All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
Then we discovered how much more money could be made by focusing on ad tech.
The relationship between people and technology was so different in 2009. I miss it.
I don’t mind SIP personally. It always unnerved me that any random executable was just a single admin password entry away from doing whatever it pleased.
My ideal desktop OS environment would be something like a polished-up Snow Leopard using the brighter, more refined theme from 10.9 Mavericks (except with the flat scrollbars de-flattened). If I had that I don’t think I could use anything else.
It's my computer, I should be at the top of the permissions totem pole, not Apple. If they're dead set on using signing to enforce the higher-than-root level, then I should be the one signing the executables. Fortunately, you can disable this crap.
But for those of us who need that access we can disable it, with a bit of a dance to make it hard for people who _don't_ need it.
Here are the instructions to enable logging in as root, since privilege escalation seems inconvenient for you:
"General purpose computing" is a niche market. Most buyers would be more than content with a machine that lets them run the specific software they need for their specific use cases, and otherwise protects them from executing malicious code. Joanna Rutkowska's "evil maid attack" is a real security threat; and one of the edges that Apple has in the marketplace is being one of the first vendors to design practical, evil-maid-resistant personal computers.
The amount of low-latency bandwidth modern computers have available is mindboggling.
I've been a pro photographer since 1990 and the Kodachrome setting embedded within the Nikon scanner is fantastic for capturing the color and detail of this exceptionally sharp film.
Do you still do film photography? Ektachrome?