things we've lost

[Contact_Feanor]

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.

I remember the early days of Mac OS X where every subsequent version from 10.0 up till 10.4 just ran faster on the same G4 hardware despite adding huge numbers of features....

 

[Macbookey]

Messages should be torn down to the studs and rebuilt.

I loathe that App.

Agreed. Why is the icon green when the original iMessage was blue in Mountain Lion? After all aren’t green bubbles signifying non  devices. A glaring example of not being detail oriented. Dynamic affordance and discoverability has been replaced with junk drawers, sidebars, toolbars, pinned and non-pinned, and then content. Time to reimagine design (how it looks and works) that considers the user on the other side of the screen once again.

 

[eyoungren]

I miss when iTunes was the gold standard for a digital music hub (Music on the Mac is  software turmoil in a nutshell), when macOS had more whimsy, personality, imagination, attention to detail, and “it just works.” Those are the losses I feel the most. To be fair, many great features have come, and macOS Golden Gate is turning the ship in the right direction, albeit slowly, but there is a need for software to match the incredible hardware that we have in so many areas once again. Hope Ternus addresses this, where Cook let it falter.

I also miss back and forth navigation gestures in Finder that made an appearance around OS X Lion, and then disappeared later, never to be seen again. How is this not there!? I also want the old Logic Pro and Safari icons back as well to name a few.

I guess I just don't see the nostalgia.

I've never used Apple Music. That's largely because I ditched iTunes in favor of other apps that could do what iTunes could not. Except for internet radio, all I ever had with iTunes was problems - particularly when I wanted to do something iTunes couldn't do. It was limited.

With regards to the OS, I do not look back on OS9 or OS X Tiger fondly. OS X Leopard was my daily driver from 2008 to 2020. From 2018 to present it's been High Sierra and above. There was a small slice of time I was on Yosemite and Mavericks at work. I do not recall Mavericks fondly. It caused issues. My one experience with Lion and discovering that I could no longer shrink my Finder windows down to the size I wanted was disappointing. I wasn't on Lion at work very long.

I will never get to Golden Gate on my Intel Macs.

There are some things I do wish to see returned from some of the OS's I've used. But not much.

So maybe I missed something somewhere, IDK.

 

[Contact_Feanor]

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.

That was a Mac feature too...

 

[Macbookey]

Just want to add that I'm keeping some of the "things we've lost" in constant use still.
🙌 ❤️‍🔥

One of my Nano 7's at the gym yesterday.
They work brilliantly with my AirPods 2 fleet that is for running & gym activities.


View attachment 2659678

As redundant and niche as it may seem to most, I would kill for the return of the iPod so I can disconnect and immerse in music alone. One job, done spectacularly well, like it used to be.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I guess I just don't see the nostalgia.

☝️ This is answered by this 👇

I've never used Apple Music.

I have no choice but to engage with Apple Music as it's the only way to organize and curate for my local device syncing needs.

AM, the App, is a clunky mess vs iTunes.

 

[turbineseaplane]

As redundant and niche as it may seem to most, I would kill for the return of the iPod so I can disconnect and immerse in music alone. One job, done spectacularly well, like it used to be.

If Apple weren't so obsessed with subscription revenue extraction, I swear they could be killing it with the fad amongst young folks for older less connected tech.

Even in the subscription world, it's wild to me they don't see an opportunity for "connected" iPods that could work offline with synced up content from the Apple Music subscription.

 

[Macbookey]

If Apple weren't so obsessed with subscription revenue extraction, I swear they could be killing it with the fad amongst young folks for older less connected tech.

Even in the subscription world, it's wild to me they don't see an opportunity for "connected" iPods that could work offline with synced up content from the Apple Music subscription.

You can see a trend in youth that is looking at the stuff us dinosaurs once used with delight. It is hard on our youth to live in this always connected world, and some are starting to see the down sides of it. You are so right. A 2026 reimagining of the iPod with what the best of  can do would be awesome. Bundle it with AirPods while they are at it.

Best analogy I’ve read is that there was a time when technology entertained us, instead of owning us.

 

[eyoungren]

I have no choice but to engage with Apple Music as it's the only way to organize and curate for my local device syncing needs.

AM, the App, is a clunky mess vs iTunes.

My needs are fairly simple. I want a music app that will file music by artist, album and date of issue. I want to store ONE single music library on my NAS and I want every Mac or PC running a music app to be able to see and access that library. I want a music app that will monitor that library on my NAS for deletions and additions and to update accordingly.

iTunes can't do this. And based on my trying the Music app, Apple Music STILL can't do this either. But Songbird on PowerPC can do this. Nightingale on Early Intels can do this. Swinsian on Intels running later versions of MacOS can do this. So, I use those.

And thus I have no nostalgia for iTunes.

 

[CerebralHumor]

Things that I've lost/miss: app icons that aren't encased in a squircle.

It was sort of fun when all the app icons had their own shapes, whatever best suited that icon - not stuck into boxes. It allowed for a breadth of creativity that I always liked.

That being said, I actually didn't mind Big Sur's implementation, where there was an invisible outer box that was the true border. That allowed for certain app icons to have elements that would "spill" out of the squircle in a way that I felt really worked:

GarageBand, Xcode, Chess, TextEdit, Automator, MigrationAssistant. I know there were others.

To me, this was evocative of iOS/iPadOS (which I guess they were going for, for better or worse), where everything must stay in the icon box, while still showing why the Mac was different...and better. At least that's my take.

To me, this is much nicer than macOS 26, where it seems the squircle is the absolute border that nothing may extend past.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

at some point there was a project on GitHub called FirstRow but never needed/tried it, yet seems quite faithful to what I remember from it

I tried it, it froze on launch and didn’t work.
Also, I’m not necessary to looking for a one-to-one replacement, more of a modern equivalent.

 

[Contact_Feanor]

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.

If I remember correctly he did budge. He tried to cancel the launch of the original iMac because it was tray-loading. Only going through with it because he was convinced subsequent models would have slot loading drives. But the first Bondi blue iMacs were very much tray loading...

 

[Contact_Feanor]

I miss the old layout of the settings app, before Ventura redid it. The new one being full of menus on top of menus feels so much less organized than it was before.

oh my god, yes!

 

[izzy0242mr]

Actually I believe they took it out in 26 but can be returned using a defaults entry. May have been even earlier when they revamped the Settings to look more like iOS.

Wow, that sucks. I haven't upgraded to Tahoe on my main machine. But I just double checked my Mac running GG beta and I see what you mean now, about how the dragable icon is hidden until mouseover.

Apparently you can enable this in Golden Gate by going to Settings > Accessibility > Display > Show window title icons. No Terminal commands needed.

 

[Contact_Feanor]

Messages should be torn down to the studs and rebuilt.

I loathe that App.

Remember iChat where you could add other messaging services to the app? Jabber, AIM, ICQ, even my Facebook messages were in that app.
Now I'm glad that I can see my iPhone texts on there, but it's useless to talk to e.g. people who use WhatsApp (here in Europe iMessage is way less popular). That and the bugs or weird behaviors (try the search function in messages, try scrolling back to old messages and not spend hours, the missing drag and drop thing,...) make it a very easy candidate for a complete rewrite...

 

[txmike418]

“It just works”

 

[turbineseaplane]

Remember iChat where you could add other messaging services to the app? Jabber, AIM, ICQ, even my Facebook messages were in that app.
Now I'm glad that I can see my iPhone texts on there, but it's useless to talk to e.g. people who use WhatsApp (here in Europe iMessage is way less popular). That and the bugs or weird behaviors (try the search function in messages, try scrolling back to old messages and not spend hours, the missing drag and drop thing,...) make it a very easy candidate for a complete rewrite...

I do!
It was an App designed for ME .. the USER .. not just to serve Apple business interests.

Great example!

 

[Contact_Feanor]

I guess I just don't see the nostalgia.

I've never used Apple Music. That's largely because I ditched iTunes in favor of other apps that could do what iTunes could not. Except for internet radio, all I ever had with iTunes was problems - particularly when I wanted to do something iTunes couldn't do. It was limited.

With regards to the OS, I do not look back on OS9 or OS X Tiger fondly. OS X Leopard was my daily driver from 2008 to 2020. From 2018 to present it's been High Sierra and above. There was a small slice of time I was on Yosemite and Mavericks at work. I do not recall Mavericks fondly. It caused issues. My one experience with Lion and discovering that I could no longer shrink my Finder windows down to the size I wanted was disappointing. I wasn't on Lion at work very long.

I will never get to Golden Gate on my Intel Macs.

There are some things I do wish to see returned from some of the OS's I've used. But not much.

So maybe I missed something somewhere, IDK.

Maybe because I spent so much time with Tiger that it became the "de facto Mac OS X version" for me; if I remember correctly I think the time between Tiger and Leopard was the longest ever between Mac OS X versions. It ran on so much older hardware that I kept it running on some machines well into the 2010's. Where leopard would drive early G4 systems to a halt, they would just fly on Tiger.

Your Daily Driver was Leopard from 2008. to 2020; why not snow leopard? It was so much better in every conceivable way; or did you somehow use a PowerPC Mac until 2020 (I remember most of them not even able to comfortably browse the current web at bearable speeds)?

 

[Contact_Feanor]

As redundant and niche as it may seem to most, I would kill for the return of the iPod so I can disconnect and immerse in music alone. One job, done spectacularly well, like it used to be.

I so love iPods that I have an entire collection of them; lacking 4 colours of the 7th generation Nano's and 4 of the last release of the iPod shuffles (difficult to differentiate generation from generation on second hand websites). I was so hoping (while knowing they wouldn't) that they'd release a 25th birthday special edition iPod this year... unfortunately it doesn't seem likely. They'd sell me every color, lol.

 

[Contact_Feanor]

My needs are fairly simple. I want a music app that will file music by artist, album and date of issue. I want to store ONE single music library on my NAS and I want every Mac or PC running a music app to be able to see and access that library. I want a music app that will monitor that library on my NAS for deletions and additions and to update accordingly.

iTunes can't do this. And based on my trying the Music app, Apple Music STILL can't do this either. But Songbird on PowerPC can do this. Nightingale on Early Intels can do this. Swinsian on Intels running later versions of MacOS can do this. So, I use those.

And thus I have no nostalgia for iTunes.

You can't keep the library on the NAS and then option click to open Music and then choose to open the library on the NAS? That used to work back in the day.

 

[eyoungren]

Maybe because I spent so much time with Tiger that it became the "de facto Mac OS X version" for me; if I remember correctly I think the time between Tiger and Leopard was the longest ever between Mac OS X versions. It ran on so much older hardware that I kept it running on some machines well into the 2010's. Where leopard would drive early G4 systems to a halt, they would just fly on Tiger.

My major issues with Tiger stem largely from the fact that the job I worked during that time was a small business. There was me and one other person and since I 'knew' computers, I was given the duties of an IT person for the companies computers (mainly PC) and Windows Server.

Our section had Macs only because I manipulated it that way. But Tiger did not want to play nice with the 2003 Windows SBS server. This resulted in a long road to discovering several things, primarily the fact that Apple's implementation of the SMB protocol was non-standard. It required the installation of DAVE by Thursby software before things settled down a bit. Even so, initiating more than two Finder instructions at a time would cause a beachball and the only way to recover was a forced restart. By Finder instructions I mean more than one copy or delete command.

Later on, I also discovered that Tiger's printserver is simply archaic in comparison to the one on Leopard.

In that job, I had a PowerMac G4 from 2004 to 2005, when the boss bought a G5. G4 went to the second person. That was the setup until 2013 when the G5 died. It was replaced by a 2010 Mac Pro. I swapped logicboards on the G5 and the second person got the G5. The G4 became a printserver, first with Tiger then Leopard, because the Mac Pro could not print correctly to the Appletalk printer on its own.

Your Daily Driver was Leopard from 2008. to 2020; why not snow leopard? It was so much better in every conceivable way; or did you somehow use a PowerPC Mac until 2020 (I remember most of them not even able to comfortably browse the current web at bearable speeds)?

I was PC until 2003, but my mom had gifted me a Titanium PowerBook in 2001. In 2003, I switched solely to that TiBook. I had no other computers. In 2009, the TiBook died (firs time). I replaced it with a 2003 17" PowerBook G4. Later, in 2010, I got a second 17" PowerBook G4. By this time I am running Leopard.

By 2017 I had acquired a Quad G5 and a 2.3 Dualcore G5. Both running Leopard. The Quad G5 lasted until May 2020 when all my workarounds finally started to fail. I was able to replace it with the 2009 Mac Pro I am typing this on. In 2025 I upgraded the Mac Pro from Mojave to Sonoma using OCLP. It's a 4,1 upgraded to a 5,1.

My typical price range when I can manage it for a 'new' Mac is $250. Apple does not sell ANY Mac for that price. So, eBay has largely been my store for Macs. Which typically means used.

So, yes Leopard. From about 2010 to 2020. As you may know, Snow Leopard does not run on PowerPC. The SL project for that I do not count and it wasn't available in 2010 in any case.

There is an entire thread about modding Leopard in the PowerPC section of this forum. Additionally, a project was created off of that thread that used a lot of those mods and packaged it all into an installer. I never used that because it came long after I'd installed the original Leopard.

 

[eyoungren]

You can't keep the library on the NAS and then option click to open Music and then choose to open the library on the NAS? That used to work back in the day.

Sure. For three or four Macs at a time? What about each Mac scanning that folder to update music after I drop in a folder of MP3s manually? What if I delete some items manually? Does iTunes on all the Macs update?

If I use iTunes on one Mac to add to the library on the NAS, do the other copies of iTunes on the other Macs see this and update as well?

What happens if for whatever reason I want to be playing music from more than one Mac at a time (using iTunes) from the same library on the NAS?

You see my problem here?

 

[crobcary]

I miss the days when iTunes had hit its stride in 10.6-7-8, because the feature set was really comprehensive for maintaining a local library of owned music files. I could spend a day in the "songs" table view and just organize the **** out of everything. Even iTunes Match was really geared towards making the files you already owned better. Now, it's so bad that the columns will just jump right back to the top item anytime it even thinks of syncing with iCloud library...and forces you to keep focus on their stupid rental service, Apple Music.

 

[darngooddesign]

Agreed. Why is the icon green when the original iMessage was blue in Mountain Lion? After all aren’t green bubbles signifying non  devices. A glaring example of not being detail oriented. Dynamic affordance and discoverability has been replaced with junk drawers, sidebars, toolbars, pinned and non-pinned, and then content. Time to reimagine design (how it looks and works) that considers the user on the other side of the screen once again.

The Mac iChat icon was blue while the iPhone Text/Messages icon has always been green. Once Messages replaced iChat in Mountain Lion as the Messaging service, the icon changed to green.

 

[Contact_Feanor]

Sure. For three or four Macs at a time? What about each Mac scanning that folder to update music after I drop in a folder of MP3s manually? What if I delete some items manually? Does iTunes on all the Macs update?

If I use iTunes on one Mac to add to the library on the NAS, do the other copies of iTunes on the other Macs see this and update as well?

What happens if for whatever reason I want to be playing music from more than one Mac at a time (using iTunes) from the same library on the NAS?

You see my problem here?

No because I don't know the answers to those questions 🙂