I get the same feeling when doing a fresh install+boot of both OS X 10.9 Mavericks and Windows 7. They're just so much more pleasant than what we have now.
It'd be nice if modern desktop operating systems took a lesson or two from their past selves.
EDIT: I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is basically everything that's wrong with the computer(-adjacent) industry. We can appreciate the problem statement by asking "why would anyone want to make a computer be a phone?" The answer is a terminal case of a particularly defensive form of groupthink. It goes something like this:
(1) "everyone is talking about the iPhone" (2) "i need to feel relevant, ergo i must make phone noises too"
then they rub these two neurons together, and since it's the only two they got it isn't hard for them, and this process repeats a few generations and like a nuclear chain reaction soon enough the entire industry is trying to make everything be a fucking phone.
It shouldn't be like that.
EDIT2: As a species we don't play these games with other tools. Cars--some super early attempts had weird shit like tillers for steering but we quickly outgrew that idea and settled on the steering wheel, levers for the other hand, and pedals for the feet. Same with airplanes and tracked vehicles (bulldozers, tanks, etc). Same with machine tools. This stupid game people are playing with computer interfaces these days is fundamentally inhuman.
These massive ""finger-friendly"" buttons don't make any sense on a traditional desktop with a mouse, but it makes a ton of sense when you realize the designers were likely designing for mobile and/or touchscreen integration at the same time.
Can't learn an evolution of the UI paradigm if you subconsciously feel your eyes are working wrong.
Hence, the person afraid of the computer changing who was described upthread.
(I was entirely surrounded by such cases when learning computing. So it was a moral and emotional battle at every step besides the sheer figuring things out - on dated, semi-functional miracles of engineering.
Now consider how, them people somewhere who "keep changing da computah", it's their job. It's us, in fact. And we're more knowledgeable, better organized, and make more than the average user. Plus chances are we're an entirely different part of the globe now where we follow an entirely different culture from our consumers, so things with the baseline mutual comprehensibility are so-so at best.
And... that's always been the case? And it's what's been giving our computerphobe friends all the right to be afraid. What reason does a FAANG dev even have, to care about your Grandma's eyesight, user experience, or sanity? Or yours? They gotz plenty to care about already, as exhibited by all the thoughtful comments poured into this site.)
Sucks for us geezers that learned things the other way around though!
Circa 2004, when 25 year olds would probably be migrated out of diapers, smartphones were palm treos and Sony Ericsson K700s. I don't think they would be great distractions for kids, there certainly wouldn't be any endless Spiderman/Elsa YouTube to lock them in.
At least, in my anecdotal experience.
People seem to forget that "smartphones" (in the post-iPhone sense) are barely old enough to drive. The first iPhone came out in 2007, android doesn't drop till the following year, and the first iPad doesn't come out till 2010.
If you were a kid with a video-playing smartphone before about 2012, your parents were pretty damn well off, and likely early adopters too
Meanwhile, the rest of the Palm Pilot UI (all the parts that were actually on the screen instead of below it in the dedicated writing area) looks thoroughly 90s: the basic buttons, drop-down boxes, tabs and dialog box layouts, scrollbars that aren't trying to hide from you. The main UI elements missing from the Palm Pilot that were present in eg. 90s Mac OS or Windows are the free form desktop layout (instead of the smartphone-like app launcher grid), and the persistent on-screen menu bar or taskbar.
The Palm Pilot UI was unquestionably designed around the assumption of higher precision than today's touch-oriented UIs. The stylus was not considered optional. The lack of capacitive touch sensing for gesture recognition meant the UI was much more reliant on precise button taps where today's smartphones would use swipes and other gestures for stuff like scrolling or "back".
To your second paragraph: of course it looks “throughly 90’s”. It was the 90’s. Did an LLM tell you to say this? I have no idea what scroll bars have to do with anything. I can tell you they were a pain to use. That hasn’t changed.
To your third paragraph: the stylus wasn’t optional. They didn’t just “lack” capacitive screens. It didn’t exist yet at scale. This was what Apple brought to the market. You couldn’t really have them if you wanted them. That being said, I used these interfaces while walking, riding in a car, and sitting still. I never had trouble tapping the right thing because the buttons were huge in the UI.
You do bring up a good point about there not really being swipe gestures to go “back”. I don’t use them today, so I’m not as familiar with that type of behavior other than to say it is really annoying when done by accident, usually while picking up the device.
I think your broader point is accurate, but computers aren't old enough yet to really compare the evolution of their interfaces to other technologies.
Likewise, at first a purely textual interface was a perfectly reasonable way to interact with a computer terminal, but the addition of mice changed the game, as did higher resolution displays and widespread adoption of touchscreens. We're 80 years into screens, 60 years into computer mice, and 20 years into touchscreens. Clearly lots of interface changes are just to keep the designers at a company busy, but it's also silly to be confident that we've nailed UX/UI standards.
Recently, I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
I kind of feel like the start menu + task bar were a mistake now.
It is nice having the bluetooth + network icon somewhere accessible, but maybe <ctrl>-space should just pop up a thing that lets you type program names + also temporarily hide all windows over 10% of the screen or something? That'd solve the problem of trying to find program manager to run a second program. Also, the windows in windows approach of program manager wasn't great. Still, it's better than most things out there these days. The icons are so... clean.
Maybe for older people who used it back then and have nostalgia for it, but I think at 35 even I'm too young to find that UI appealing for daily driving when linux has WMs/DEs targeted for minimalism, efficiency and productivity but in a modern way.
Otherizing your users like this IS THE PROBLEM. Every technologist was once a "nontechnical person" (for whatever definition of that useless term you like) who learned and grew and thereby became "technical". The very minute you start thinking of your users in these terms you have lost the entire fucking game.
I broadly agree with your point, but I think the causal root of the problem is this industry arrogantly treats it's users as, to quote Mark Zuckerberg, "dumb fucks." We didn't always do this. It used to be better.
Philips just screwed up my TV. They've updated the firmware (of course, it was automated) to make home screen more of a dumb fucking experience with everything animated and self-playing movies jumping out at you for no reason, and so on... But the interface is now completely unusable - literally can't even launch YouTube. No amount of resetting helps. They also hid all the previous firmwares and I can't even roll back from a USB stick. I am a dumb fuck when it comes to TVs. And I will most likely be considering another brand next time.
I think Apple struck a good balance for a while--and to some extent still does--at least in the OS X era of treating users with a bit of respect. Not trying to make an interface for "power users" or "nontechnical users" but instead just making one for "computer users".
It used to be that we made tools for people, and endeavored to make them well. Now we make tools that treat people (their attention in particular) as a cash crop to be harvested. Everything is about "engagement" and the like. I prefer using tools that had effort spent on making them useful, not effort spent on "monetizing" the user.
I think the thing tech nerds do of trying to distinguish between "technical" and "non-technical" users is extremely arrogant, and in a way adjacent to the downright sociopathy of "monetizing" a user base. If you care about making something good, don't start down that road. That's the game--making good tools that help people do good work.
I have a friend who refuses to use anything other than CDE and still manages to compile and run it on modern Linux distros.
This is a highly subjective thing.
> Personally I prefer […] looks extremely dated to me now.
Compare to the GP comment, for instance, where this may still be the case but is less clear from phrasing:
> They're just so much more pleasant
I understand why Aero didn't continue on in its Vista/7 form, but Metro swung way too far in the other direction. The Fluent look used by Windows 11 is a nice middleground that I wish 8, 8.1, and 10 could've adopted instead. Too bad the rest of 11 sucks.
> Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it
Apple has a whole page on making a bootable USB, it can save you a step: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101578
This one’s a doozy because i hit it last month.
The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.
I had an elderly relative (who disabled updates because they were scared of the computer changing) really upset everything was broken. Gmail app gave obscure can’t connect messages, almost all websites failed to load. When i went there of course the os wouldn’t update as well. We use https for everything now.
The keychain system is so hidden from users it was hard to even get to for myself. Took a usb key of a set of certificate updates. Harder than you think because when you look in keychain you’re not sure of which certificate is used for which and it’s a pain to find what you need. In the end a transfer from a healthy mac worked enough to get a manually downloaded os update running and from there it was fine.
What a doozy though! If you know of people with old macs that stopped working at the start of this year this is why
These days, keychain access is under /System/Library/Core Services/Applications/Keychain Access.app. That's not intuitive, but, once you know it's there, it's not hard to navigate to it. Was it different under older versions?
Then
s<tab>/l<tab>/cores<tab>/a<tab>
Simple!
However, while Spotlight works well when you know what you are looking for, it can still be useful to navigate the filesystem, and it's too bad that Apple hides tools in relatively obscure locations rather than somewhere like /Applications/Utilities.
Tip: You can find all your passwords, passkeys, and verification codes in the Passwords app on your Mac.
I wish I knew this last week while trying to restore a 2010 21" iMac.
Apart from this, I encountered another annoyance mid-way; the official download urls for Sierra and High Sierra were nowhere to be found. I somewhat remember being able to download the official dmg/disk image from some official repository, probably some App store public url?
https://github.com/chris1111/Download_Install_macOS could also be another option.
I know I used one of the macos downloaders from github before, I just forget which one though.
IMO the whole PKI thing is a terrible idea to begin with. It would make much more sense to tie the trust in TLS to DNS somehow, since the certificates themselves depend on domains anyway. Then you would only have a single root of trust, and that would be your DNS provider (or the root servers). And nothing will expire ever again.
Over a long enough timeline, there will be vulns discovered in so much of the software that guards the CA certs in RAM
And what if the certificate is compromised before it expires? Right, there's a revocation mechanism for that. So why expire them then if they can be revoked anyway IF they get compromised?
The reason why domain TLS certificates expire is that domains can change owners. It makes sense that it should not be possible for someone to buy a domain for one year, get a non-expiring TLS certificate issued for it, and then have the ability to MitM its traffic if it ever gets bought by someone else later.
Domain certificates are sent as part of the connection handshake, so them expiring is unnoticeable for the end users. However, root certificates rely on the OS getting updates forever, which is unsustainable. Some systems lack the ability to install user-provided root CAs altogether, and some (Android) do allow it but treat them as second-class.
Why do they have to?
(This will also tell you why certs in your OS need to expire.)
I'm completely serious when we need to abandon the ID verification part of certificates. That's an entirely separate problem from encryption protocol. An encryption protocol needs absolutely no expiration date, it's useful until it's broken, and no one can predict that. Identity should be verified in a separate path.
and for whatever reason 2.4ghz only devices cant find the SSID unless you if there is a name conflict on the 5ghz frequency
its also less likely that you have access to the router now to change the SSID
Huh? Is this true? It doesn’t make intuitive sense to me—if the device doesn’t have a 5ghz radio I would expect it to be physically impossible for the 5ghz network to interfere.
so happens that its not backwards compatible very well to 2.4Ghz only devices. Not because of the frequency itself but because of the band steering implementation from the router
It's not an issue with the device itself, it's an issue with the device setup process.
For whatever reason, I assume it's easier in some common device platform, a lot of IoT devices do not use the SSID for discovering WiFi APs. Instead they connect directly to the BSSID (read: WiFi MAC) of the specific radio on the AP. These devices always rely on a phone app for setup, and the phone app has you select the WiFi network by the SSID name, but passes the BSSID to the device over Bluetooth.
When your phone is connected to the 5 GHz (or now 6 GHz) radio as would be normal for a modern device in a combined network, the BSSID it sees is invisible to the 2.4-only IoT device and thus it doesn't work unless you force your phone to only see the 2.4 GHz radio.
The problem also comes up if you have a larger network with multiple access points, set up a device, and then move it (or if your phone just happens to be hanging on to a more distant AP that the IoT device's puny antenna can't see).
It's been a stupid problem from the beginning, it'd be trivial to solve permanently in software if these device vendors would get their heads out of their collective asses, and yet the "you have to disable 5GHz" nonsense persists for the same reason as software vendors still insist on admin privileges for everything, any/any firewall rules, etc.
Regardless, this one is going on eBay, so it's probably best for it to be running the latest Apple OS. Whether the $60-or-whatever I get for it is worth the hassle is another story.
I apologize if that came off harsh. I feel like your comment had a different angle/context than where I took it. Apologies if so.
Microsoft hate is easy to come by on HN (I get it), so I don't like seeing a Apple's coincidental victories magnified in one of the few areas Microsoft does well as a feature.
Even devices that don't suffer from planned obsolescence can and do become obsolete.
- Fall back to old IOT SSID with ancient protocols
meant 2.4G and not WPA3.
I just tried to put Monterey on a 2021 MBP and holy hell.
USB installer. "Not supported OS, you can quit, or install in reduced security mode". Reduced security is fine for me.
"Installation of Reduced Security failed." Cool.
"Get the IPSW and do a DFU install". Nah, you can't do that. "Drag the IPSW onto the target Mac where it says DFU in Apple Configurator". Nope. No error, just nope.
Dig dig dig. "You might need to do this from an older computer. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura". Hey look, I have one!
Alright, install Apple Configurator.
"Nope. You need Sequoia to install Configurator."
Jesus wept. This is an OS that is 4 years old, on a 5 year old laptop. Apple, "It just works".
Find an old version of Configurator from some guy on Reddit that zipped one up.
Now we can do an IPSW install.
Good luck, mortals.
Just getting past the mandatory online account ID took us half an hour, and only worked because she was diligent in writing down her password for Skype 10 years ago which somehow (I realize why but it's insane) now is her Microsoft account and involved in logging in to Windows. Then we stared at a non-interactive initial update screen for another half an hour before it offered the option to postpone updates. I assume if you ship your new computer somewhere without Internet, you simply cannot use it?! And of course all the dumb dark patterns, as if designed by a scumbag pick-up artist.
Then I had to deal with Windows file sharing to copy stuff from the old PC which was exactly as intuitive as it was in LAN parties around 2000 (used mostly the same UI, as well); but at least unlike the new quick share features worked eventually.
Don't get me started on how we got her old printer to work. It's still a miracle to me and involved multiple reinstalls of multiple drivers and finally digging through to a Windows 2000 era dialog listing various printer interfaces and manually selecting the right one that at some point popped up. I was all but convinced she'd need to buy a new one.
But still...
> I assume if you ship your new computer somewhere without Internet, you simply cannot use it?!
This is true of new Macs too, for the MDM enrollment check. The OOTB installer will not complete without internet access. Back in the days of Monterey you could "black hole" those DNS records, but not any more. No functional access to at least half-a-dozen Apple services and you cannot complete OS installation.
". . . that new user interface builds on Apple's Legacy and carries it into the next century and we call that new user interface Aqua because it's liquid. One of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it . . ."
Steve Job, Macworld San Francisco 2000: https://youtu.be/Ko4V3G4NqII?t=405
Any work arounds?
I did have issues with these machines running Linux due to driver support (broadcom BCM43xx) but USB to ethernet worked fine.
No one at school knows anything technical about the WiFi as it’s supplied by a 3rd party.
Both are running latest available software.
I detest crummy Unix-style online stub installers and package managers, because the original downloads are always down when you need them, and it's much harder than it should be to force offline replicable reinstallation.
To my recollection on machines with discrete GPUs this is what triggers the appropriate hardware configuration (BIOS boot, disabling the internal GPU and switching the MUX to only route via the AMD card)
But I do recall getting the internal GPU working with this trick https://github.com/0xbb/apple_set_os.efi
I installed the MacOS Lion installer from a memory stick to the internal SSD (partition 1), Mac OS Lion itself to partition 2 (minimal size) and Win7 to partition 3 via Bootcamp, and it works well, aside from laggy screensavers on one of them, and losing around 10GB to the Mac Lion installer partition 1 (I don't know if there's a way to force it to install MacOS to 1x partition, rather than 2x, while fully offline)
I managed to install Sonoma or Sequoia on my 2011 mbp but it was barely usable - nearly every Apple application was broken due to lack of Metal support. So I've pick Manjaro and while every now and then Wifi stops working, it's bit more capable but nothing crazy tho since it's nearly 15 yo machine.