Tasteful color UI elements (System 7). Unicode support. Multitouch trackpad gestures for window/app management. Dragging data and files between applications (System 7 Pro, IIRC). The ability to run more than one application at once (MultiFinder, but really only standard in System 7). Not having to manually allocate the amount of RAM an app should use (Mac OS X). The zoom box actually being useful (System 7). Being able to move (some) modal dialogs (System 7). Finder being able to do more than one file operation simultaneously (Mac OS 8). Window minimization (Mac OS 8). Menus that don't require you to keep holding the mouse button down (Mac OS 8).
Countless others, really -- System 6 is a very different UX. There's likely some element of modernity you'd actually miss.
I can use touch gestures, scroll intuitively or swipe between recently active websites or apps on my iOS device.
I can work seamlessly on the same document using multiple devices and/or with multiple people.
(Web) UX advances let me view maps, browse apartment listings, compare various kinds of products and order stuff online.
Then again, not sure how much all that is worth since I still use console for work.
Desktop OS has mostly been marked by innovations that didn’t really pan out even if they were interesting (e.g. Windows 8 and the tile-based Metro UX)
My preferred way of interacting with a desktop OS is via a touchpad.
Over time we seem to have decided that people where familiar enough with computers that we could drop manuals or hints in the UI. On a modern Mac there's a ton of keyboard shortcuts, gestures and helpful feature, there's just no good way to learn about them. I think where missing out on a ton of stuff, simply due to poor discoverability.
It was not a ripoff. They had a license agreement and a whole bunch of people went from PARC (where they felt they had amazing technologies but could not do much with them because Xerox did not care) to Apple (where they could actually put a lot of ideas in practice).
> That is where things really went from zero to one, on a lot of things.
Some things. Others did not exist at the time and there have been a lot of improvements since then. Things done at PARC also depended on a lot of groundwork done by people like Turing and in places like the Bell Labs. Yet we don’t argue that Babbage was the real revolution and nothing of note happened since then.
People say things like this and because they haven't researched the matter more deeply they miss out on some great gems from that such as the way overlapping windows worked on Apple's Macintosh compared to how Xerox did things because the Apple engineers didn't know how Xerox did it, thought they were doing more than they did and in the course of trying to recreate it invented something better.
A reference to what I mean can be found here:
http://novel.tingroom.com/lizhi/1019/30667.html
The bottom line is that even re-implementing something can lead to creativity and extend the original in exciting new ways as a result. To my mind that makes it much less a 'ripoff' since it's a new way of doing things.