things we've lost

[turbineseaplane]

Speaking of things we've lost

 

[eyoungren]

Speaking of things we've lost

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Having owned both a TiBook and a Quicksilver, I do get the nostalgia. The reality was a bit different, especially after 2010.

That said, the look of the Quicksilver remains my favorite.

 

[zevrix]

for non-system apps you can still change the app icons to non-squircles by going to the app in the finder, selecting, getting the info pane; and then copy pasting an icon onto the app icon in the info pane

...until the app is updated, after which you have to do this again. I'm still doing it. i also just recently learned that you can drag-and-drop the icon instead of copy-pasting.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

I used and miss Dashboard. It was a nice place to have widgets.

I didn’t realize I’d started using LaunchPad as much as I had until Tahoe removed it. LaunchOS app does a pretty good job of providing similar functionality as LaunchPad with the benefit of additional settings/features.

I was hoping for so many years that Apple would eventually just combine Launchpad and the desktop widgets that they introduced in Sonoma.
Basically making it act like the home screen on iOS has, since iOS 14, where you could have a mix of icons and widgets.It would keep the launchpad, while also basically reintroducing the exact same functionality as dashboard.
I’m not a big fan of my widgets always being on the desktop, but that’s all Apple offers now.
It’s especially bizarre given that they are apparently about to introduce a touchscreen MacBook, you’d think that the launchpad would be the perfect demonstration of something like that.

 

[turbineseaplane]

The golden era of "Products" 😀 and not "Services" 😡

 

[zevrix]

This setting (Accessibility | Display) enables the little icons next to the Finder device/location in the title bar.

I find it interesting that many perfectly standard UI options are now listed under "Accessibility" as if those who need them are people with special needs.

On the other hand it has a positive side. We can now demand UI improvements as part of compliance with accessibility rules.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

Front Row.
Still looking for a proper replacement if anyone has one, would love to use an Apple TV remote to control a super simplified interface to control music, movies, TV shows, and podcasts on my Mac.
The TV app that exists now on the Mac is just terrible.
It’s fine on iOS, iPadOS, and the Apple TV, but on the Mac it’s just barely functional.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

I do miss the lovely 3D Dock! They also gutted TM but kept some parts to where it no longer makes sense, conceptually.

I also miss how tight and zippy their software felt. It now feels like there’s a sea of code behind any app that makes it behave like mud. It’s just a qualitative feel I don’t like. Little stutters. The iconography now feels like fiverr art. Just boring glyphs without much thought behind them. No cleverness or care. FaceTime is just the shape of a green camera. Messages, a green chat bubble. Phone, shocker, an old school phone. Home… a home. You cannot get more base than that. Emojis have more character and quality to them.

The ugly ash rounded borders and faux glass, which I’m sorry but conceptually runs against the childish fiverr glyphs, gives off serious Fisher Price vibes.

MacOS feels childish and lazy as opposed to austere and clean. The whole vibe of the OS just feels off, like a hodgepodge.

The constant bugs that are piling up, never getting fixed despite being just so obvious are becoming truly insufferable. We all expected a Snow Leopard pass on OS26, but we didn’t even get that! Just minor tweaks. Literally every bug in OS26 is still there. I really miss Jobs’ commitment to quality software. Something Cook gutted real quick and now it’s impossible to ignore the sad state it’s in.

 

[conmee]

MacOS feels childish and lazy as opposed to austere and clean. The whole vibe of the OS just feels off, like a hodgepodge.

Agree with the entire post, but this right here, for me, gets to the heart of the matter.

 

[ignatius345]

I used and miss Dashboard. It was a nice place to have widgets.

Dashboard was amazing -- just a super fast HUD that would quickly appear as needed. Layering like that is such an underutilized concept. The little strip they replaced it with is so constrained and dumbed down. Because it’s so narrow, I find myself having to scroll down to see things if there’s much in there. And because it shares its real estate with notifications (which is really weird), that just eats away even more at its available space. Not well thought out.

One of the most underrated features of Dashboard, IMO, was that you could crop out a section of a web page and save it as a little snippet there. So if you had some key bit of info that you wanted to keep tabs on that didn’t have an actual Dashboard widget available, you could simply snip it and have it always there -- and it would of course fetch changes from the website every time you brought up Dashboard.

Dashboard would also provide an excellent layer to access iOS apps, now that we have Apple Silicon and can run them natively on the Mac.

 

[macuser29387]

Aqua UI and skeuomorphism. I miss both
View attachment 2658983

Early OS X was gorgeous ☺️

 

[AlixSPQR]

MacOS stopped supporting and reading native Mac OS Standard (HFS) CD’s in 2019. I have to use Linux to read them. A tad bit stupid.

 

[thelion7]

Hey,
I've been a macOS user since the early days of the Mac OS X big cat era. MacOS has changed a lot since then, some for the better, some for the worse. Sometimes, for no reason at all, features go lost. What are the things "we"ve lost" that you are most sad or mad about. I'll give some (quaint) examples of mine:

• the colored finder sidebar (lost with Lion I think). I found it soooooo much easier when the folders in the sidebar had icons in full color. I mean: how nice is this: View attachment 2658833
• the little folder or file icons on top of the window chrome (like the little house icon next to "guest" in that previous image) that you could drag and drop as if it was the folder or file. Now you have to hover and wait for it to appear.
• No longer being able to drop a file or photo on the messages icon to send it to someone... was so handy and so Mac-like. Suddenly with an update it stopped working....


so... what are yours?

Not a Mac OS one but I used to love Cover Flow on OG iPods and early iOS versions.

I think it got removed due to a law suit from not paying licensing fees?

Either way, I do miss the old aesthetic of Cover Flow in music.

 

[thelion7]

Speaking of things we've lost

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Wow, I mean I joined in the iPod era, then got my first Mac 2010 MacBook Pro 13 inch.

I had no idea MacBooks had a front loading disc drive at one point.

However I did love the slot loading drive on the side of my first MacBook.

Barely ever used it but it definitely gave the machine a sign of more life and functionality.

Even though discs aren’t seen very efficient anymore.

It is sad in a way that Apple tried to make MacBooks with as little ports as possible because the just wanted you to have a block of aluminium and glass.

 

[1st-alex]

the old "About This Mac" would show the OS's logo (the same one from the installer icon) like the Mojave desert for 10.14 or the Catalina cliffs for 10.15. they replaced it with the device icon in Ventura. I think until Mavericks or El Captain they just had the Apple logo in there ? I do not remember anymore as I wasn't looking there much.

For nostalgia's sake, here is the "About This Mac" dialog from Mac OS X Lion:

I believe with Ventura and newer, the About This Mac dialog was redesigned to focus more on providing basic stats on your Mac device and less on the OS itself, hence the icon change.

Screenshot from macOS 15 Sequoia, for posterity:

 

[eyoungren]

Early OS X was gorgeous ☺️

But not really usable for paid employment until Jaguar. Not really fully functionable until Panther and not fully customizable until Panther/Tiger.

Leopard of that time period was/is my favorite, but it took several years and two apps to manage getting a black theme to work on it. Even then, certain parts of Finder windows remained stark white.

 

[eyoungren]

LOL! Some of you do not get into the PowerPC Mac and Early Intel Mac sections of MacRumors very much. 😀

 

[ignatius345]

But not really usable for paid employment until Jaguar. Not really fully functionable until Panther and not fully customizable until Panther/Tiger.

I was working on Macs in print publications all through that time. I remember switching over to OS X, probably around... 2001? I remember it feeling super futuristic, especially when we started getting all that new translucent hardware. That first clear mouse with the laser instead of a roller ball underneath really blew my mind!

 

[eyoungren]

I was working on Macs in print publications all through that time. I remember switching over to OS X, probably around... 2001? I remember it feeling super futuristic, especially when we started getting all that new translucent hardware. That first clear mouse with the laser instead of a roller ball underneath really blew my mind!

99 percent of my employment in the last 27 years has been with small, weekly newspapers. The paper I left in 2003 was still using OS9. I didn't get fully into OS X until mid-2004 at a new paper (one I stayed at for 14.5 years). Had to update the Mac and that's when I found out that labels weren't supported. I think they came back in Panther.

But that time period was an effort in converting that paper from PC/Windows/Pagemaker to Mac/OS X/QuarkXPress for the first year or so. Panther was stable and I was able to survive getting the paper out each week using that OS.

Oh, and the mouse you mention was/is the Apple Pro Mouse. I still have my original. But, I prefer the wired Mighty Mouse because I don't have to CTRL-click everything to get the contextual menu. 😉

 

[Hajj.david]

Four things immediately spring to mind…

1. Popup windows. This was an OS9 feature where you could move a Finder window to the bottom or side of your screen and the title bar would minimize and appear as a tab. Moving your mouse over the titlebar/tab popped the entire window up. When you were done and moved your mouse away, it sprang back to the side or bottom as the titlebar/tab again.

2. Minimizing windows in place.

3. Color labels. And I'm not talking about the dots. I mean, full length color labels for folders/files.

4. Minimum Finder window width. Since Lion, there is a minimum Finder window size and you need an Applescript to make a Finder window smaller. Move it and it springs back to the minimum size.

Those things I have whined about losing frequently.

1. Long pressing icons and minimizing does the same thing
2. Absolutely still exists:
   
3. Sort of made a comeback in Goldengate? Adding the dot also changes the folder color
   
4. Why on earth would you ever need a finder window smaller than this, not saying to argue I am simply confused as to why?
   

 

[QuarterSwede]

3. Color labels. And I'm not talking about the dots. I mean, full length color labels for folders/files.

Yaaaas. The simple colored circle/dot in Tahoe is flat out horrible for those that are colorblind. I'm not even that bad and even I can't tell the difference between red and green dots until I stop and look closely. I LOVED the full length pill colors. Glad they're getting a bit better in GG.

Although, it could be worse. It could be Windows where colored folders are only available if you're using OneDrive. Talk about dumb.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

Not a Mac OS one but I used to love Cover Flow on OG iPods and early iOS versions.

I think it got removed due to a law suit from not paying licensing fees?

Either way, I do miss the old aesthetic of Cover Flow in music.

Yeah, Apple literally stole it from Cover Flow (the app’s name at the time) and did it so brazenly, they even kept the official name of the app it first appeared in! It was disgraceful.

But I believe they did settle the suite and just took it out when Ives took over, stripping all the skeuomorphism.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

1. Long pressing icons and minimizing does the same thing
2. Absolutely still exists: View attachment 2659061
3. Sort of made a comeback in Goldengate? Adding the dot also changes the folder color View attachment 2659062
4. Why on earth would you ever need a finder window smaller than this, not saying to argue I am simply confused as to why?View attachment 2659064

macOS not intelligently (use a damn ratio not a static default window size) scaling new windows to the size of the display has always been peak insufferable. Getting a 120x80 px window on a 27” display is just so grating. The scaling across the board could be fixed by using a percentage of the physical display with little effort but that tiny little bit of effort would take a user to the stars! How annoying it is to have to constantly resize everything 😡

Like WTH is this?! A UI for ants!?!? How they thought this would be even remotely acceptable I don’t even know.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

However I did love the slot loading drive on the side of my first MacBook.

That was all Jobs. Even going back to the Bondi Blue iMac, he historically hated trays and felt them to be absolutely unnecessary. He had to fight with c-suite who wanted to cut costs as they were significantly cheaper than slot loaded drives but Jobs did not budge.

A lot of the extra bits of quality found across all of Apple’s older hardware and software was all Jobs.

 

[conmee]

macOS not intelligently (use a damn ratio not a static default window size) scaling new windows to the size of the display has always been peak insufferable. Getting a 120x80 px window on a 27” display is just so grating. The scaling across the board could be fixed by using a percentage of the physical display with little effort but that tiny little bit of effort would take a user to the stars! How annoying it is to have to constantly resize everything 😡

Like WTH is this?! A UI for ants!?!? How they thought this would be even remotely acceptable I don’t even know.

View attachment 2659077

After reinstalling macOS, one of the first OCD things I do is resize my app windows to fit my Studio Display. And I’ve been using Magnet for years to center app windows (and generally manage app windows). Since Big Sur, the only app that doesn’t retain size and position is Disk Utility. It always opens up slightly different sized and different location. And Books sometimes I have to resize twice, change the view maximize/minimize then close and it finally saves the size/position. And I’ve noticed since Ventura probably that when I resize Finder I have to then do something like copy, make a duplicate, some sort of file action otherwise if I just open it up, resize, reposition, it just goes back to the previous size/position upon reopening. Lots or quirks like this.