I really enjoyed this article from ars technica going through their past reviews of OS X… right up until the part where the author apparently forgets that most of the criticisms from the previous five pages are at least as valid now as they were when originally made, and declares it a good system after all. It fails to pick at some of my favorites, like the total lack of look-and-feel consistency (Apple ships first-party programs in no less than eight different widget sets – and people look down on the GTK/Qt thing on Linux), but nicely articulates many of the things that are so irritating about Apple’s UI design of late.
I’ll freely admit that the classic Mac OS was a technical disaster (Cooperative multitasking? Really?), but it was a marvel of UI consistency, owing largely to the good HIG Apple put out (and developers actually followed) in that era, and it had personality. I mostly lost interest in new Macs around the time OS X came into being, despite the fleet of Macs I grew up playing with, as it was basically slow, quirky UNIX that ran on expensive hardware, with virtually nothing in common with the Classic OS. I did (and do) still regularly interact with Macs though, and am sort of amazed Apple survived the 10.0-10.1 era when the OS completely unusable, in addition to starting from scratch on native applications. I will also admit things improved – I actually kind of liked the 10.5 boxes I played with, especially since it’s UNIX-like behavior got more standard, it introduced things I’ve come to expect, like only mildly broken virtual desktops (and because Microsoft’s platform at the time was an un-recommendable turd). I set up a 10.6 VM to play with recently and it honestly “feels” worse than 10.5 did – the UI elements are even quirkier, and there is a very uncomfortable “You will do this the apple way or you won’t do it” aura, that kind of reminds me of trying to use iOS devices. It isn’t bad, it just doesn’t do anything that I couldn’t set up more to my liking a Linux box… then again, my tastes in computing devices are demonstrably weired.
