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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

IMO the last few versions of the Classic MacOS were the peak. There was a lot of hate for Aqua and the fisher-price look. Remember the pinstripes?

Tiger was a big improvement. And, the earlier versions of OS X still look way better than what we have now.

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Tiger remains to this day my favourite look for macOS. It's not that I don't like the modern look, but there's something incredibly friendly and inviting about the 10.4 era Aqua interface. I wish you could still skin macOS because I'd totally run a Tiger desktop on modern macOS if I could. Best I can get is a brushed metal theme for Firefox to mimic old-school Safari!

The Tiger -> Snow Leopard period was amazing.

Tiger: Great new UI. Spotlight. Dashboard. Leopard: Quick Look. Time Machine. I hated it from a functional perspective, but wow it looked amazing. Snow Leopard: They just cleaned up everything.

Snow Leopard was also probably the most stable Mac OS X ever. I had it for years and I don't ever remember it crashing under duress.

Early versions of Snow Leopard did have a bug that could delete all the data on your hard drive. :)

10.6.8 was pretty good, but I've had similar stability on Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9). I think Snow Leopard has developed a legacy partly because Lion (10.7) was pretty bad, and partly because Snow Leopard was the last release to support Rosetta.

Then again, Yosemite (10.10) was also really bad, and I seem to be the only one who thinks Mavericks was the actual pinnacle. *Shrug*

Snow Leopard was great to work on. When we were told the next release of OSX would focus on stability and performance, morale went way up. Having a massive backlog of bugs felt like an unseen energy vampire, sucking away the will to live. You just knew some user out there is hating life because you don't have time to address their issue. The Radar issue count for Finder was in the tens of thousands alone and it could be argued each bug was worthy of being fixed.

Do not fear--it's only a matter of time before the "design conscious" crowd, which includes a large contingent of Apple employees, alights on the year 2005 as the pinnacle of "retro" and starts creating throwback versions of everything. By my estimation we're at about 1994 right now so ...

... in 10 years, as the cycle of nostalgia takes about 30 years.

I literally have a playlist called 'modern 80s' which is 2020s music releases that kind of sound like they're from the '80s. I definitely subscribe to the 30 year nostalgia theory!

There were a lot of bands harkening back to an 80’s sound in the 2000’s, and people were saying that the “retro cycle” was therefore 20 years (if it was recurring in the 2020’s that’d be 40 years). But I think someone could make the case that the 80’s have just become the permanent retro decade, and that everything since 2000 has been subsumed into a sort of “infinite present”.

I think the internet and free universal frictionless undifferentiated unbiased access to recordings has made all sounds equally available at all times, starting somewhere in the 90's, and that has made anyone who was born after that point perceive them a bit differently than before.

I have a neice who was born in 96. When she was 10 or so I found out she was listening to both Green Day and Patsy Kline with essentially equal interest.

That's when I got this idea.

She was born entirely after not only the existense of recordings that go back at least a few generations, not only after the existense of the internet, but after the mass adoption of the internet, digital copies of recordings, and countless distribution means, both centralized and peer to peer. The essential nature was not that different from today, the day she was born, let alone 10 years later.

For me, Patsy Kline was only on the oldies station at my grandmas house and the barber shop and which actually called itself the oldies station, and my parents wouldn't be caught dead listening to Green Day.

For my neice they are both just content.

Born in 2001 here, and can confirm.

I can go from Yes, to Twenty One Pilots, to Kansas, to TheFatRat, to Johnny Cash, to random youtuber, to Linkin Park, to Guns 'n Roses, to Elvis, and so on.

They're all just there, there's good stuff from every time period - why would you limit yourself?

I think there's a technological aspect too where after 2000 or so, nobody has really figured out as many new novel sounds to make with synthesizers or turntables or instruments or whatever. The technology of music instrument/tool development plateaued, so the novelty started to as well.

I’d definitely disagree on that front. Though I do think there’s been a bit of a logarithmic curve, the difference in what was possible in 2000 vs 2022 is pretty huge. Like, listen to Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009) or any of James Blake, Jamie XX or Burial’s stuff from the past decade. Not all of that was impossible before 2000, but you’d have a hard time finding people making music with those timbres (outside maybe some really cutting edge IDM).

Oh and don’t forget auto-tune ;) Although there are a few examples of it being used for pitch correction before 2000 (+ that Cher song), it wasn’t until the 2000’s that it got ratcheted up to T-Pain levels.

How does the magnitude of that difference compare to vs 1980, and then to 1960, though? Both in terms of the possibilities and in terms of how much the possibility space had been explored?

>But I think someone could make the case that the 80’s have just become the permanent retro decade, and that everything since 2000 has been subsumed into a sort of “infinite present”.

As if we lived in the Matrix.

That may be true culturally in general, but my theory is just that the 80s marked the end of the period where the sound of pop music was heavily constrained by the technology of the instruments. After that, synthesizers got good and didn't have to sound like synthesizers. There was a little gasp of that when Autotune got overused, but otherwise, music can sound however you want it to sound now, so there's no consistency of style.

It used to be 20. 70s—>50s (American Graffiti, Grease, Happy Days), 80s—>60s (Summer of Love, Touch of Gray, Love Shack), 90s—>70s (Tarantino, lowrise bell bottoms), 00–>80s… When you’re 18-25, your model is the previous generation. Around 30, the pattern resolves and your grandparents somehow become sophisticated in hindsight.

I miss a lot of things about the 10.4-10.6 era. Brushed metal Safari is not one of those things.

As I recall, per the HIG, the official line on brushed metal was that it was for apps that interacted with physical hardware in some direct way: portable music players, synch. managers, optical drives, disks, something. Now if you think that’s vague, you’re not wrong; most apps could at least print something, and it wasn’t applied consistently even within the iLife suite which up until the inclusion of iWeb consisted entirely of apps that were intended to bring the Mac and peripheral devices together (CDs, digital cameras, MP3 Players/iPods, DV cameras, SuperDrives, MIDI). This vagueness and the low popularity of brushed metal Safari in particular was one of the reasons the brushed metal theming was retired after Tiger.

I know I'm in a minority with brushed metal but I really liked it, yes its official usage guide was vague and it probably was abused a bit but from a purely aesthetic point of view I liked it, like a lot of things in Aqua of that era it made things feel very tangible. I'm one of the apparently few people on HN who actually liked the touch bar (but not the lack of a physical escape key) on the MacBook Pro as well so take my opinion with a pinch of salt!

That’s fair, but I found it grating in any app I looked at for a decent length of time, like web browsers. I think brushed metal with stricter usage guidelines (followed by Apple) that wasn’t per App but per Window-type could have stuck around. Having some way to distinguish Apps and window types in Exposé isn’t that worst thing in the world and was about the only redeeming aspect of Apple’s Lion theming choices.

Anyway, I used Firefox and Camino around that time.

Brushed metal worked because you were already touching a surface that was a similar texture as the UI.

Only on a MacBook Pro or PowerBook. Not accounting for 3rd party accessories: iBooks, MacBooks, Apple’s Mice & Pro Mice, Mighty Mice, Apple’s Pro Keyboards, Apple Keyboards and Apple Remotes were all plastic at the time, and mostly white or translucent plastic with a couple of exceptions.

The aluminum stuff all came about just immediately prior to (about one or two month’s prior) or after Leopard’s release, but Tiger’s era (and Brushed Metal didn’t start on Tiger) was dominated by plastic input devices.

My favorite thing about Tiger was that at the end of its life cycle it was incredibly stable.

Which is pretty incredible, since Tiger was the first public version of OSX to have distros for both PPC and Intel!

Tiger was solid - Leopard was where it was at. Snow Leopard may be my favourite, but as I can’t run it on any of my PPC systems I have no excuse to run it anymore.

I actually liked Exposé a lot more in Tiger and Leopard than in Snow Leopard, where all windows were resized to a grid, and you lost relative window sizes as a visual cue. Thankfully, there was a hack to get Leopard Exposé in Snow Leopard, by overwriting a binary with one from a beta! https://superuser.com/a/212717

There were hacks for absolutely everything. Simpler times...

Me too.. The old expose was way better. I also loved the virtual desktops in a grid.

When they moved them into a row and changed the way multi-screen worked it completely lost its usefulness for me. Before that I always used a 3x3 grid. It was one of the many ways macOS evolved against the grain for me.

Other major regressions: LaunchPad (cool for iPad users I guess but completely ridiculous on a 24" screen - Even Microsoft moved back from this). The incessant power saving tricks imposed that are all but impossible to switch off (I use mainly desktops so I care about performance, not battery). Notarisation, every app calling home to Apple every time it's run.. Wtf. Then there was Apple "Server" which became more of a joke with every release (the Leopard version was the last real one).

But really what it told me was that I hate an OS where every year some people sit around a table and decide what I should want changed, and offer no way to choose. In other words: I hate opinionated software.

I recently moved to KDE and wow, it's so amazing to have all the things I missed back. And also a more useful expose-style function again though the relative window sizing is unfortunately something it doesn't do.

It was in the middle of the 64bit transition, as well.

I actually still use a quad core G5 with 16GB(!) of RAM, and 2x1TB SSDs for some audio production work in Logic 9.

64-bit started for me back when the G5 came out, and today that G5 screams, easily feeling as responsive as my girlfriend’s M1 MacBook Air most of the time.

It’s almost unbelievable how the G5 performs like it’s got bloody Sonic the Hedgehog trapped in there on a hamster wheel generator. My Intel machines never came close, and a lot of it seemed to have to do with major bloat as the OS moved along. Probably also bloat in Logic. My G5 can handle the hell of a lot more effects and VSTs with about 50% the impact they have on my Intel machines. It’s surreal.

I also find it absolutely pathetic and astounding that up until this year (16 inch MBP excluded) the maximum RAM a MacBook could have was the equivalent of a computer I got in 2005. 15 years later I still couldn’t get even 32GB RAM in a MacBook. And it was soldered so it couldn’t be upgraded. Shameful.

The 8 DIMM slots don’t fit in a laptop anyway ;) Seriously though, the 16GB limit was mostly due to the Intel parts not supporting more LP-DDR.

But yeah these things were beasts. The dual-CPU and then the dual dual-core were seriously impressive. I really wanted one at the time but could not justify it. I finally got one for €100 2 years ago, now it sits next to a G4 Cube. Both are some exceptional pieces of engineering.

IIRC there was a hack to make it work on PPC machines, no?

Or there was a hack to backport certain things from Snow Leopard onto Leopard PPC...

There are hacks to get Snow Leopard on PPC, but they're a recent development. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsuppo...

It is real Snow Leopard with a Snow Leopard kernel, but a lot of components are copied over from Leopard, and there are still a lot of issues. I'm not clear as to whether or not anyone has gotten graphics acceleration working, for example—it certainly doesn't work on most models.

Ahhh got it, thanks for the insight!

Tiger looks over a Snow Leopard core. What more could anyone possibly want?

I was one of the Aqua haters, but I got used to it quick after installing OS X Public Beta and switching it to the graphite color scheme. Doesn’t mean I don’t miss OS 9 Platinum, though. I’d be interested to hear from anybody who spent time using the Dark Platinum/NeXT hybrid desktop of Rhapsody and OS X Server 1.0/1.2, although I have to wonder if there was ever anyone who used the server OS as a daily driver.

Fun fact: OS X Public Beta had an Easter egg setting that I can’t quite remember, defaults write com.Apple.something or other, that would set all Cocoa apps to a straight-up NeXTSTEP appearance. It completely broke usability, though, as windows would minimize into little squares in the corner of the screen a la NS rather than into the dock.

> Fun fact: OS X Public Beta had an Easter egg setting that I can’t quite remember, defaults write com.Apple.something or other, that would set all Cocoa apps to a straight-up NeXTSTEP appearance. It completely broke usability, though, as windows would minimize into little squares in the corner of the screen a la NS rather than into the dock.

Wow I've never read about this -- know of any screenshots? Would be really interesting to see what some of the default OS X apps looked with the NeXTSTEP appearance.

It’s not exactly what you’re asking for, but this Twitter thread from Stephen Troughton-Smith has screenshots of several stock OS X apps as they changed from NeXT/OpenSTEP → Rhapsody/OS X Server → Developer Previews → Public Beta → final release.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1125050952506052609.html

You could move/rename the `Extras.rsrc` file in `/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/Resources/` and disable Aqua in the very early versions, returning lots of things to a Mac OS X DP2-style Platinum appearance:

https://macosx-dev.omnigroup.narkive.com/WZX5AkMk/extras-rsr...

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosxdp2

I also like to use Jagwire's Extras.rsrc on Tiger to get my sweet sweet pinstripes back: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/jaguar-ui-on-tiger-proj...

I loved Aqua, particularly after they toned down the pin stripes and transparency, so, yes, around Tiger (and up until around Snow Leopard). It was indeed a great step forward in terms of UI, which cannot be said of many more recent releases.

Everybody is very positive about Tiger’s UI, but what I remember were the disjointed elements. Brushed metal was prevalent in many apps, and completely broke the UI’s look.

Even though we have many gaping holes in the details of the current UI due to the many paradigms (SwiftUI, AppKit, Catalyst), skin-deep macOS is much more agreeable.

Yeah brushed metal from the experiments in Panther was still too present. It got better with Leopard.

Cocoa apps are mostly fine in modern macOS. Their main issues are the lack of contrast*, but things like the dark theme are great. From what I have seen SwiftUI is fine too, although it still has some way to go to catch up with AppKit, and has some rough edges. Catalyst is plain garbage, though.

* a pet peeve: I have to click 3 times when I want to make sure that the shuffle mode is either on or off in Music. Another one: document proxy icons are getting hidden and harder to use, even though they are a fantastic feature of the OS. There's a bunch of others features that are becoming more and more obscure, which is a damn shame.

Since this opinion seems near universal, is there any explanation for what the heck Apple is doing?

Project manager driven decision-making. Everyone wants to make a name for themselves, so every update gets a big UI overhaul even when it doesn't need one. Features get taken away when they don't need to be. Workflows get redone when they don't have to be redone. Imagine if this were to happen for something as important as Bash, people would revolt and fork, but in the big tech world you are beholden to these corporate products.

It's not just apple, its everything in big tech. Venmo just released an update where they moved key workflows around for no reason at all, and now I don't have muscle memory for the app anymore, but I'm sure some project manager justified it with telemetry and got a huge bonus for rolling out an update and showing downloads grew by 1% (which they probably would have anyway).

“Project” or “product?”

Apple doesn’t have product managers and the project managers don’t make these decisions. (They have regular managers instead.)

It's rose-tinted glasses. Every release meets the same same level of criticism as to how it's the end of macOS, how the interface design is a regression towards infantilism. It has been ever thus, even in the System/OS 7, 8, 9 days. The difference now is that macOS is more mainstream.

Mh, I don't know. Some of the changes that people complain the most about (from Leopard's 3D dock to Safari 15 tabs) were undone by Apple. And for some changes that haven't been undone, like monochrome icons everywhere, I still mis-click things so often that I doubt it's just nostalgia.

If you'd let people mix and match elements from different eras of macOS, I'm sure you'd see some patterns regardless of when people got into Macs; similar to how people have lots of abstract opinions about architecture, but somehow the tourist buses always stop at the same cozy-looking old towns. Beauty and usability are not entirely subjective.

I’ve been an Apple user since the early 80’s. Apple being simultaneously the gods of UI and scourge of UI have been a constant, along with the ‘doomed’ narrative. A lot of this is the peanut gallery repeating what they’ve heard, as well as exaggeration of the issues individuals face. For instance, in the 40 or so years that I’ve used computers, I believe they have never been more user-friendly than they are now for the typical user. Not just Macs, but Windows and Linux’s desktops too. Reading opinions here would make you think the opposite is true, but here is full of people that love to tinker, and fewer seem to want to go back to the “good old days”. Hence the ‘rose tinted glasses’ comment. I was there, it wasn’t that great! I jest, well a little bit anyway. I remember Tiger being released and a-not-insignificant-amount of people complaining about brushed metal. As I said, it has been ever this. Long may it continue - it makes us that do care think.

Yep. Everyone is cool with all the change that was necessary to get software to the point where they were most emotionally attached to it, and all change after that is “useless meddling that no one likes and is only done to give PMs and designers a job.”

This massively oversimplifies the state of technology and is unfairly dismissive of the significant productivity hit that some changes can inflict on the most loyal and experienced users.

It’s certainly possible for changes in UI to significantly harm productivity, but you would need to systematically gather evidence to know if this is happening. Whether it’s happening is almost completely independent of anyone’s individual feeling of frustration at needing to learn about and adapt to new UI changes.

But more importantly, they existence of change is inherently important to the large-scale advancement of computing over time. Even if it is the case that a certain UI overhaul of a major operating system harmed productivity, the solution is not “permanently halt all software changes after this specific version that I have learned and enjoy using.” We ought to reject arguments that forced stasis is the solution any time changes introduce risk.

We ought to reject arguments that forced stasis is the solution any time changes introduce risk.

We also ought to reject the idea that forced change is the solution.

The iPhone.

Look at the MacOS release feature lists before and after the iPhone. It's pretty clear that the Mac teams got cannibalized and didn't recover for years.

It’s not universal, people just don’t bother writing posts with the opposite perspective because it’s boring. Tiger was my first version of OS X and I think what we have now looks much better.

The UIs are designed for the monitors of their time and it’s not fair to compare them on the same screen. 2000s computers had shitty TN LCDs with low contrast which is why the UI had so much kitsch.

They are in the Windows 8 phase of design. They want to merge mouse and keyboard systems with touch systems, and are thusly forcing mouse and keyboard users to use interface conventions that are derived from touch platforms.

Mobile platforms benefit more from high contrast, very simple and flat designs.

Beyond just the touch screen convenience features -- A significant portion of users is seeig their UI under conditions of extreme sunlight, water droplets, or cracked screen at any given time. These things all inform design choices for mobile.

Now then, why is Apple making the same mistake as Microsoft Windows 8 by forcing these design elements onto Desktop and Laptop market segments? Apple doesn't really think of the PC market much. According to their financial reports, they make more money selling chargers for their mobile devices than they do on the entire PC market.

The answer, I assume, is apathy.

Apple isn’t merging mouse and keyboard systems, though. Not in macOS. So that hypothesis is complete bunk.

This design move is at this point getting to be a decade old. So this explanation from you makes zero sense.

This. macOS has been in an incremental phase for several years now. Windows 8 was a major overhaul from Microsoft which ended up as a big mistake since they didn't consider the impact of such an overhaul in terms of user experience. macOS on the other hand is quite mature and Apple knows that any major change would hurt users in the end.

Was Big Sur one of those "incremental" updates?

Just an "incremental" update where they added touch screen apps (from the iPhone and iPad) to the desktop and laptop experience. Oh, they also changed the system tray to mimic the touch functionality of iPads 1:1 as well, despite being a (far more precise) mouse pointer controlled system. Incremental they say. I was way off base and taking crazy pills when I saw any relationship between these design elements and touch interfaces.

Yes.

The latest design elements feel straight from iPad OS imo. They also have had a focus on allowing iOS installs onto MacOS. This is from BigSur onward.

I was mostly describing my feelings and guesses of it.

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