
I Miss My Mac - Derbasti
https://bastibe.de/2020-01-21-i-miss-my-mac.html
======
paulrpotts
I've been using Macs since 1985 and I've owned several, going back to the SE,
PowerBook Duo 230, PowerBook G4, and 2008 Mac Pro, which is still my basic
workhorse machine. I've also done a lot of development for "classic" MacOS,
MacOS X including applications and audio drivers, and the deceased Newton
platform.

As far as I'm concerned, the usability of MacOS X peaked with Snow Leopard.
That was an amazingly reliable build. My uptime was months and months without
shutting down or crashing. With that build, I recorded and mixed a number of
songs from scratch, with Logic Pro X. I imported and edited a number of
videos. And I scanned and edited hundreds of photos with Photoshop and
Aperture. I also could still run some vintage applications.

In my opinion, just about every update of MacOS X since then has made it
dumber and less usable. I loved the "vision" of what the Mac could be back
then - a "digital hub" to organize, create, and edit things from my other
devices.

The ongoing attempts to push me and all my content into the cloud and turn
everything into a scheme to extort money from me monthly is not something I've
ever liked or wanted to participate in.

I am impressed by the hardware design of the new Mac Pro, but it clearly isn't
aimed at me. I think I paid $4,000 for my 2008 Mac Pro, with the beautiful
monitor that still works. But the new Mac Pro has gone up in price far more
than inflation would justify.

I've gradually moved much of my regular writing work to a series of semi-
disposable new and used laptops running either Ubuntu MATE or Windows 10 and
all open-source workflow (NotePad++ instead of BBEdit, my favorite editor, and
Pandoc). I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my music production, Aperture,
and iTunes libraries. It's frustrating.

------
Finnucane
My favorite Mac, hardware-wise, was the B&W G3/G4 I had some 20 years ago--
even the cpu was upgradable. But I'd say Mac OS X peaked with 10.6.8, which I
kept for way longer than I should have, until I just couldn't ignore the
software update problem any longer. These days I mostly use Linux Mint, at
least at home, which I find works pretty well for me.

------
ktpsns
Used a Mac in the same time and it was gorgeous. For the sake of their mobile
OS ("unification") and for some foolish reason of abandoning OSS (like CUPS
and the like), OS X is no more the same as it used to be.

------
supernintendo
Like the author, I’m nostalgic for Macs from that era although I’ve actually
had a great time since switching to Linux as my daily driver. Fedora is
wonderfully stable and up-to-date and with KDE I can configure my desktop to
look and feel exactly how I want. There’s really nothing I used to do on macOS
that I’m not able to do on Linux. I know “year of the Linux desktop” is a meme
but it really feels like now could be that time.

