops so I care about performance, not battery). Notarisation, every app calling home to Apple every time it's run.. Wtf. Then there was Apple "Server" which became more of a joke with every release (the Leopard version was the last real one).
But really what it told me was that I hate an OS where every year some people sit around a table and decide what I should want changed, and offer no way to choose. In other words: I hate opinionated software.
I recently moved to KDE and wow, it's so amazing to have all the things I missed back. And also a more useful expose-style function again though the relative window sizing is unfortunately something it doesn't do.
64-bit started for me back when the G5 came out, and today that G5 screams, easily feeling as responsive as my girlfriend’s M1 MacBook Air most of the time.
It’s almost unbelievable how the G5 performs like it’s got bloody Sonic the Hedgehog trapped in there on a hamster wheel generator. My Intel machines never came close, and a lot of it seemed to have to do with major bloat as the OS moved along. Probably also bloat in Logic. My G5 can handle the hell of a lot more effects and VSTs with about 50% the impact they have on my Intel machines. It’s surreal.
I also find it absolutely pathetic and astounding that up until this year (16 inch MBP excluded) the maximum RAM a MacBook could have was the equivalent of a computer I got in 2005. 15 years later I still couldn’t get even 32GB RAM in a MacBook. And it was soldered so it couldn’t be upgraded. Shameful.
But yeah these things were beasts. The dual-CPU and then the dual dual-core were seriously impressive. I really wanted one at the time but could not justify it. I finally got one for €100 2 years ago, now it sits next to a G4 Cube. Both are some exceptional pieces of engineering.
Or there was a hack to backport certain things from Snow Leopard onto Leopard PPC...
It is real Snow Leopard with a Snow Leopard kernel, but a lot of components are copied over from Leopard, and there are still a lot of issues. I'm not clear as to whether or not anyone has gotten graphics acceleration working, for example—it certainly doesn't work on most models.
Fun fact: OS X Public Beta had an Easter egg setting that I can’t quite remember, defaults write com.Apple.something or other, that would set all Cocoa apps to a straight-up NeXTSTEP appearance. It completely broke usability, though, as windows would minimize into little squares in the corner of the screen a la NS rather than into the dock.
Wow I've never read about this -- know of any screenshots? Would be really interesting to see what some of the default OS X apps looked with the NeXTSTEP appearance.
https://macosx-dev.omnigroup.narkive.com/WZX5AkMk/extras-rsr...
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosxdp2
I also like to use Jagwire's Extras.rsrc on Tiger to get my sweet sweet pinstripes back: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/jaguar-ui-on-tiger-proj...
Even though we have many gaping holes in the details of the current UI due to the many paradigms (SwiftUI, AppKit, Catalyst), skin-deep macOS is much more agreeable.
Cocoa apps are mostly fine in modern macOS. Their main issues are the lack of contrast*, but things like the dark theme are great. From what I have seen SwiftUI is fine too, although it still has some way to go to catch up with AppKit, and has some rough edges. Catalyst is plain garbage, though.
* a pet peeve: I have to click 3 times when I want to make sure that the shuffle mode is either on or off in Music. Another one: document proxy icons are getting hidden and harder to use, even though they are a fantastic feature of the OS. There's a bunch of others features that are becoming more and more obscure, which is a damn shame.
It's not just apple, its everything in big tech. Venmo just released an update where they moved key workflows around for no reason at all, and now I don't have muscle memory for the app anymore, but I'm sure some project manager justified it with telemetry and got a huge bonus for rolling out an update and showing downloads grew by 1% (which they probably would have anyway).
If you'd let people mix and match elements from different eras of macOS, I'm sure you'd see some patterns regardless of when people got into Macs; similar to how people have lots of abstract opinions about architecture, but somehow the tourist buses always stop at the same cozy-looking old towns. Beauty and usability are not entirely subjective.
But more importantly, they existence of change is inherently important to the large-scale advancement of computing over time. Even if it is the case that a certain UI overhaul of a major operating system harmed productivity, the solution is not “permanently halt all software changes after this specific version that I have learned and enjoy using.” We ought to reject arguments that forced stasis is the solution any time changes introduce risk.
We also ought to reject the idea that forced change is the solution.
Look at the MacOS release feature lists before and after the iPhone. It's pretty clear that the Mac teams got cannibalized and didn't recover for years.
Mobile platforms benefit more from high contrast, very simple and flat designs.
Beyond just the touch screen convenience features -- A significant portion of users is seeig their UI under conditions of extreme sunlight, water droplets, or cracked screen at any given time. These things all inform design choices for mobile.
Now then, why is Apple making the same mistake as Microsoft Windows 8 by forcing these design elements onto Desktop and Laptop market segments? Apple doesn't really think of the PC market much. According to their financial reports, they make more money selling chargers for their mobile devices than they do on the entire PC market.
The answer, I assume, is apathy.
This design move is at this point getting to be a decade old. So this explanation from you makes zero sense.
I was mostly describing my feelings and guesses of it.
Tiger was a big improvement. And, the earlier versions of OS X still look way better than what we have now.