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nextos

The Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked.

There was also a great boutique apps ecosystem.

Right now, it seems that macOS is going through its enshittification phase, sadly.

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I still remember Snow Leopard - I think that's when I started using Mac.

Most of the upgrades since then I have resisted and not enjoyed, though I seem to recall liking Mavericks.

A lot of the big features each time seem to be about tieing further into the Apple ecosystem, which doesn't interest me at all, since I have no other devices and don't use iCloud.

I think also that Snow Leopard era (unibody) MacBook Pro design was peak Mac. It was really full-featured while also having clean intentional design.

Tiger on a G4 tibook was peak apple.

Snow Leopard was spectacular. Rock solid, I never had a single problem with the OS. Lots of third-party developers making good software helped, I think shortly after (Lion?) I bought Things, Little Snitch, Sketch, and Alfred.

> Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked

Was it also great for developers? (Genuine question.)

xcode has been getting better bit-by-bit. No major regression.

I'm not mac dev but wasn't apple all in on objc back then and these days it's more swift? that is pretty big shift, I'd assume for the better for most parts.

I prefer Swift as a language, but Apple's developer documentation back then was clear, detailed, and overall excellent. Occasionally I felt like I was reading a classic CS text rather than a manual. I could always find the guide on the particular facet I was looking for within a few clicks.

Yeah, OS X was definitely the nicest native development experience at the time. Apple's documentation was considerably better and more searchable back then than it is now (especially as it is now for desktop). And even though they've introduced lots of niceties (including Swift), as Apple's piled additional features and APIs into Cocoa/Xcode I find the overall experience quite a bit less coherent or intuitive or ergonomic than it used to be.

Pretty much. Xcode was quirky but it still is. But the frameworks were well documented and 1 Cocoa book could get you a long way. I loved building Obj-C/Cocoa apps back then.

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