As someone who’s used macOS since the early betas I really don’t understand this perpetual meme that the early versions were so good and it’s all locked-down rubbish now. Seems more like faulty memory mixed with a general tendency to think that everything was better ‘back in my day’.
Every version had its bugs at release and were mostly fixed after a few point releases. If I recall, the only one that was fine from the start was 10.6 Snow Leopard, and that was only because 10.5 Leper was so bad.
Also worth mentioning Sierra (I believe...) that let you login as root without password.
For me the tooling on MacOS is the only advantage that it offers. I am familiar with it which makes some tasks quite easy and the platform more powerful for me than Windows.
The latter offers alternatives by now and they are quite good as well. Powershell is in parts just a bit more modern than the average Linux shell or you can just install a Linux subsystem to begin with. For me it was a bit late to the party though, but this is one part where Windows really did improve a lot.
But both closed source OS have become worse overall. This isn't some nostalgia the parent hints at, there are certain features that can establish that pretty clearly. From ads to account requirements or thorough suggestions at least.
I’ve long assumed it’s because it also coincidentally lines up with the Intel Macs, and especially the MacBook Air. Which was probably a lot of people’s first Mac ever. It was definitely an upgrade over Leopard.
I had started using OSX with Jaguar on my G4 PowerBook and Snow Leopard doesn’t stand out in my mind. I liked Lion more because it had full disk encryption and AirDrop.
Snow Leopard came with a certain ethos that I think was very appreciated: there were few feature changes and no aesthetic changes, but all the work went into the "under the hood" systems, lowering the memory footprint and preparing for the transition to all 64-bit everything. It was one of the rare times that a software company released a new major version with no consumer-apparent changes except for increased speed and efficiency. HN's audience might have a soft spot for that sort of thing.
I really liked the pre-Unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
I have both in my collection. Including one tattered 2006 first-gen Intel MBP that I picked up from a trash heap and restored.
Every time I open that MBP up, the design makes me feel like a high-roller Hollywood producer. I was just thinking the other day that I wish I could have that machine with M1/M2 guts inside of it.
Those plastic MacBooks are also a joy to sit in front of.
And though I thought the unibody MacBooks/Pros looked spaced aged at the time, they kind of look unsightly today. Those black bezels are huge and obnoxious, and give the laptop a raccoon look.
It’s a good point. The Intel transition is when Macs started to take off again, and the first experience is always special. That and a severe dislike of change.
While I have soft spots for 10.2 as that’s when OS X finally became usable and 10.4 when it overtook Windows there’s not a chance I’d want to use any of the older versions on a daily basis - it’s never been better than it is now.
Lion was a little sluggish and buggy at the start, but it proved itself to be a fine transitional release, and I agree about those feature additions - loved them!
I don’t think OSX was better than MacOS, however I do feel like Apple has missed some opportunities for improvement and has introduced some head scratching UX elements.
I don’t feel like MacOS is any more locked down than before. I think that is just a thing people say because it aligns with their computing philosophy and makes it easy to hate on Apple.
I'm still using xquartz (https://www.xquartz.org) on current machines - with the last release just a few weeks ago. But it's only for retro stuff. Other than that, X11 was never anything why I would buy a Mac for.
1) was a problem in the early days, but what they poured into clang did eventually pay off. It's a reasonable compiler with tons of vendor extensions, many being Apple's, these days. Clang also served as a source for GCC to take new features from. Good to have some competition.
2) XQuartz took a while, but is doing well.
3) was a big one in making upstream wine not work. with wine32on64 you can sure still pull the pinball party trick, but building that thing takes too much.
4) was specifically SIP for me, especially when they started making updates break with system changes. The ntfs-3g automount thing has always relied on replacing mount_ntfs [which is, by the way, not the proper way to make an fs on a Mac -- there's some filesystem bundle business], and now it's too much of a pain to still access the Windows drive.
>Ventura dropped support for AFP and make it difficult to enable any sort of filesharing at all. In order to get the built-in samba server to work properly, you have to add a manual security exception for it using the command line.
What?
I enabled SMB sharing along with joining my Windows-based LAN at home on my M2 Macbook Air and it was by far second only to Windows in ease of setup. No command line voodoo required, just set some configs under System Settings and Bob became my uncle.
In fact it was so easy to setup the Macbook is sharing everything onto the network...
Some things are heavily optimized to promote their ecosystem, I agree. But it's Apple software so it's expected they want you to use their ecosystem.
But they always provide an escape hatch. Yes random binaries are harder to run, but that's for the security of 90% of all mac users. The last 10% still have ways to run it anyway, it might be a few clicks more yes.
Overall I think it's still a very developer friendly operating system when you compare it with the competition, Windows. Which is spamming you with ads, also many Windows Defender warnings, random binary removals or refusing to execute them even when you allow it.
Holy taking the goalposts and running with them Batman.
> Apple is even doing it with file transfers. *On an iPhone* there's no way to select a default file save location; it always starts in your iCloud folder, and third party file sync tools are third class citizens.
We’re not talking about iOS here, we’re talking about macOS.
The bit about Samba is nonsense. It just works and always has. If you’re going into the command line to turn on file sharing you’re quite literally doing it wrong.
Yes it’s harder to run any random binary or delete an important system file, but that’s probably a good thing. Computers these days are people’s entire lives and therefore have to be reliable and resistant to user carelessness and external maliciousness.
You can still run totallynotavirus.app or delete Finder if you want, but it rightly makes you work for it.
> It's objective, provable fact that Apple has been steadily locking down its software ecosystem through restrictions and UI dark patterns in concert with ever-tightening hardware lockdowns.
Only if you intentionally conflate iOS with Mac OS.
Apple didn't create a new Mac bootloader that allows you to boot an unsigned third party OS without weakening the security when you boot the Mac partition because they are "locking down" Macs.
Every version had its bugs at release and were mostly fixed after a few point releases. If I recall, the only one that was fine from the start was 10.6 Snow Leopard, and that was only because 10.5 Leper was so bad.