With that being said, there is something warm-feeling and even whimsical about the classic Mac OS and classic beige Macs. I truly think the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of the 1990s were well written and are timeless recommendations for making great, usable software. I believe designers of today's user-facing software tools should acquaint themselves with a classic Mac running contemporary programs like Microsoft Word 5.1 and the ClarisWorks suite to see great examples of well-designed software. I also like both the System 7 and Platinum themes, with a slight preference toward Platinum. I'm really curious about A/UX, which married the classic Mac OS and Unix, and I'm also curious about Rhapsody, a predecessor to Mac OS X that was based on NeXTSTEP but featured the Platinum theme from Mac OS 8.
1. The increased iOS-ification of the user interface. I believe a desktop operating system should support desktop workflows and not import at wholesale UI elements that don't make sense outside of touchscreen environments; I have a similar complaint about modern Windows and GNOME.
2. The introduction of notarization.
3. Over the years I've noticed that macOS has gotten more annoying when it comes to notifications. Back in the Leopard era there was a classic commercial mocking Windows Vista's "Cancel or Allow" dialogs. Yet it seems I have to wade through many notifications whenever I'm using Macs these days.
In my opinion, it seems that the old guard from the days of the classic Mac, NeXTSTEP, and early Mac OS X with their deep knowledge of the UI guidelines of those eras has less and less influence at Apple these days, while younger software developers with little-to-no experience with these operating systems but who have extensive experience with the Web and newer operating systems are having more influence on the Mac's UI/UX. Unfortunately the Mac is becoming more like iOS and less like an operating system completely tailored to the desktop computing experience. Don't get me wrong, modern macOS is still a good OS, but I prefer the Snow Leopard era of Mac OS X.
http://morrick.me/archives/9220
Adding a new processor could be a huge speed improvement, adding a new graphics card would greatly expand your screen capabilities, etc.
This site alone has a system with a 601 at 60MHz replaced with a G4 at 300 MHz, and RAM from 8MB to 264MB. That's like going from 8GB to 256GB today, just insane difference to how you use the system (and RAM was much faster than the disk back then, so RAM disks made sense, etc).
I remember our last DOS computer had enough RAM that it made sense to RAMdisk most of the most commonly used programs we had, even though it slowed boot up copying them into the RAM disk.
That's a computer that came out in 1994 upgraded with a processor from 1999.
Even if you could put a 2022 chip in a 2017 Mac laptop, it wouldn't be the same sort of improvement.
IMO this slowdown in the pace of single-component improvements is what has killed upgradability - buying a computer in the 90s, you knew that within a generation or two you'd probably be looking at at least a doubling in general-purpose or capacity, applicable-everywhere performance within the same socket/graphics card interface/hard drive/memory interfaces. So not having component upgradability, like, say, in some eMachines without an AGP port, was a big limiting factor for the usable lifespan, in a way it just isn't anymore.
I do disagree with your timing though. I think the best of times was in the early to mid 90s. With radius graphics card. Daystar accelerators on Nubus slots. For some macs, separate math coprocessor. Asante network card. APS and LaCie external scsi hard drive and Daisy chaining them. Adb port devices. Nostalgia!!
But I'm not actually saying the 6100 was "the best of" anything; it was the bottom-of-the-line cheapest one you could get at the time. I'm really just talking about pre-OSX. The early Macs were and are fun too.
Also, SCSI chains requiring terminators (or not), and internal SCSI drives with the jumpers in the wrong pins. Original Wacom tablets built like tanks. 21" CRT monitors that weighed a bazillion pounds, had half-a-mile of bezels, and sitting 2 side by side caused EMI so the images were disturbed. ProTools requiring DSP boards that numbered more than slots in the computer. Expansion chasis to handle all of the extras. All now outpowered by your damn social media device, er, smart phone
I also fondly remember DIP switches being added onto SCSI external drives along with their block-like 50Ω resistor terminations. Woe betide you if you pushed the case back against the wall and flipped one of those mid-write...
Apple was failing in their quest to secure a modern successor to MacOS 7.
It sure was a lot of fun looking at what they threw at it, and MacOS 9.2 was polished for sure. But without MacOS X, MacOS would have gone the way of BeOS and Amiga...
Anyone else remember having a top-spec iMac G4 in 2002 that couldn't even scroll or resize a window smoothly? Pathetic, and painfully slow. I gave up on 10.1.x and just ran Yellow Dog for about a year until I managed to lay my hands on a copy of 10.2, which was marginally better, but still much slower than Linux at the time. The iLamp was a wonderful machine, but very much let down by its intended OS.
In 2002, Macworld was happy with the iMac G4 performance:
"Generally, using the iMac was a pleasure. It was speedy and responsive in most cases, although the Mac OS X version of iMovie was more sluggish than we’d expect from a G4-based machine."
PC Magazine gave it 4 stars and an Editor's Choice award. Readers gave it a 5 star member rating.
I disagree.
I loved BeOS. I still miss it. It was a great OS, and I preferred it to NeXTstep.
But it wasn't just the OS. NeXT had 2 key things Be didn't: [1] state-of-the-art dev tools [2] Steve Jobs.
Stealing from my own blog post on the subject...
Apple's then CEO Gil Amelio was considering buying former Apple VP Jean-Louis Gassée's company Be, for BeOS, or Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' company NeXT Computer, for OpenStep, the successor to NeXTstep.
They went with NeXT. BeOS was excellent - small, fast, efficient, modern, streamlined, and ran on Apple kit. The company was small, with some excellent engineers. The snag is, Gassée wanted a lot more for it than Apple was offering. Although this was bad - terminal - news for Be, it was probably all for the best for Apple.
BeOS was a great OS, but if Apple had moved to it, its 3rd party developers probably would not have, for the most part, and it would have killed the company.
Apple needed a follow-on for classic MacOS, it needed it urgently and it needed to be a blinder. BeOS did not have one crucial advantage that NeXTstep offered, and as such, it would not have had the same appeal, the devs probably would not have fallen in love with the new Apple OS, and Apple would have withered and died. What didn't BeOS have that NeXTstep had? Well...
NeXT was going cost a packet anyway - it was doing better and had some big names on board. Some were working for it, including several people who worked on the Mac in the early days, including, of course, Jobs himself. It also had some serious clients, including CERN - where Tim Berners-Lee developed the WorldWideWeb on a NeXTstation, and corporate clients such as the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). NeXT's OS was also beautiful, sophisticated & very hi-tech - but didn't run on Macs, nor even on the Mac's PowerPC processors. It offered 2 major advantages over Be, though: #1, getting Steve Jobs back, and #2, one of the great strengths of NeXTstep was its world-class, industry-leading development tools. Be had nothing to rival these.
Amelio went with NeXT. If the Mac had to move to a new OS, then all Mac developers would have to learn to code for the new OS. Mac devs were pretty wedded to their platform, as were Mac users. And transitioning to a whole new OS, Apple really needed to get the devs on board.
Classic MacOS's dev tools were nothing special and quite hard work. Be was moving its dev tools over to GCC but whereas this was good, it was nothing amazing. But NeXT's Objective-C and Interface Builder were in a whole different league. Getting the Mac 3rd party devs to move to NeXTstep would be vastly easier than to BeOS, as NeXT's dev tools were almost universally recognised as among the best in the industry.
So that's what Amelio did, and history has proved him right.
The excuse was always that Be had no software. But NeXT stuff getting into OS X wasn't exactly perfect. Part of me thinks that at least one or two looked at getting A/UX or MAE or something on top of Be, just like Blue Box or whatever got onto OS X.
The high order bit in Apple's resurgence was Steve Jobs. He's mostly known for his charisma on stage, but he was instrumental in restructuring the company from the ground up.
Despite early pains, the NeXT technology stack has proven to be an incredibly capable platform which has served Apple extraordinarily well as the basis for two decades of macOS development, and as the software foundation for the iPhone and iPad. The fact that it was underpinned by UNIX was how the Mac got taken seriously by developers in the mid-2000s.
We had “Sorry, a system error occurred” bombs. It was “funny” that those errors remained in 1 bit color even though the entire system had full color support for decades.
System 6, 7, and 8 could crash in spectacularly visual ways, as some off-by-one memory access wrote into the VRAM.
I remember it was a point of pride that macs crashed in ways that Windows BSODs could only dream of.
The first generation iMac, on the other hand, I did think was a lot of fun. All of the sudden the UI was responsive and the software was surprisingly reliable.
I had a Mac from that era that sipped with a software modem, and at some point I upgraded to a serial modem for exactly that reason.
Mine had an annoying beat, like two fans running at slightly different speeds. Apart from that, it was a great machine, and ran Logic really well which was it's main job.