Oh, I see - that makes sense.
What was it that you thought made it perfect and what has changed that you think has had a negative influence? I'd be interested to know.
It's just everything. The reliability of the OS, the hardware, the integration of the software.
A PowerMac G5 in 2005, running Tiger and iLife 05 was literally bug free. There were no problems. I remember it clearly, and I confirm it every time I work on a pre-2006 tower. They run their native OS's smoother and more glitch free than the current machines run their native OS's.
iMovie 06' is a perfect example of when the downhill started. They added a bunch of features that didn't add anything useful to the application, but all of a sudden it was taking twice as long to export videos or to burn DVDs. The program was just slowed by 50%... apparently for no reason. I don't know what they did, but it was a disaster. And of course they dropped the sensible, mini-FCP version of iMovie shortly after that, leaving us with a bizarre new age toy.
Mac OS 10.0 was unusable, 10.1 was iffy, 10.2 was solid and glitch free. 10.3 was a big improvement on 10.2, and 10.4 was a big improvement on 10.3.. all of these changes bringing bigger and better, bug-free operating systems.
Now 10.5 introduced Time Machine, but at the same time it was the first "shaky" version of Mac OS X, in terms of bugginess and stability. Then 10.6 was even worse, and 10.7 was about as bad as 10.6.
It is my understanding that 10.8 has been quite a solid system on the newest machines, but it still is now bogged down and overly gimmicked out with its imitations of the iPad, etc.
If you take Tiger, and you add Time Machine, everything you need is there. I like dealing with applications and documents like a normal person... moving my mouse around to click things, keeping my own notes for myself, etc. Essentially, the changes over the last six years are distancing the user more and more from the nature of what a computer is, and making it an automated toy-like device.
And the iPod. The 3rd generation iPod was the climax. After that the scroll wheels were no longer as smooth, the operation wasn't as quick, etc. And the current iPod Classic is like an elephant with its big color screen, album artwork... only displaying four items at a time on the screen because of having to include that stupid album artwork.
I could really go on and on.