I Miss My Mac

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.

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.

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.

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.