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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

MacOS was starting to get good in 2004, but unfortunately I feel that it went to their head. My opinion of MacOS didn't really start to decline until Catalina, at which point it started to become blatantly obvious that Apple was focused more on "business" than "computers" these days. I was surprisingly content with the openness of Mojave, and even hopeful for the future of the OS. If any slivers of hope were hanging on during Catalina, they were certainly demolished when they showed off the Big Sur redesign.

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Share the same opinion - in fact, I downgraded back to macOS Mojave. In some ways, I guess the picture is clearer now on why macOS seems to have gone downhill. With their own ARM processors, Apple had to re-shift its focus away from Intel and make its OS work well on its own processor.

And of course, with their own ARM processors they can further dumb down macOS and lock it down like ios as that's more profitable for them in the longer run.

> And of course, with their own ARM processors they can further dumb down macOS and lock it down

Anything to back this up? There was nothing preventing them from ‘locking down’ an intel based macOS, and I haven’t seen any evidence of a money grab with M1 based macOS either…

> There was nothing preventing them from ‘locking down’ an intel based macOS

On Intel Macs, you can install Linux and Windows if you are unhappy with macOS. So they couldn't really lock it down. With their own custom ARM processors, they can prevent the installation of other OSes. Thus, like with iPhone or iPad, you will be stuck with the OS they provide. With the M1, so far you can only run other OSes on VM.

Ok, but they’ve done the opposite- helping linux projects get linux on M1 macs..

The whole M1 mac and its architecture is so closed, without Apple providing any useful system literature for it, or even closed source drivers, that developers are experimenting and trying to reverse engineer it to successfully install and run Linux on it. And they are still struggling because Apple is the least interested in helping their effort.

Snow Leopard was the best version for me. I used it for months only restarting to install updates and there was no impact on the performance or stability.

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