A fairer characterization would be to say it is in NeXTSTEP’s lineage. Not only had a lot changed by 10.0, but at this point Mac OS X has been under development (and forked into multiple OS projects several times over) more than twice as long as NeXT had existed as an independent entity.

Some ways in how the NeXTSTEP culture prevails in 2024.

Its approach to kernel design, the way drivers are written in a OOP based framework, UNIX is there as bottom layer (certified even) but doesn't get the spotlight, Objective-C (and now Swift) frameworks is all that matters for developers invested into the platform, heavy IDE based development (remember famous Sun vs NeXT 1990's commercial), what cool stuff can be done with OS frameworks (starting with products like Lotus Improv or Web Objects).

This is what I meant, not what NSSomething are still in use.

I gotchu and I understand what you mean, just assisting with clarity because it is more fair to say "Mac OS X has continued the lineage of NeXTSTEP" than it is to say "Mac OS X is basically NeXTSTEP."

Think about everything Mac OS X has or has had which NeXTSTEP has never had. DTrace, HFS+ and then APFS, Quartz replaced Display PostScript, OpenGL and Metal, IOKit replaced DriverKit and is now being functionally replaced (at least in part) by something called Driver Kit, Catalyst, SwiftUI, Quick Look, Spotlight, Safari/WebKit, Keychain, Xcode has replaced both Project Builder and Interface Builder, Core Audio, Core Animation, QuickTime and then QTKit and then AVFoundation, I mean the list goes on. Unicode is everywhere now too, which is neat; NeXTSTEP and Mac OS had their own character encodings.

Carbon was also a significant technology for the first few years, as was the first Rosetta (and we have Rosetta 2 now), and the Classic environment.

So, clarifying more than disagreeing. :)

Only under the hood unfortunately. It would be great to have a desktop OS aimed at professional use again, but everybody has been chasing the needs of the mythical "casual user" in the last few decades (which is basically the tiny cross section of the taste and requirements of all computer users lumped together, but that tiny cross section on its own is useless without being extensible and customizable to the needs of each specific user)

What are the features you’d say are required for “professional” use? I can think of a few things that I’d like to see, such as better keyboard navigation and the return of a spatial finder.

But I think that if you asked ten people that question (especially here), you’d get 11 different opinions. So the only option is something that covers a pretty minimalist overlap.

Mostly things that would hurt security unfortunately, e.g. opening up (maybe even requiring) each UI application to be scriptable and (to some extent at least) controlable from the command line (e.g. going full in on ideas like AppleScript and Automator instead of letting those go stale), getting rid of the stupid notarization requirements and quarantine mode for executables downloaded from the the internet, being able to extend OS features with system-wide plugins (e.g. installing new 'data types'), being able to extend the Finder with new features (similar to how TortoiseSVN integrated into the Windows explorer context menues), provide an official package manager (although Homebrew is mostly good enough).

E.g. there should be a toggle which says "this is my computer, I want to do with it what I want, and yes, I know the risks and won't sue Apple if things go sideways").

There kindo of is. Restart in recovery mode, open a terminal and type `csrutil disable`. Also, there are finder extensions that do what you suggest.

Upvoted for useful information that’s harder than it should be to find.

But “maybe brick my box if my hands shake in a weird mode with weird dots” isn’t what GP meant: those of us who are properly backed up and have great net connections can merrily pull stunts like that but it killed the “customize my Mac” apps and stuff, even to the tune of “same size and format of image, even bounce the hash off a server, just square corners”.

So it’s like “pretty sure I’m not driving to the Apple Store today” to “anyone who disagrees with us about shapes should be treated like malware”. That’s quite a leap.

Right now the hardware is such they can pull that: they bought out all the hot shit TSMC stuff.

But Intel 18a is sitting on people’s desks at least under a black cloth: you have to continue to lead on the fundamentals, and hackers liking your shit is maybe the most important one.