Comment by bluedino
7 years ago
The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated.
And the column-based file browser never appealed to me.
I do agree that a high-res black and white screen is so much better for text related tasks than what we had back then in PC land. 640x480x16 colors was a mess. Worked fine for things like CAD but kind of gross to type documents on.
> And the column-based file browser never appealed to me.
That's actually my favorite feature of the Finder and really the only thing I miss when using Windows sometimes. Using arrow keys + typing a letter or two to jump through dirs, and being able to see full hierarchy the whole time works really well with my mental model of the filesystem in a way the tree-based list view never does.
I remember paying $129 for Mac OS X 10.0 and it didn't feel anything like NeXT.
On a supposedly state of the art Mac G4, it ran like a lobotomized sloth mostly because of the heavy new graphics stack. The giant fonts, translucent titlebars, pinstripe patterns and "lickable" candy color buttons were the aesthetic opposite of the 2-bit original NeXT.
While 10.1 did a decent job of patching up more egregious issues, 10.2 Jaguar was the first truly usable iteration of OS X, and it incidentally also brought the first bits of toning down to Aqua.
A lot of folks fondly remember Snow Leopard but for me the golden era for OS X was 10.2 - 10.4. 10.5 and 10.6 were great too, but honestly speaking I wouldn’t be bothered if I had to use a modern version of 10.4 for day to day work.
Agreed, 10.4 Tiger was the high point.
IIRC, Leopard was a bit of a disappointment. It was delayed because they moved engineers to work on the first iPhone... And that's pretty much when Mac stopped being a priority at Apple.
The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated.
Very interesting. My first Mac was an OS9 machine that came out so close to the release of OSX that it came with a free upgrade coupon.
I had a NeXT at work at the same time, and my memory is that the two environments were significantly different. Different enough that I gave the OS9 machine to my wife when OSX came out because it was so easy to use (she had a PS/2).