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As someone who’s used macOS since the early betas I really don’t understand this perpetual meme that the early versions were so good and it’s all locked-down ru

As someone who’s used macOS since the early betas I really don’t understand this perpetual meme that the early versions were so good and it’s all locked-down rubbish now. Seems more like faulty memory mixed with a general tendency to think that everything was better ‘back in my day’. Every version had its bugs at release and were mostly fixed after a few point releases. If I recall, the only one that was fine from the start was 10.6 Snow Leopard, and that was only because 10.5 Leper was so bad.

sockaddr 4y ago
> 10.5 Leper Heh
Klonoar 4y ago
10.6 wasn't even perfect from the start, it just has the standout point of being "perfect" by the end before 10.7 got funky.
modshatereality 4y ago
Sequence of events for me: 1) stopped using the GOAT compiler GCC 2) killed X11 support 3) killed all 32bit support. 4) hit rock bottom.
- arthur2e5 4y ago
  1) was a problem in the early days, but what they poured into clang did eventually pay off. It's a reasonable compiler with tons of vendor extensions, many being Apple's, these days. Clang also served as a source for GCC to take new features from. Good to have some competition. 2) XQuartz took a while, but is doing well. 3) was a big one in making upstream wine not work. with wine32on64 you can sure still pull the pinball party trick, but building that thing takes too much. 4) was specifically SIP for me, especially when they started making updates break with system changes. The ntfs-3g automount thing has always relied on replacing mount_ntfs [which is, by the way, not the proper way to make an fs on a Mac -- there's some filesystem bundle business], and now it's too much of a pain to still access the Windows drive.
- lispm 4y ago
  I'm still using xquartz (https://www.xquartz.org https://www.xquartz.org) on current machines - with the last release just a few weeks ago. But it's only for retro stuff. Other than that, X11 was never anything why I would buy a Mac for.
pram 4y ago
I’ve long assumed it’s because it also coincidentally lines up with the Intel Macs, and especially the MacBook Air. Which was probably a lot of people’s first Mac ever. It was definitely an upgrade over Leopard. I had started using OSX with Jaguar on my G4 PowerBook and Snow Leopard doesn’t stand out in my mind. I liked Lion more because it had full disk encryption and AirDrop.
- Telemakhos 4y ago
  Snow Leopard came with a certain ethos that I think was very appreciated: there were few feature changes and no aesthetic changes, but all the work went into the "under the hood" systems, lowering the memory footprint and preparing for the transition to all 64-bit everything. It was one of the rare times that a software company released a new major version with no consumer-apparent changes except for increased speed and efficiency. HN's audience might have a soft spot for that sort of thing.
  - keyle 4y ago
    Yes to me, snow leopard was the pinacle of macOS, pre-iMessage. It was faster, smaller, did just as much as leopard, just solid.
    - slowmovintarget 4y ago
      Shakes cane in System 7
    - wyclif 4y ago
      Also a big Snow Leopard guy here. Learned how to program Python mostly on my old white 13" MacBook. Everything just worked.
- mattkevan 4y ago
  It’s a good point. The Intel transition is when Macs started to take off again, and the first experience is always special. That and a severe dislike of change. While I have soft spots for 10.2 as that’s when OS X finally became usable and 10.4 when it overtook Windows there’s not a chance I’d want to use any of the older versions on a daily basis - it’s never been better than it is now.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
[flagged]
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >Ventura dropped support for AFP and make it difficult to enable any sort of filesharing at all. In order to get the built-in samba server to work properly, you have to add a manual security exception for it using the command line. What? I enabled SMB sharing along with joining my Windows-based LAN at home on my M2 Macbook Air and it was by far second only to Windows in ease of setup. No command line voodoo required, just set some configs under System Settings and Bob became my uncle. In fact it was so easy to setup the Macbook is sharing everything onto the network... I wish Samba was this easy to setup in Linux.
  - sekh60 4y ago
    What is so hard about Samba on Linux? UID and GID management?
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      Quite literally everything. I don't know what it is about Samba, but it's an imperial pain in the ass to get it working right.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  > It's objective, provable fact that Apple has been steadily locking down its software ecosystem through restrictions and UI dark patterns in concert with ever-tightening hardware lockdowns. Only if you intentionally conflate iOS with Mac OS. Apple didn't create a new Mac bootloader that allows you to boot an unsigned third party OS without weakening the security when you boot the Mac partition because they are "locking down" Macs.
- gempir 4y ago
  Some things are heavily optimized to promote their ecosystem, I agree. But it's Apple software so it's expected they want you to use their ecosystem. But they always provide an escape hatch. Yes random binaries are harder to run, but that's for the security of 90% of all mac users. The last 10% still have ways to run it anyway, it might be a few clicks more yes. Overall I think it's still a very developer friendly operating system when you compare it with the competition, Windows. Which is spamming you with ads, also many Windows Defender warnings, random binary removals or refusing to execute them even when you allow it.
madeofpalk 4y ago
> the only one that was fine from the start was 10.6 Snow Leopard Snow Leopard had a bug where using the guest account would wipe the data from the main account.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  Also worth mentioning Sierra (I believe...) that let you login as root without password. For me the tooling on MacOS is the only advantage that it offers. I am familiar with it which makes some tasks quite easy and the platform more powerful for me than Windows. The latter offers alternatives by now and they are quite good as well. Powershell is in parts just a bit more modern than the average Linux shell or you can just install a Linux subsystem to begin with. For me it was a bit late to the party though, but this is one part where Windows really did improve a lot. But both closed source OS have become worse overall. This isn't some nostalgia the parent hints at, there are certain features that can establish that pretty clearly. From ads to account requirements or thorough suggestions at least.
etempleton 4y ago
I don’t think OSX was better than MacOS, however I do feel like Apple has missed some opportunities for improvement and has introduced some head scratching UX elements. I don’t feel like MacOS is any more locked down than before. I think that is just a thing people say because it aligns with their computing philosophy and makes it easy to hate on Apple.

sockaddr 4y ago

> 10.5 Leper Heh

Klonoar 4y ago

10.6 wasn't even perfect from the start, it just has the standout point of being "perfect" by the end before 10.7 got funky.

modshatereality 4y ago

Sequence of events for me: 1) stopped using the GOAT compiler GCC 2) killed X11 support 3) killed all 32bit support. 4) hit rock bottom.

arthur2e5 4y ago
1) was a problem in the early days, but what they poured into clang did eventually pay off. It's a reasonable compiler with tons of vendor extensions, many being Apple's, these days. Clang also served as a source for GCC to take new features from. Good to have some competition. 2) XQuartz took a while, but is doing well. 3) was a big one in making upstream wine not work. with wine32on64 you can sure still pull the pinball party trick, but building that thing takes too much. 4) was specifically SIP for me, especially when they started making updates break with system changes. The ntfs-3g automount thing has always relied on replacing mount_ntfs [which is, by the way, not the proper way to make an fs on a Mac -- there's some filesystem bundle business], and now it's too much of a pain to still access the Windows drive.
lispm 4y ago
I'm still using xquartz (https://www.xquartz.org https://www.xquartz.org) on current machines - with the last release just a few weeks ago. But it's only for retro stuff. Other than that, X11 was never anything why I would buy a Mac for.

pram 4y ago

I’ve long assumed it’s because it also coincidentally lines up with the Intel Macs, and especially the MacBook Air. Which was probably a lot of people’s first Mac ever. It was definitely an upgrade over Leopard. I had started using OSX with Jaguar on my G4 PowerBook and Snow Leopard doesn’t stand out in my mind. I liked Lion more because it had full disk encryption and AirDrop.

Telemakhos 4y ago
Snow Leopard came with a certain ethos that I think was very appreciated: there were few feature changes and no aesthetic changes, but all the work went into the "under the hood" systems, lowering the memory footprint and preparing for the transition to all 64-bit everything. It was one of the rare times that a software company released a new major version with no consumer-apparent changes except for increased speed and efficiency. HN's audience might have a soft spot for that sort of thing.
- keyle 4y ago
  Yes to me, snow leopard was the pinacle of macOS, pre-iMessage. It was faster, smaller, did just as much as leopard, just solid.
  - slowmovintarget 4y ago
    Shakes cane in System 7
  - wyclif 4y ago
    Also a big Snow Leopard guy here. Learned how to program Python mostly on my old white 13" MacBook. Everything just worked.
mattkevan 4y ago
It’s a good point. The Intel transition is when Macs started to take off again, and the first experience is always special. That and a severe dislike of change. While I have soft spots for 10.2 as that’s when OS X finally became usable and 10.4 when it overtook Windows there’s not a chance I’d want to use any of the older versions on a daily basis - it’s never been better than it is now.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

[flagged]

Dalewyn 4y ago
>Ventura dropped support for AFP and make it difficult to enable any sort of filesharing at all. In order to get the built-in samba server to work properly, you have to add a manual security exception for it using the command line. What? I enabled SMB sharing along with joining my Windows-based LAN at home on my M2 Macbook Air and it was by far second only to Windows in ease of setup. No command line voodoo required, just set some configs under System Settings and Bob became my uncle. In fact it was so easy to setup the Macbook is sharing everything onto the network... I wish Samba was this easy to setup in Linux.
- sekh60 4y ago
  What is so hard about Samba on Linux? UID and GID management?
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Quite literally everything. I don't know what it is about Samba, but it's an imperial pain in the ass to get it working right.
GeekyBear 4y ago
> It's objective, provable fact that Apple has been steadily locking down its software ecosystem through restrictions and UI dark patterns in concert with ever-tightening hardware lockdowns. Only if you intentionally conflate iOS with Mac OS. Apple didn't create a new Mac bootloader that allows you to boot an unsigned third party OS without weakening the security when you boot the Mac partition because they are "locking down" Macs.
gempir 4y ago
Some things are heavily optimized to promote their ecosystem, I agree. But it's Apple software so it's expected they want you to use their ecosystem. But they always provide an escape hatch. Yes random binaries are harder to run, but that's for the security of 90% of all mac users. The last 10% still have ways to run it anyway, it might be a few clicks more yes. Overall I think it's still a very developer friendly operating system when you compare it with the competition, Windows. Which is spamming you with ads, also many Windows Defender warnings, random binary removals or refusing to execute them even when you allow it.

madeofpalk 4y ago

> the only one that was fine from the start was 10.6 Snow Leopard Snow Leopard had a bug where using the guest account would wipe the data from the main account.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
Also worth mentioning Sierra (I believe...) that let you login as root without password. For me the tooling on MacOS is the only advantage that it offers. I am familiar with it which makes some tasks quite easy and the platform more powerful for me than Windows. The latter offers alternatives by now and they are quite good as well. Powershell is in parts just a bit more modern than the average Linux shell or you can just install a Linux subsystem to begin with. For me it was a bit late to the party though, but this is one part where Windows really did improve a lot. But both closed source OS have become worse overall. This isn't some nostalgia the parent hints at, there are certain features that can establish that pretty clearly. From ads to account requirements or thorough suggestions at least.

etempleton 4y ago

I don’t think OSX was better than MacOS, however I do feel like Apple has missed some opportunities for improvement and has introduced some head scratching UX elements. I don’t feel like MacOS is any more locked down than before. I think that is just a thing people say because it aligns with their computing philosophy and makes it easy to hate on Apple.