Fantastically dramatic assessment! I'm curious just what aspects of the pre-iPhone Apple were preferable?
1) OSX was a viable operating system that was first class in the Apple ecosystem.
2) Laptops and desktops that were actually better than the competition including models geared toward power users.
And looking back on ye olden MacOS 9, prior to OSX, there were things that just felt nice about the interface that no longer hold sway.
Clicking on an icon gave an immediate response. The mouse cursor felt more precise. Compare to these nightmarish touchpad/button slabs (and worse still, touchscreens), mouse movement and pointer precision were lightyears beyond the way things seem to work lately.
I have to retry things a solid 1/3 of the time, because some kind of gesture or taptic garbage tripped me up, and pushed me into an unintended outcome. I have to focus, and concentrate on finessing my hand motions and pressure or I am punished by mistakes that need an undo. When I'm in a rush, life is hell. This makes me hate life.
No zealously decorative animations meant (on an unstressed system with low CPU/RAM load) the menus flashed before you like lightning. Text was crisp, unshaded pixels, with no font smoothing. There were no transparency overlays, and so everything was high contrast. Nothing was EVER lagged by network traffic except browser images and FTP/SMB shares. (and doom deathmatches)
Most of this was also true of Windows 2000 at the time.
Had operating systems stood frozen (particularly GUIs), while terabytes of disk space, gigabytes of RAM and dozens of CPU cores had inflated our hardware resources, I've often held the belief that we'd like our computers more, and fewer people would be as obnoxiously incompetant with computers as we see. I'm probably wrong, but the idea feels right.
Looking at some of the major "features" - more emoticons and reactions in Messages... Siri.
Some were certainly nice - Apple Pay... but I don't really see PIP being used, or Continuity (which usually actually pisses me off, because I'll switch from my Mac to my phone with an image or similar on the Clipboard, and have to wait several seconds while Continuity syncs - shame, such potential).
Apple really needs a Snow Sierra release to just concentrate on squashing bugs.
Take a basic command, `readlink -f`. Works everywhere except MacOS X. This comes from FreeBSD, which added `-f` years ago, but MacOS X hasn't resynched its code with FreeBSD for an age, so it's running the version from 2007 or similar. I can show you plenty of examples of this sort.
It would take very little effort to do this on a regular basis, and it could probably be automated.
This creeping incompatibility due to being outdated and unmaintained is becoming increasingly problematic. Not something a regular user cares about, but for development and technical users, it's lacking.
2) I don't see much competition that can even match Apple's build quality. The ones I do see, I am excited about, because that means they are striving to improve, and can challenge Apple and force them to improve more. Much better that, than having Apple rest on their laurels because nobody is even trying to get close.