It also looked absolutely amazing. We came from blocky ugly 256 color icons, bland shades of grey, and lumpy fonts to aqua. Each icon looked "real", either as a

It also looked absolutely amazing. We came from blocky ugly 256 color icons, bland shades of grey, and lumpy fonts to aqua. Each icon looked "real", either as a real thing you could hold (hard drive, CD, printer, trash) or a glossy photo realistic artists rendition (the network icon and favorites heart in particular were gorgeous). The faint pinstripes and transparency matched apple's hardware at the time, and it just looked absolutely incredible. It's contemporary oses, windows xp mainly, improved the resolution of their interfaces, but still had garish cartoonish icons, and Linux DEs didn't really shake their lumpy pixelart icons till Nuvola and Crystal came about