Think I've read this article before, but it's relevant with Mojave around the corner. Snow Leopard remains my favourite OS, period. It was so incredibly usable.

Think I've read this article before, but it's relevant with Mojave around the corner. Snow Leopard remains my favourite OS, period. It was so incredibly usable. Of course, it had bugs - no OS is perfect. But Apple made a wise decision. Leopard was a runaway success - the gorgeous UI with metal accents and its deep purple default background, well-established workflows and other aspects - and Apple just refined it, making it pure x86-64 (it performed much better on my MBP than Leopard with its lingering PPC support) and embracing open technologies (OpenGL and OpenCL especially) to increase performance, but leaving the UI alone. Every release since has been trying to 'modernise' the UI, with extremely varied success. I recently got a Retina MBP and installed Sierra on it, and I use none of the new UI features. In fact, there are times I miss simple things like the 'lozenge' to switch a Disk Image window into a full Finder window. I hate the washed out, low-contrast, flattened look of the current OS. It staggers me that, in an era where we have a glut of processing performance on tap, the UI has less 3D elements than 10 years ago when you needed dedicated GPUs. There's no eye candy or anything that would make you step back and appreciate the thought and design that went into the interface; it all just blends together. Sure, it's not distracting, but I like clearly defined buttons that tell me where I can click. I like the UI to do exactly what it's told and not try to get me to change my ways (Siri, Launchpad etc.). And what the HELL is this obsession with Dark Mode?! I have seen zero useful reasons to upgrade to High Sierra or Mojave. The feature lists are wearing thin. Apple have long since run out of ideas for the OS on its own, but it seems they've also run out of ideas to copy from iOS, so their current approach is to make some superficial UI tweaks and call it a new OS. Maybe making the OS chargeable again would help - I actually bought Snow Leopard (still have the DVD at home, used it this year to build a VM!) and it's one of the most satisfying pieces of software I've handed over money for. Maybe the total loss of revenue from the OS division has sucked the motivation right out of them.