
The End of OS X - Amorymeltzer
https://stratechery.com/2020/the-end-of-os-x/
======
lordleft
I've looked at the trajectory of Apple these past few years with mounting
bitter-sweetness. At its best, MacOS really felt like the best of Unix
combined with the consumer focus alluded to in the article. I still adore the
craftsmanship of the latest Macbooks, but my 2015 Macbook felt like the apex
of Mac's design. It was the kind of device that was such a pleasure to develop
on. You could leverage the power of Unix in a UI designed with thoughtfulness
and care. It reminded you that power and accessibility to end-users can be
balanced. And now that balance has tipped away from the power-user, the
developers, to the end-user, and in doing so I question my commitment to this
extraordinary ecosystem. Why develop on a platform that contends with me every
step of the way? Because the users and the money are there? That was never
what brought me to the Macbook.

EDIT: I suppose most users in the Apple ecosystem aren't on Macbooks, but
iPhones.

~~~
crystaln
I am a developer and power user. I am incredibly happy with every update from
Apple. Unix with good design is _exactly_ what I want from my OS.

Sure I can't disassemble my laptop and change the hardware. I have no desire
at all to do that. I literally can think of no reason I personally would want
to do this, although I imagine there are a tiny fraction of users who would
and you may be among them.

~~~
wwweston
> I literally can think of no reason I personally would want to do this

Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can
extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given
machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts. And Apple used to make
it pretty easy to do this, and enough people did that there was a subeconomy
of vendors selling for this purpose, although of course there were full-
service options for people who literally couldn't imagine doing it themselves.

This also meant that downtime wasn't controlled by Apple Store service
availability (literally had a drive fail on me once, had my bootable backup,
swapped it into the machine, good to go).

And on a number of occasions I've done more complex replacements, a DVD drive
here, a keyboard there. I can see why most people wouldn't want to do those,
they're a giant pain, but having the option can be empowering.

What's _actually_ hard to think of, if one is thinking, is what Apple has
gained in return for this. I can kinda squint and see that irregular (and
therefore, perhaps, less efficiently swappable) battery shapes have some
credible advantages, but the rest of the marginal ounce-gains and dimensional-
golf scores belong to a category of diminishing returns.

~~~
chongli
_Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can
extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given
machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts._

It isn't just the cost of new parts. It's also the cost of those parts being
larger in order to accommodate user-accessibility and replacement. When
everything is surface-mounted on the PCB it can be made a lot smaller. This
allows Apple to shrink the laptop as well as allocate more space for the
battery.

No one is asking for phones where we can swap out the RAM and storage. Why do
we want this from laptops? I'm typing this on a 2020 Air which I configured
with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. I really don't anticipate a need to upgrade
either of these things before the machine reaches end of life anyway.

~~~
kelnos
> _Why do we want this from laptops?_

Why shouldn't we? I would gladly sacrifice a few mm of thickness for a machine
where I could upgrade the RAM and storage (and replace the battery) every few
years. Not only would that save me money, but it's much more sustainable from
a manufacturing and waste perspective.

I just finally threw out my old (sadly broken) 12" G4 PowerBook, and marveled
that it had a removable battery (you don't have to disassemble it; you just
flip a latch on the external bit, and the battery slides out). And I
remembered that at some point I'd done a trivially-easy disassembly at one
point to upgrade the HDD. I got that laptop secondhand, when it was already a
couple years old, and it lasted me a good five years, and probably would have
lasted longer had my then-girlfriend not dropped it on concrete, which somehow
fried the drive controller.

~~~
chongli
My Air is 2.8lbs, far thinner and lighter than a 12” PowerBook G4 (which I
used to own as well) with way better battery life. I don’t want to go back to
an old brick of a laptop like that. I think most people don’t.

You’re part of a very small niche. The tinkerer who doesn’t want to jump to
Linux. This is a tiny number of people, sadly, just as the number of people
who want to tinker with their cars is very small. Most people just want
something that works and is very convenient. They prefer to leave the service
to service people.

~~~
kelnos
> _My Air is 2.8lbs, far thinner and lighter than a 12” PowerBook G4 (which I
> used to own as well) with way better battery life. I don’t want to go back
> to an old brick of a laptop like that. I think most people don’t._

Not saying you'd have to. Battery technology has improved since then; we can
make lighter batteries that last longer. Hard drives have been replaced by
small PCBs with a few chips on them; again, much lighter. Further
miniaturization of the internals means a smaller chassis which means less
material; again, much lighter.

It's be perfectly possible to build a laptop with similar dimensions and
weight as the current crop of laptops, but allow for easier battery
replacement, and even RAM/storage replacement. I'm not saying it'd be as
simple to swap as it was in 2005, but it'd at least be easier/possible and not
involve special tools.

Apple seems to implicitly claim that their anti-repair/anti-upgrade stance is
due "delighting customers" with smaller, lighter hardware, but I suspect it's
mostly driven by their desire to lock down their hardware against tampering,
and keep people on the upgrade/purchase treadmill every few years.

> _You’re part of a very small niche. The tinkerer who doesn’t want to jump to
> Linux._

I actually do run Linux (previously on Mac hardware, but I finally gave up on
it last year), so that's not the niche I'm a part of.

But that's not really the point; I'm not speaking for myself, I'm speaking for
average users. I see a lot of posts here claiming that average users "don't
think about" this or "don't care about" that, and I posit that the average
user doesn't care about an extra few millimeters of thickness or an extra few
tenths of a pound of weight. Especially if it doubles or triples the useful
life of the device through a RAM/storage upgrade and easy/cheap battery
replacement every few years.

> _They prefer to leave the service to service people._

That's fine too, but Apple is actively against allowing a robust, price-
competitive field of independent repair shops. And even if they weren't,
soldering in the RAM chips and NVMe drives means the only thing those repair
shops could do would be to swap out batteries and main boards, rather than do
cheap, targeted upgrades.

------
parasubvert
I personally think that the MacBook Pro 16 inch is the world’s best laptop,
and look forward to see what the next generations can do.

But the whole point has been MacOS. I’m not sure what to think of the changes.
If they stabilize the mess that was Catalina, then they’re doing the right
things, even with the increased iOS-ification of the Mac. If they just slap
more Windows 8 style touch gloss on deep and unresolvable system level issues,
then Apple has reverted to all the reasons that Classic MacOS was so unstable.

That said, after 20 years with the Mac I recently added an Alienware Aurora R9
desktop to my life. Wanted to PC game again, and use VR. Also wanted to catch
up with Windows, as I hadn’t really used it regularly for 10 years. Early
Windows 10 did not impress me.

I have been surprisingly really happy with Windows 10 build 2004 and Windows
Subsystem for Linux v2. To the point it’s my main dev box now. (With COVID
there’s less need for a laptop!).

Some weirdness with cut and paste, but file system sharing and networking has
mostly been smoothed from what I remember. Docker runs well integrated, as
does Kubernetes. Everything is blazing fast. The main thing I miss is
Spotlight search, but there are third party replacements for that.

I really can’t see myself moving back to Linux, which was my go to prior to
the Mac from 1995-1999. I tend to follow the JWZ adage, Linux is only free if
your time has no value. I use it as a server OS plenty, but don’t really need
it on my desktop.

~~~
_bxg1
> Linux is only free if your time has no value

Hah, that's great. I'll have to tuck that one away.

~~~
badRNG
That was probably a fair assessment a decade ago, but Linux seriously "just
works" now. About a year ago I bought a Dell XPS 13, I've thrown Pop!_OS on
there, and it worked out of the box, no driver downloads, no sneakernetting
Wi-Fi drivers, no codec installs, no track-pad problems (two fingers to right
click works!), no scaling issues, no 3rd party repos. It just works. (I'm sure
FOSS folks may dislike the distribution of 3rd party binaries, but I don't use
Linux because I'm a FOSS purist.)

Pop!_OS comes with a built-in tiling manager you can toggle on that completely
changes the game for development. If you have never used a tiling manager, you
owe it to yourself to do it at least once. The built in software manager is
excellent, and is the one-stop-shop for installing VSCode, Android Studio,
Steam, Chromium and IntelliJ all at once. No finding/adding repos, automatic
updates, _it just works._

Even gaming (on Steam and Lutris) is a breeze. It honestly requires zero
tinkering (on Steam at least) to get 90% of my library to run (including AAA
titles.) If you haven't used desktop Linux since 2010, it is a radically
different experience. It honestly is easier to use and get what I want it to
do than a MBP today.

(Disclaimer, I'm sure mileage varies depending on your environment, hardware,
and chosen distro, just sharing my experience. I prefer to compare the XPS +
Linux experience to MBP + macOS)

~~~
_bxg1
Ironically, I _first_ used it in 2010

It's definitely gotten better over the past decade, and maybe the jab is a
little unfair if you're using off-the-shelf Ubuntu on very vanilla hardware.
But that's mostly what I do when I use Linux, and yet I've never had it "just
work" without several asterisks.

Sure, the mouse and keyboard just work. The display and network adapter
(usually) just work. Audio may or may not just work. A second display may not
play very nicely. Setting up GRUB/dual-booting always takes some effort to get
it running smoothly enough for daily use. Installing my dev tools, there's
always one random things that goes wrong. Sometimes I'll install my browser
the wrong way and it doesn't get an icon in my launcher; so I have to go look
up how to configure that manually. I still have this weird issue where
whenever I boot Linux and then boot back to Windows, my system clock (in
Windows) is off by 6 hours; I gave up trying to fix it because it wasn't worth
the effort.

It's a death by a thousand cuts. I'm sure officially-supported installations
like those on the XPS 13 work just fine, but if you're installing it yourself
you're going to get pulled off track from what you were trying to do _with_
your computer, and into forums trying to find someone else who had your exact
issue. Some people revel in this experience, and I've been known to take a
sense of accomplishment from it before, but most of the time I don't want to
be _messing_ with my computer, I want to be _using_ it.

~~~
Nition
I feel like Linux people have got so used to sorting out those thousand cuts,
they don't really think about it as a problem anymore, just part of initial
setup. But as soon as Joe Bloggs installs it and his wifi doesn't work or his
graphics card has a minor glitch it's a complete dealbreaker.

And I agree with your assessment that I don't think I've ever installed even
Ubuntu and had _everything_ work perfectly out of the box. In contrast,
Windows has plenty of things you'll _want_ to change configuration on, but
usually nothing that's outright broken.

~~~
_bxg1
That's true- and macOS has plenty of things I reconfigure whenever I set up a
fresh install too, so I guess you could argue that takes up just as much time.
I would say it's a do-once-and-forget thing, but then I'm sure there are
people who would say the same about Linux issues.

------
gjsman-1000
What I think a lot of us programmers miss is the experience of the end-users
who are likely to buy a Mac.

The fact of the matter is, 99.9% of people who buy a Mac are not going to know
what subpixel hinting is. Or care too much that they can't delete Chess.app.
To them, the Mac is nicer looking and easier to use than ever.

Will iOS devs care? Not at all - developing for the Mac has become easier with
Catalyst. It's easy and cheap to get a new audience for your apps. Will web
devs care? Not while homebrew and all of the packages in it still work fine.
I, as a web dev, have everything working great on the Big Sur beta already.

And as for some saying that MacOS is becoming more iOS like: Yes, it's been
happening since Mac OS X Lion with the fullscreen Launchpad. Nothing has
changed.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
> And as for some saying that MacOS is becoming more iOS like: Yes, it's been
> happening since Mac OS X Lion with the fullscreen Launchpad. Nothing has
> changed.

I'd say a lot has changed, because everything is a matter of degrees. As soon
as I realized Launchpad was a piece of crap, I put an Applications folder
stack in my dock a la the Leopard default, and forgot that Launchpad exists.

Can't really ignore it anymore...

~~~
Jtsummers
My solution is to just use Spotlight Search to launch everything. My hands are
on the keyboard much more than a mouse or touchpad, and it's a good habit for
when I switch between the laptop (where the touchpad is more convenient) and a
desktop setup where they're more physically separated. Hunting for things on a
screen with a cursor is tedious and annoying to me, when I can always just
type it. But maybe that's a habit from growing up with MSDOS and (later) Linux
and FreeBSD starting in college.

~~~
ByteJockey
Spotlight search is one of the only patterns I really took away from using a
mac for work.

I even mapped Super (win key) + Space to the application finder in XFCE. It's
just muscle memory at this point, just like the vim keybindings.

And, really, any excuse to use the mouse less is a win.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
_> what the company perceives as a weakness: the paucity of apps in the Mac
App Store._

I think that the issue with the Mac App store, is that it imposes restrictions
on a once-free-for-all development environment. I know many app developers
that have abandoned it, after giving it a damn fair shake.

Mac developers just got used to being able to wander all over the house,
poking their noses into whatever they liked.

iOS, on the other hand, started off restricted. iOS developers have never
known the freedom that Mac developers have had.

To be completely fair to Apple, the iOS model is the one that needs to be
followed, if security and privacy are the goals, and I think that a big part
of MacOS 11 will be to add restrictions.

I suspect that non-App Store apps for the Mac may be seeing the twilight.

I am not looking forward to the restrictions on the Mac, but it has been quite
some time since I've stepped outside the walled garden, myself.

~~~
0x0
On the other hand, what a modern desktop is sorely lacking right now is
protecting users and developers from themselves. Whenever I run "npm install"
I have to close my eyes and ignore the chills down my spine thinking about how
a thousand random npmjs.org account holders just ran their postinstall scripts
on my computer with full access to ~/Documents/. The traditional multi-user
Unix permission system is no longer appropriate for the modern waterhole
malware world. Nobody cares if you break root and hack system binaries, they
can always be restored. The gold is in the user's content. We need a system
where regular users don't need to worry about defending against software
developers who don't carry the user's best interest in mind, and we need a
system where even the cowboy I-know-what-I'm-doing developer doesn't point a
gun at their foot, while still providing the freedom to tinker and share.

~~~
_bxg1
Maybe what we need is a granular permissions model for all executables,
including those in the terminal. Instead of the binary choice between "this
code is allowed to rewrite my operating system if it wants to" and "this code
can 'only' read and write all of my user files", what if we had to explicitly
give binaries access to specific directories? Network access? The desktop
environment? Drawing to the screen anywhere outside of their designated
windows?

IMO this is the real innovation of iOS: not simply locking everything down,
but locking everything down _by default_ and putting the user in control of
where to release those valves. Catalina introduced a fairly ham-fisted version
of this that doesn't work super well in practice, but I think they've got the
right idea.

Improvement ideas for the Catalina model:

\- A terminal interface. Right now if you run a program that tries to access
Documents you get a pop-up. If you ran it from the terminal, why not get a
terminal prompt, a la sudo?

\- A central place to manage all of the permissions you've allowed and
disallowed (this may already exist and I just don't know about it)

\- No special status for folders like "Documents" and "Downloads"; a
generalized way of specifying any arbitrary directory (recursive and non-
recursive, maybe with patterns). For regular users there can be a simplified
UI overlaid on top, while power-users could manage these directly.

\- Separate read and write permissions for files and directories

Imagine if you ran all those NPM install scripts and they only had write
permissions to their subdirectory of node_modules, only had read permissions
to your path, and would dynamically prompt you if they had a reason to request
something beyond that

EDIT: What if you could also designate certain programs as trusted
"authorities" that can then automatically delegate these permissions to other
programs? Running with the example, you could allow NPM to dole out narrow
permissions to postinstall scripts as needed, coming back up to prompt you in
unusual cases. This would hugely improve the user-experience issue and these
"authorities" wouldn't really have any more power than they already do today.

~~~
mason55
IMO there are two problems.

The first is that no one actually wants to manage that kind of access.
Especially not your every day computer user.

The second, related, problem is that if every app is asking you to review 20
permissions, people are going to stop reading the list and blindly accept. Or
at least the people who need the guardrails the most will blindly accept.

For all the crazy granular permissions I just don't see a way for it to work
other than a source like Apple doing the review, saying that this app is
trying to read your documents for no reason and so it's rejected. But now
you're back to all apps going through the app store sandbox.

~~~
_bxg1
A highly-granular system can be organized under a simplified, streamlined,
user-friendly interface. I fully believe that this could be made to work well.

~~~
auggierose
And the end result would be Catalina ;-)

------
gjvc
Snow Leopard (version 10.6) was the peak of OS X. Everything since then has
been downhill.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard)

~~~
perardi
I would not go that far. Security changes. iOS integration with AirDrop and
Messages. Laptop trackpad gestures.

But note what I'm highlighting for the most part: mobile features. They've
added good stuff for laptops, and for interfacing with iOS devices. But for
desktops, and laptops living on a desk? Not so much. If you're using a full
keyboard and a mouse, sans trackpad, I can't think of a lot of real UI
enhancements since 10.6.

(Which makes total since, given they sell so, so many more laptops than
desktops. But still. I get it.)

------
codemonkey-zeta
As a younger hacker, who has never been into the Apple ecosystem and doesn't
know much about Steve Jobs, the video presentation of the funeral for MacOS 9
sort of blew me away. It was so funny and theatrical, but got the message of
Apple's new direction across so clearly. You can even see people in the front
rows standing up and gawking, trying desperately to figure out what was going
on. What a fascinating production.

~~~
Yhippa
Got a good link?

~~~
codemonkey-zeta
It's the first video in the original post.
[https://videopress.com/v/cTvJLHm8](https://videopress.com/v/cTvJLHm8)

------
peternicky
I’ve been unhappy with macOS and Apple for the past few years and in January
switched back to developing on a windows PC. I could not be happier with that
decision and with the “roadmap” Apple provided yesterday, I expect it will be
a long time before I go back to macOS, if ever.

~~~
defnotashton2
I don't understand how you can get anything done without fighting windows
nonsense proprietary tools.

~~~
sudosysgen
I've had to help people in my classes fight Apple nonsense proprietary tools
because no one could understand why Apple won't let you open a file using your
own code. If there wasn't anyone there that understood the issue (and that was
almost the case) they'd have to use Windows.

Trust me, macOS is much worse on that front than Windows is. At least on
Windows if you have issues with your OneDrive account folders won't start
disappearing from your Desktop.

------
toyg
As someone still on Mojave and really disappointed with the Mac strategy from
Mavericks onwards, I've resigned myself to the idea that my next laptop will
not be an MBP. I was enamoured with the original OSX Look&Feel and its unixy
underpins; the former is now dead for good (the Big Sur icons are 2001-gnome-
level horrendous, and everything is flatter than flat), and the latter dies a
little bit more with each release.

I have to admit that I dread going back to the utter boredom of the Microsoft
ecosystem, though. I would dearly love a Linux laptop that doesn't make me
deaf with fan noise, can last 3 hours of Firefox and Pycharm on a battery
charge, and doesn't freak out when waking from sleep. Does such a thing exist
yet?

~~~
acomjean
I have the system76 oryx pro (last years model). I'm moving from my 13"
MacBook pro (2015) which I really like but it was time for a new machine
(should have bought more RAM/ SSD space..).

Its pretty great. Compared to the the MacBook its much faster and has a ton of
ports, and everything just works (why you pay a premium for a linux notebook).
Build quality isn't as good, but not bad.

Its not perfect, However when running Nvidia video the fan does spin up (its
not quiet, but not that bad). The battery life is, terrible, (probably about 3
hours), but it runs jet brains software really well. I've only had one problem
waking from sleep in the year I've owned it. Even steam runs well on this
thing (the video card is a beast).

Its the year of linux on the desktop (again....maybe)

------
quijoteuniv
One of the big turndowns from Apple for me was when they did not give me a
choice but to upgrade an Ipad 2 i had loaded with cool music apps. The ipad
was 1 instrument more un my studio, could trigger MIDi or have good apps. I
can remember why i had to upgrade, but waited as long as i could. After the
upgrade the ipad became unresponsive, they slowed down the processor but it
did not came out untill they got sued. I gave the ipad to my mother and never
again bought one. I still use a Mac pro in the studio. I run El capitan, with
newish protools and Ableton, and have another partition with 10.6 with legacy
Pro Tools and a ton of nice plugins. But when i need to do office or
programming i boot in Linux. I have also and old macbook air that is in the
process of be turned into Linux. For music it was and it is amazing to be able
to run withouth trouble, it was always a hassle to update as music software
was a year behind at least. Apple was cool, now is just another big
corporation.

~~~
scarface74
Apple never got sued for slowing down the iPad.

~~~
greedo
Nor did they force any iPad upgrades...sigh

~~~
quijoteuniv
The issue was that I could not sync my Ipad with Itunes anymore i believe, so
I could not for example load music to my Ipad. So they did not "force" me you
are right, but I did not get other choice because they disable some core
functionalities. I aprecciated if you elaborated the meaning of "sigh", as you
might noticed english is not my native language. And please do tell on your
experience on the subject.

~~~
scarface74
My original _iPod Touch_ from 2007 could still sync to my computer as of about
a year ago.

Also as of about a year ago, I could still download “the last compatible
version” of apps like Hulu, Netflix, and Crackle on my first gen iPad and they
worked. Music I bought from iTunes was still playable and still synced
automatically to it. I didn’t try to sync from my computer.

------
coliveira
OS X (the name) is gone for a while, it was replaced by macOS. The numbering
change now is inconsequential.

~~~
thedjinn
Most people probably don't even refer to the macOS versions by number but by
codename.

~~~
gregoriol
Sure, but version names are hard to order: was Catalina before or after X? who
will remember? (maybe if it at least was like Ubuntu with names following
alphabetic order)

------
meddlepal
OS X was a marketing name and was dead for a while now.

Besides the CPU arch change and a slightly refined UI it is pretty much the
same.

~~~
gjsman-1000
Homebrew packages work fine, you can still disable SIP, Gatekeeper hasn't
gotten tighter. Everything is almost exactly the same as Catalina. There's
really no substance whatsoever to the claims that MacOS 11 is locking the OS
down. You could make this claim for Catalina, but Big Sur isn't changing
anything of consequence at all.

~~~
xinsight
Maybe people are only just now starting to see Apple's intentions of locking
down their system. I remember it being a bad omen a few releases back when i
found i could no longer (easily) delete the Chess.app.

------
pjmlp
What many UNIX fans that abandoned their Linux and BSD distributions for OS X
fail to understand is that Apple culture was never about CLI, shell scripts
and daemons.

Mac OS was never like that, A/UX was a failed attempt into UNIX market while
keeping the Mac OS spirit, and for NeXT is was a way to embrace UNIX
workstation market and extend it with NeXTSTEP Objective-C frameworks.

Steve's opinion regarding UNIX is well known.

And then there was BeOS on the race or the failed Copland project, both
without any major UNIX story.

~~~
runjake
Apple marketed directly to UNIX and Linux power users with their famous
advertisement:

[https://julxrp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/apple_unix_ad.jpg](https://julxrp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/apple_unix_ad.jpg)

In this era, they were all about marketing to UNIX people.

~~~
pjmlp
When the ship is sinking anything goes, they also had sessions at CERN back in
the day, but that was never a central role in Apple culture, nor its users for
the most part.

~~~
runjake
I would argue that their UNIX focus was a major contributor to the popularity
of the (post-OPENSTEP) Mac.

It attracted UNIX nerds, which attracted other nerds and all those nerds
spread the word to family, friends, and coworkers and helped spur adoption in
a significant way.

That's how I seem to remember it, anyway.

------
gjsman-1000
I mainly program web apps on my MacBook Pro 2017, and upgrading to Big Sur
hasn't changed almost any of this for me. I can still install brew and do my
work. The UI is a rough around the edges in some areas, but I actually don't
really mind, and some of the new features are pretty nice.

------
crmrc114
That family tree is wrong, right?

1\. Unix was first, then BSD came from Unix... then Mach was built quite a bit
later.

2\. NextStep was then built by jobs after he was let go from apple by Mr. Soda
man.

3\. Jobs comes back to apple, brings NextStep- reads the tea leaves with OS7-9
and sets up NextStep as the successor with OSX. Apple branded NextStep becomes
OSX.

Is my chronology correct?

~~~
k__
I think so.

OSX was bought, NT was bought, Android was bought.

Which big OS vendor build their own OS? Maybe Google with Fuchsia?

~~~
pjmlp
NT wasn't bought.

~~~
homarp
Maybe a shortcut of Dave Cutler plus what Wikipedia said "While creating
Windows NT, Microsoft developers rewrote VMS in C. Although they added the
Win32 API, NTFS file system, GUI, and backwards compatibility with DOS, OS/2,
and Win16, DEC engineers almost immediately noticed the two operating systems'
internal similarities; parts of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures,
published by Digital Press, accurately describe Windows NT internals using VMS
terms. Instead of a lawsuit, Microsoft agreed to pay DEC $65–100 million, help
market VMS, train Digital personnel on Windows NT, and continue Windows NT
support for DEC Alpha"

Also [https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-
vm...](https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-
story)

~~~
mycall
Using VMS in the 80s at my university, it was a solid foundation for creating
a proper OS that NT became.

------
crazygringo
First OS X was big cats, then it was mountains.

Very surprised they didn't switch to a new naming theme!

I guess an architecture change was as good a reason as any to revert back to a
normal, sane versioning system where the first number increments like most
programs. But it's just weird how "unannounced" or unacknowledged it is.

~~~
dhosek
Not mountains, but California landmarks.

------
fluffything
This blog post is 90 prelude/buildup toward these two claims:

* MacOS X was a very good OS for developers,

* MacOS X 11 is not.

The first claim is discussed in the prelude, but irrelevant for the
conclusion. Three arguments are given for the second claim:

* macOS11 runs on ARM

* macOS11 UI supports touch

* macOS11 is not open and good [like macOSX] but easy and good enough

That's it. This leaves me quite disappointed.

macOS 11 running on ARM, RISCV, x86 or powerpc has little to do whether it is
good for developers. I have an intel mac and do a substantial amount of ARM
development on it: qemu works just fine. I expect qemu to work as good on arm
for developing for x86.

macOS11 supporting touch does not say anything either about whether it is good
for developers. Windows UI supports touch, and that's quite good, even for
developers. I also have a Lenovo Yoga, and I can fold it, and sketch on it,
which is great for web meetings. All thanks to having a good touch screen and
good OS touch support. So IMO this change could make macOS11 better for devs
than macOS10.

I haven't heard any information suggesting that macOS11 is less open and less
good than macOS10. macOS10 was never great. It has quite old BSD utilities
that are often subtly incompatible with their Linux or modern BSD variants for
apparently no reason. macOS11 does not make this better or worse. macOS10
requires pretty much every process to grant permissions for everything
nowadays, which makes it a bit of a pain to do something in the terminal
without granting all permissions to the terminal, but that's only one click
away, already "prepared" by apple, and you only have to do this once, etc.
Each release of macOS 10 has made it more painful to use for development in
some ways, and also better in other ways (zsh as default shell, C++17, C++
modules, dropping CUDA support, no native Vulkan support...). It was never
great, it was always kind of a mixed bag.

------
crystaln
So Apple changed their OS numbering system. Is there any more significance to
this event?

~~~
swyx
why exactly did they change the version number? i dont get it

~~~
jaywalk
I don't think Apple has explicitly said anything, but the fact that this
version will support a new CPU architecture seems like a pretty good reason.

~~~
sudosysgen
Not really, OS X supports PowerPC and Intel (32 and 64 bits) at various stages
in it's lifetime.

~~~
aylmao
macOS 11 will support Intel and ARM.

------
amatecha
Wow, I totally missed that version number in the About box. Very interesting!
I guess 10.16 will be the last version of "OS X" as we knew it (even though it
was already called macOS). The end of an era, indeed.

~~~
timw4mail
10.15, you mean?

~~~
amatecha
Yeah maybe! Some other commenters were saying the intel version is still
called 10.16 but it depends where you look in the OS... My guess is it will be
updated everywhere to be called 11.0 , so I guess yeah 10.15 would be the last
of the "OS X" generation (even if it was renamed macOS already).

------
gdubs
I have fond memories of when the first OS X CDs arrived at our college
computer lab, and we installed them on a PowerMac G4. The aqua UI felt so
futuristic, and it matched the hardware!

------
mark_l_watson
Before leaving on my morning hike, I cleaned up some storage, getting 50G free
on my MacBook, and downloaded the 9G installer while I was hiking. It turns
out that I was still about 12G short in required disk space.

I mention this to save other people from lost effort.

A question: lots of my 256G of storage is taken up by remote mobile storage in
~/Library. If there an easy way to tell macOS to temporarily not keep local
copies, and get them back later from iCloud?

~~~
saagarjha
Did you happen to have Time Machine enabled? (To answer your question, I think
what you're looking for is brctl evict.)

~~~
mark_l_watson
I deleted ~/.stack and ~/.mvn and had plenty of room. I usually do Haskell dev
on a very fast VPS anyway.

I am running the macOS Big Sur beta and also the iPadOS 14 beta. Things seem
to run slowly on my MacBook, but ti seems like some work is done the first
time apps are opened. My $3400 Common Lisp kit does not work on the Big Sur
beta, so I will probably revert in a few days, but I am having fun with the
beta right now.

I have had no problems with the iPadOS 14 beta so far.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Mac OS 11 feels like it might end up being the Windows 8 of Mac OS. A company
is taking/took a well-loved and highly productive desktop/laptop optimized
operating system (OS X for Apple, Windows 7 for Microsoft) and is making/made
it more like a tablet/phone operating system. Unfortunately, that made it less
optimized for the desktop/laptop use case.

~~~
rvz
That could be true of macOS 11 but it's too early to tell unless they
completely removed Finder.app and blew it up into a new user interface for
macOS, which Windows 8 did for the start icon that destroyed the user
experience, but we'll see.

If that's the 'Windows 8 of Mac OS' I don't want to see what the 'Window 8 of
the Linux Desktop' is.

~~~
arexxbifs
I think Gnome 3 is the "Windows 8" of Linux: It's pushing touch, it's moving
away from tried and true desktop concepts and its release led to the creation
of numerous "alternative" desktop environments for people who liked the old
Gnome.

------
ascotan
What's interesting to me after reading a bunch of the threads here is that
consumers are constantly re-evaluating your product.

Mac became popular, not because of hackers, but because it was a great
platform for doing graphic design and artwork. Apple put a lot of time and
energy into the human factor and it paid off. That and the iphone basically
saved the brand from extinction.

It's clear that apple is moving the same direction that Windows did years ago
where they're putting the mobile OS on the desktop. I'm wondering how this is
going to pay off for desktop/server users. Apples fortunes are in mobile and
they're basically ballooning their mobile device inventory with multiple form
factors.

I think a lot of what keeps apple users buying more expensive laptops/servers
is because they simply 'work'. However, apple has been sneaking in a lot of
annoying features that I would expect on mobile devices but I have come to
dislike on a desktop. No i don't want my email address tied to my purchases,
no I don't some random device in my house popup with a MFA code, no I don't
want what I do on my home laptop sync'ed to every mobile device I own.

Usability and human design has always been the 'win' for apple and it's what
Linux/Windows can never match (because they don't control all the parts for a
uniform customer experience). However, there has always been a line between
phones and mobiles devices. That line is in the fact that my laptop doesn't
have a GSM/CDMA cell device in it. Because it would be "silly" to take calls
on a laptop (i guess). I'm not sure I really like this line blurred. I'm not
really sure that my laptop is just another IoT device running the same OS
making annoying popups and tweets that I have to cancel while I'm working.

Anywho there is an intangible distinction between a laptop and a phone and by
blurring this line I think some people might begin to dislike it. There are
other options out there.

------
pjbster
Am I the only one who wants to call it MacOS 11 Big Bottom? Any Spinal Tap
devotees here? Oh never mind.

~~~
jmull
You can have one chuckle for that.

------
renewiltord
I predict that Apple will go on from this in strength. Moved some of my VITAX
directly into AAPL.

------
gumby
So what’s the significance signaled by the numbering change?

I often like Thomson’s writing (and have him in my RSS feed) but this meanders
a bit too much for me to follow. Can someone help me out?

------
DrBazza
This is just the 2020 version of Windows 95+NT = XP.

------
LockAndLol
Wait... so in a few updates Macbooks will be locked down like iPhones without
a possiblity for "sideloading" ?

~~~
tgv
I hope not. In the presentation they mentioned homebrew, so I suppose that's
something.

------
Yhippa
Does anybody have any reasons as to why they totally downplayed this major
version release of their flagship OS?

~~~
ShamelessC
They did?

------
doggydogs94
You spend $6K on a laptop and then Apple kills the product line. Sweet.

------
Not_John
i switched 2002 from a Mac Powerbook G3 "Wall Street" to Windows. I will
switch to a Mac again at the end of the Year when a Mac with an Apple Chip
comes to Market. Exciting Times :)

------
shmerl
_> an open platform on top of the tremendous hardware innovation being driven
by the iPhone sounds amazing._

macOS is anything but open though. If anything, it's completely the opposite,
in many senses of being not open. If you want an open platform, use Linux.

~~~
oneplane
Depends on what you call open and what the 'opposite' you refer to is.

Open as in 'welcoming to users'? Open as in 'it has hinges on the device that
open'? Open means many things.

If you refer to Open Source in terms of the OSI, then no, macOS is not that
kind of open. It's also not entirely closed as there is plenty of 1-to-1
source code available, also under OSI-approved licenses (but not all of it).

If you refer to Open in terms to 'the ability to add and remove at least some
components so you can do your work', then macOS is plenty open. Want to get
rid of Pages and install Microsoft Word? No problem.

~~~
shmerl
Apple for example refused to support Vulkan and don't allow anyone else to
provide drivers for it. It means they have control over what features you can
use - you have no say in it. Even Windows being as closed as it is doesn't
have such restrictions. So I'd say macOS is closed to a sickening level and
it's completely disingenuous to call it open.

May be if you compare it to iOS which is closed in even worse ways, you could
say macOS is "open". But it's like comparing something that's rotten to
something that's rotten even more. Both are rotten.

~~~
oneplane
That's a rather extremistic view. Apple doesn't support vulkan because they
tried to get OpenGL and OpenCL working. Nvidia didn't play ball and AMD wasn't
in the picture back then. The result was that Apple had to come up with
something else (Metal) and that has worked out great with them.

But unless you are writing a graphics engine (which almost no user does) that
doesn't even matter.

Regarding your openness, you still haven't provided with a description as to
what you describe as open or closed. Is Windows open? No. None of it is,
except a few example apps and things like the calculator. You don't get kernel
sources, you don't get library sources, and you can't run any custom versions.
With macOS you can.

Same goes for DirectX if you want to stay with graphics stacks (Direct 3D to
be more specific). That's about as closed as it gets: you can't remove it, you
can't use it elsewhere, you can't get the sources and you can't modify it.

You can still run Vulkan on macOS if you want -- you are free to implement it,
run it, make shims or layers if you wish etc, just not with Apple's support.

What you call open or closed isn't clear, but the fact that you use the word
'rotten' signals to me that you are emotional about it and probably not really
looking for a discussion.

~~~
shmerl
I don't really care for their excuses why they don't do it. Even if anything
of that applied in the past, they have no excuse today.

The bottom line - they don't do it and don't allow let's say hardware makers
to provide drivers, like they can do even on Windows. That alone is an
indication that it's anything but open.

 _> You can still run Vulkan on macOS if you want -- you are free to implement
it, run it, make shims or layers if you wish etc, just not with Apple's
support._

You aren't free to do that. Hardware drivers for macOS are all controlled by
Apple. Otherwise you'd see AMD, Intel and Nvidia providing native Vulkan for
macOS already. The only thing you can do is to provide translation into
Apple's Metal lock-in (like MoltenVK, gfx-rs and so on).

macOS is one of the worst examples of closed systems.

~~~
oneplane
> You aren't free to do that. Hardware drivers for macOS are all controlled by
> Apple.

No, they are not. Apple ships some drivers themselves because they obviously
support the hardware they deliver, but you are free to get your text editor
out and write one yourself, compile it, and load it.

~~~
shmerl
Apple won't allow you to run any hardware driver without them signing it. And
Vulkan would require GPU driver support for it. So they are the gatekeeper who
is preventing this from happening. Keyword here is _gatekeeper_. "Open" system
much? In open systems gatekeepers aren't in the way of the user.

------
nazgulnarsil
it is frankly unbelievable how unusable the play store is.

------
drunkpotato
I know this is about the coming MacOS 11.0, but Catalina was the end of OS X
for me, and the end of Macs in general for me. I will not be migrating from
Mojave to Catalina, and will use my current generation of Macs until they are
obsolete, while finally making the transition to Linux. Mac and I had a good
run, but I'm clearly no longer the target demographic and their corporate
goals aren't aligned with mine as a customer any more.

~~~
stouset
I suspect you're being downvoted because this is an empty, meaningless comment
without some elaboration on _why_ you've decided this. As it stands, there's
no room for discussion: the only paths forward are for others to simply agree
or disagree, or to try their best to guess at what your concerns are in order
to further the conversation.

~~~
pumanoir
The comment states the why clearly when read within the context of the
article: "I'm clearly no longer the target demographic and their corporate
goals aren't aligned with mine as a customer any more"

~~~
HatchedLake721
Did we miss a memo where Apple suddenly changed their target demographic and
corporate goals?

I don't think they did.

The comment seems like an emotional nostalgic conclusion they have after
watching the WWDC, without any mentions why they think future will be worse
than what we have now or what we had in the past.

~~~
brnt
Those things are rarely (publicly) unambiguously stated, so no, we didn't miss
the memo because there wasn't one. Does not mean that over the course of time
a target demo can change for a company though. Apple would hardly be the only
company who did.

Pity though, Snow Leopard was something to be envious of.

------
MintelIE
Lots of pointless user-facing "innovations," some of which break things with
no warning, and very little improvement of the base OS from what a Unix person
would notice, combined to cause stagnation.

When Apple moved to file 'tags' from comments which one could edit which would
be attached to the file, they literally nuked thousands of annotations of
mine. I was never warned that they would be blown away. What kind of company
just does this?

------
emersonrsantos
Intel version is still 10.16, new ARM version is 11.0.

~~~
gjsman-1000
I can confirm this is false. I have MacOS Big Sur on my MacBook Pro 2017, and
it identifies as 11.0.

~~~
amatecha
What does it say if you run:

sw_vers -productVersion

~~~
gjsman-1000
10.16.

However, it is clear that Apple wants to move everything to 11. Xcode also
says 10.16, but Apple Developer Docs say 11. My suspicion is just that the
developers of Xcode and other parts of the OS weren't aware of the switch yet.

~~~
amatecha
Ahh interesting! Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. It's 10.16 now, but I wouldn't
be surprised if all of those version numbers will be updated to say 11.0 upon
the final production release.

------
fierarul
I know that Java is not hip nowadays (was it ever?) but at some point Jobs
bragged Macs are the best Java workstations. Clearly Apple not only does not
care about Java but hates it. macOS Catalina is also pretty scary.

So, I am enthusiastically waiting on getting a new laptop with the Ryzen 4800
CPU to run Linux on. I do some Java tooling projects and I will just use the
existing Mac gear to support them, for a while.

As weird as it sounds, even Windows is starting to look like a good target OS
for somebody spending lots of time in the terminal and doing some Java.

~~~
pron
Apple is a _huge_ Java shop. They're quite secretive but a very large portion
(the great majority?) of their backend is Java.

OpenJDK has a Linux/AArch64 port, and it will have a macOS/AArch64 port, too.

~~~
panzagl
Do they currently run their backend on MacOS?

~~~
oneplane
No they do not. They (as some would maybe not expect) even use Oracle software
as backend for some systems. But not macOS. Unless you count developer
workstations and things like Xcode build servers or their ASD replacement.

