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Today Marks 20 Years Since Mac OS X First Launched

desktopguy said:
I remember the transition as it was epic!
MacOS 10 was unusable in the graphic design/publishing world, 10.1 was the starting point for the adventurous and 10.2 was when I started shifting clients across.

There was so much hesitation as the industry in Australia was 95% QuarkXpress which was Mac OS 9.

In fact, I did a deal with Apple Australia and they loaned me a specced-up G4 and CRT Studio display and for the next year I was loaning this setup to clients with versions of all the apps and showing the new workflows.

The only reason this came about is in a previously life I did tech support for QuarkXpress and other publishing/prepress tools and worked alongside some who ended up at Apple running marketing.

This was around the Quark4 and Indesign2 era when Quark royally shot themselves in the foot by actively promoting Windows instead of Apple and taking FOREVER to release a native version of QuarkXpress.
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I remember specifically this time. I actually did a few projects with a pre-released version of Indesign while waiting for Quark to come around to OS X. And while it wasn't a 100% stand in for Xpress, it was "good enough" and I decided I would just grow with the Adobe suite on OS X instead of being held back on OS 9. I did get burned a little bit because the documents created with the pre-release of Indesign were not compatible with the released version, but that was a minor set back for my freedom. Quark never got another dollar from me.
 
I remember going to MacWorld in San Francisco that year. I was so fed up with Apple at that point that I was planning a switch to Windows. When they finished with the OSX introduction, I thought to myself, Damn, they’ve got me again LOL. Then the release date came, I upgraded my Mac and suffered for the next couple years as they fixed all the bugs. I stayed with it and am happy I did.
 
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MacBH928 said:
The best there is, the best there was, the best there ever will be.

Mac OS X was the most stable, beautiful, pleasant, and functioning OS in computer history. Its hard to believe that back then it looked this good.

Sensitive Content warning. Horror picture for comparison.
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Don’t punch me, but I actually liked Windows 98 SE and 2000 back then, before moving on to Apple side and get Snow Leopard, back in 2009/2010. Along with Windows For Workgroups 3.11 (which was my main system when I was a little kid), these three Windows versions were my favorite. The other versions are complete (censored) and garbage.
 
I really miss aqua, but I love the more recent dark mode. Aqua with dark mode would be so awesome. I switched to Mac in ‘06. I feel like 2009 -2011 was the peak for macs. The Thunderbolt Cinema Display came out in ‘08– wife still uses our 27” one and it looks spectacular still. The older MacBooks were user upgradable (including ram). I took the disc drive out of mine and had an SSD boot drive and a separate HDD for my stuff. The keyboard didn’t suck. The thing had plenty of ports on the side and MagSafe. It was inviting and fun. iPhoto is better than Apple Photos. iTunes is better than Apple Music. Just noticed that the disc utility in Bug Sur is not as capable as disk utility in older macOS versions. Keeping my ‘12 Mac mini on Mojave until it dies, and I may never get another Mac because I’m a big iTunes user, and Apple Music search functionality is useless for me. Might as well get a pc, sadly.
 
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Great memories moving from OS9 to OSX. Bugs and all. It was a fun trip with all the G3 and G4 models I owned during that time. Kinda miss those old desktop OS days of iLife and ripping CD's.
 
Yes. Remember when:
- Apple had a serious OS X team headed by a brilliant scientist, a UNIX expert (Bertrand Serlet). Their goal was to develop a best-in-class OS serving power users and normal users alike
- the GUI still followed famed guidelines and quantitative metrics (though OS X was always weaker than classic Mac on that front). No hiding of buttons, for one
- Each release was a major update, with dozens of heavy-weight new features (not just a dark mode addition), and a significant speed bump
- release cycle was much more reasonably long, and we paid for a quality product (imagine that!)
- before Forestall raided the team to develop iOS
- because of this high-energy development, OS X market share was rising steadily

Compare to today. Sigh.
 
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I went to a launch party at a local Mac reseller and bought this on launch night. They had Apple employees showing demos on a projector, and one thing I remember very vividly was when they put a G3 PowerBook to sleep and it woke up almost instantly! Coming from Mac OS 9, that was quite a feat. The look of it was so modern, glassy, and incredible looking. I had a shirt from that launch party too but I lost it somehow in the last 20 years….
 
Anybody noticed the perspective and design of the Windows File Explorer icons in the latest Windows 10 Insider build looks very familia?

The disk icon is straight out of OS 9/8. Amazing how much things have come kinda full circle.

Screen Shot 2021-03-24 at 8.33.19 PM.png
 
Seanm87 said:
I feel like I'm the only one that likes Big Sur.

I think it looks cleaner and more modern compared to Catalina.
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I like how Big Sur looks. I dislike the performance and how things like Time Machine have become crippled under Big Sur.

Hopefully macOS 12 or whatever they call the next version will be a lot more optimised.
 
serpico007 said:
Great memories moving from OS9 to OSX. Bugs and all. It was a fun trip with all the G3 and G4 models I owned during that time. Kinda miss those old desktop OS days of iLife and ripping CD's.
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For real. I had amassed quite the CD collection from Columbia House and ripping all those CDs took forever... but I loved every minute of it on my 17" PowerBook G4 (my first Mac).

The simplicity of it and sending songs to my iPod was such a HUGE contrast to my Windows ME and Sony MiniDisc player/burner setup.

I promptly replaced both and never looked back until I switched to Android after iOS 7 came out. But now I'm back!

Sadly, I believe my macOS days are numbered... I'm waiting for new iPad Pros and my iMac and 17" MBP will be put out to pasture.

Unless the rumored MBA redesign brings me back. ;)
 
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audiophilosophy said:
I really miss aqua, but I love the more recent dark mode. Aqua with dark mode would be so awesome. I switched to Mac in ‘06. I feel like 2009 -2011 was the peak for macs. The Thunderbolt Display came out in ‘08– wife still uses our 27” one and it looks spectacular still. The older MacBooks were user upgradable. I took the disc drive out of mine and had an SSD boot drive and a separate HDD for my stuff. The keyboard didn’t suck. The think had plenty of ports on the side and MagSafe. It was inviting and fun. iPhoto > Apple Photos. iTunes > Apple Music. Just noticed that the disc utility in Bug Sur is not as capable as disk utility in older macOS versions. Keeping my ‘12 Mac mini on Mojave until it dies, and I may never get another Mac because I’m a big iTunes user, and Apple Music search functionality is useless for me. Might as well get a pc, sadly.
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My Mac purchases stopped in 2012 like a suicide death in the movie Constantine (with Keanu Reeves).

The release of soldered Macs and the death of the 17" MBP ushered in what I consider the "dark years":

Soldered RAM, proprietary then soldered SSDs, glued iMacs, butterfly keyboards, the Touch Bar, single-port-type dongle-hell, the Tube, and general Mac neglect.

Those days seem to be behind us now, but I have now adapted to not need a Mac at all, which is somewhat ironic.

The 2012 Macs I own will probably be my last, to be replaced by the very iOS devices that supplanted Macs in the Apple universe back then (focus-wise).
 
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I still find it kinda weird to this day, Internet Explorer was available to Mac back then.
 
JMacHack said:
I think those times are long gone, unless you want the barest bones of a Linux distro. Even old farts on here grew up with GUIs, and the new generation is growing up with touch interfaces.
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I guess I'm an older than old fart then!! My first was an Apple IIe!! :)
 
Pixol said:
LOL. How is macOS a pig?

Swift, Metal, APFS. All 64 bit applications. Apple Silicon. Machine Learning. SF Symbols. Dark Mode.

Nope. macOS is pretty trim.

Windows, on the other hand, well...that's going not very well.

View attachment 1748439
View attachment 1748440
And that...that's from their official UI guidelines.
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And don't forget the occasional box/screen with terminal style text to give you that 1980 MS-DOS flashback
 
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CJ Dorschel said:
Nothing beats snow leopard. Also important to note development required wiping the system and installing a new beta every two weeks over a 2 to 3 year period. This allowed for proper debugging of the core OS to ensure that third-party apps and plug-ins weren’t causing issues.

I’d rather go back to two to three-year release cycles for $129 than a rushed annual release for free. Big Sur is a big mess. The UI is terrible on desktop systems. It’s washed out and lacks any depth and consistency. No matter how hard I tweaked my 5K displays to compensate for the harsh washed out finder windows and icons it never seemed to make a difference. It’s essentially iPadOS on a Mac.
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Yes, Snow Leopard was amazing OS. But everybody keeps forgeting that it was buggy at first. Only after all these updates it became solid as a rock.

My first of the favorites was Mac Panther OS. It was first OS that was nice, clean, minimal and very stable compared to what was on the market. I would agree that they should drop yearly release cycles. This benefits nobody. OS is a matured platform that need just regular updates. I don't want any radical changes..
 
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Tech198 said:
I still find it kinda weird to this day, Internet Explorer was available to Mac back then.
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Safari was available for windows too. o_O I think it's time for a complete overhaul of the OS UI, dock etc. It all looks the same to me. Nothing has changed.
 
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