Are you using an SSD? Anything after Mountain Lion will be the same speed on a mechanical hard drive. 10.6 was the pinnacle of the stability of the OS. It was the most refined version, IMO only Mountain Lion and Sierra come close. However Mountain Lion is lacking software support, Mavericks is the bare minimum now for browsers. I am on Sierra now for software support.
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Any Mavericks/iOS 6 holdouts?
- Thread starter retta283
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I do have an SSD and I don't notice much improvement nor slowdown from Mavericks thru Mojave. As for reliability, I've never really had any stability issues with any macOS, other than betas. When you say that 10.6, 10.8, and 10.12 are the most stable, what problems in the other versions are you referring to? Perhaps you have incompatible software or drivers, or a bad installation. OS X has always been rock solid for me.
Lion was always extremely unstable for me. For as long as I used it, it always crashed and was slow. I ran it on 4 different Macs and all the same. Mavericks was decent but I found it used up a lot of RAM. Yosemite and El Capitan both beach balled for me a lot, however I did not use them with SSDs. Same can be said of High Sierra and Mojave. I found many problems with memory management in both of those versions.
Absolutely, I can relate to that. I feel that High Sierra runs faster than any other OS I have installed and used for the last 5 years. However, you yourself stated that GUI is the matter of personal preference. The thing is that GUI is not something to be easily tossed aside when dealing with the everyday necessity to spend hours in front of the screen. Your virtual habitat is just like that of the real world and you want your habitat to provide comfort and efficiency you feel you will get best by living and working under these particular conditions. By efficiency I mean not only esthetics but the GUI that interfaces with me in a way that I find comfortable to tackle many big and small things and methods I got used to. In practical terms it means that, for ex., OS 1 has fewer novelties than OS 2, but evaluating my efficiency by comparing the two OS'es I come to conclusion that sticking with OS 1 tilts the balance to the advantage of OS 1 and I perfectly do well with OS 1 employing workarounds (like 3rd party browsers or other software) that wouldn't sacrifice my experience. Bear in mind that this is relevant in light of too frequent upgrades so after 1 or 2, or even more years using a comparatively "older" OS doesn't provoke the emergence of the burden of obsolescence and if it does that could be a ramification of marketing campaigns Apple carries out. If you are attentive enough you'd notice that 1st and foremost a facet of the UX that suffers and gets old are social, sharing and browsing although the computer is a universal medium and can perfectly serve offline too. You feel it's old by 5/6 when you see Safari struggling to load sites.
The last sentence cannot be overestimated since very often you would want to run older software that works better and, ironically, provides more features - such as iWork'11, iLife'11. iMovie'11 and every version of iPhoto as well as Aperture that Apple dropped makes for better result and usage for more demanding users but provides less stable and ultimate experience with every newer OS X (examples - Final Cut Pro 10 initially was almost universally rejected, iWork '13 is a downscaled version of the previous iWork, Aperture is still unsurpassed in terms of organization, however in Mojave Aperture is reported to have multiple issues resurfaced en masse just after the upgrade - why would I want to upgrade then: I'd better buy another Image manipulation software and use it in conjunction with Aperture in older OS and run an up-to-date OS alongside currently used - this is a totally legit use case). I don't use Photos at all and when I do I just export photos from iPhoto and Aperture to it to be able to share them. This is just a fraction of illustration of why an older OS and software could still make them more valuable and desirable than newer ones despite newer features: a novelty is not synonymous with user experience. It's only in a perfect world that the new is better, however in the real world your experience is what's ultimate and the old can be, actually, better - for you. The companies make the life of their consumers not easier but harder by pushing too much in short spans.
Quite the contrary: as evidenced by examples, I drew above old versions are not only nicer but can be practical either, especially considering the iOS-driven mentality of decision-makers at Apple. iOS itself is a very controversial topic these days. Many still consider iOS 6 the best. Why? Not because of who-has-more-features competition but because of the user experience. Both iOS6 and SL are undoubtedly and unfortunately, outdated but they deserved their fame not out of nothing: user experience matters more than novelties and that's where the interests of companies and consumers are at odds with each other. Smooth user experience can make you feel like you're on the edge of progress. Up-to-date software being buggy, cumbersome and obtrusive ("security" is an analogue of the Balmer's buzzword "developers" these days: f*ck it off, it annoys me to type in my password 1000 times a day, lose parts of previously acceptable functionality such as browser extensions just because now Apple&Co think it doesn't comply and be on the phone support with Apple just because I can't sign in my perfectly "secure" account - this is not GOOD UX) feels like the epitome of stagnation.
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