They made it so "user-friendly" it is no longer user-friendly.

MacOS X peaked in being user friendly with Tiger.

I vehemently disagree, Snow Leopard was the champion.

Fellow Snow Leopard fan here. Best version of any OS, ever, in my estimation.

+1

I wasn’t even on a Mac at the time but I was highly impressed by it. I modded the hell out of Windows to match SL visually.

I’m looking forward to the next SL release, assuming it ever happens.

+1... And the last one without cloud pushed down your throat

I was a college student the time and decided to spend hundreds of dollars on the SSD upgrade (going from 500gb HDD to 128gb SSD) for my Macbook Pro. Best decision ever. It was amazing to see the machine booting completely to the desktop in under 10 seconds, not even my M1 MAX MPB boots that quickly.

Snow Leopard ruined things. Tiger was the best. /s

(Get off my lawn)

In recent years I've been using the search bar a lot anyway, since the modal nature of the old System Preferences app wasn't great for quickly checking through several settings screens. And I often forget where some settings are — the taxonomy is not always so clear.

The new Settings app seems like an improvement to me. The vertical list of settings categories is easier to quickly scan, and it remains visible all the time. That alone is a great improvement, and makes it quite a bit easier to navigate the (huge) list of available settings.

>The new Settings app seems like an improvement to me.

While using Gnome's style for the settings application is a huge improvement, the implementation is laggy and doesn't scroll smoothly. And it takes a while for each Stack item to load and render when it's selected. x86_64 here.

Yeah, the items could load more snappily. On my M1 there's a delay (0.2 – 0.5 seconds?) between clicking an item and it showing up — enough to make it feel annoyingly laggy.

I haven't used Gnome in decades. To me it looks just like the iPad Settings app, or iPhone's in horizontal mode.

I gave up a while ago trying to remember in which preference pane each setting was. There are just too many buttons that are moved every other version. I cannot live without Spotlight in system preferences.

I gave up when a bunch of easily-accessible settings for mouses/mousepads/keyboards went to the "Accessibility" pane. It was annoying to see the Accessibility pane become a catch-all pane for power-user features...

iOS does this too. Why is disabling "Tap to wake" in the Accessibility settings? That should be with the Display or Lock Screen settings.