This is my interface on OS Big Sur 11.6. It's a very capable machine, but the interface is definitely cluttered and less user-friendly than older versions, and the iCloud integration is a pain in the ass; having to sign in and authenticate things is really annoying, so now I use localhost with my Mac Mini that I have made into a storage box, and it saves money as well on iCloud subscriptions
It’s been an ongoing discussion happening on MR and elsewhere how Apple
have abandoned strict style, design, and use standards for their user experience, especially since the Silicon-oriented macOS builds have been rolled out. The counterpoint is a looser adherence to design standards can accommodate the UI/UX familiar to folks who’ve come of age in the “app era” and are accustomed to software-as-a-service for everything they do online (TV, social, etc.).
But this abandonment has also undermined Apple’s longstanding reputation for delivering consistency and clean design solutions — especially baffling since Apple had worked for decades to fine-tune the Mac OS/OS X/earlier macOS UX to be simple, yet extremely powerful within that superficial simplicity. If anything, the Silicon-era builds of macOS, in their never-ending quest to delete the line between iPadOS and macOS, are moving more toward the haphazard, every vendor-their-own-way approach one might expect with, say, a Windows 95/98.
Alternately put, it’s as if Apple’s current crop of UX/UI talent want to re-invent wheels which
can’t be re-invented, and it’s steadily getting worse.
(Yes, I still use iTunes 12 at times because Music App is a PITA for me and syncing my iPods):
In my home, all but one Mac (the Tiger-bound iBook G3) use iTunes 10 (10.6.3 for most, 10.4.1 for a special case), as this was an apex for ease of use, especially whilst archiving and entering metadata, and for its stability, as well as having the widest
operability (is that even a word?) of all the iTunes builds. It is able to run on everything from OS X 10.5.8 on PPC, up through the very last security update of Mojave in 2021; had a 64-bit iteration been built under that version, it would have gone even further.
All of this is to say: I don’t judge your desire to stick with iTunes over Music, as the latter is designed to sell content as its principal raison d’être, whereas the former was intended from its inception to manage one’s own library (with sales-as-a-service appended to its base later).
If I want an appliance, Apple, I will buy an appliance. (You make horrible appliances, by the way. Stick to computers.)
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Compare that to the simplicity, pre iCloud on my MBP '09 running SL 10.6.8:
Snow Leopard, as I’ve written repeatedly to the point of boring the regulars, was Apple’s high-water mark on stability, cleanliness of UI, consistency, versatility, and longevity. I often wonder how different Apple’s trajectory with post-SL builds would have differed had they not jettisoned ZFS at the eleventh hour during development of Snow Leopard. But that’s another discussion.
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Things are a lot lighter, simplistic, and easier to run without needing to download apps either. And look at that cover flow on iTunes 10, it's just perfection. Everything is smooth and responsive and it does look a lot more cohesive. I use that Macbook when I need a large screen and distraction-free editing. It's a real treat. Haven't had ANY trouble with this on 10.6.8, unlike 10.11 El Capitan, and downloading recovery for that. It was a three-day saga until I gave up and just loaded the SL spare HD onto that HD.
I’ve settled on High Sierra for most of my post-SL activity, as a lot of the teething issues with the change of direction, post-Yosemite, are more or less ironed out (with
notable exceptions). I briefly ran Mojave on my rMBP, and realized I preferred High Sierra at that point. I may revisit Mojave in the near-future, though.
And for even more simplicity (and to run OS 9 classic apps) and have less distraction, and to tinker around/experiment with, I use an iBook G4 with Tiger on it (10.4.11 that I updated from Panther through a disk install to give it to more usage). It runs well most of the time and it's a good environment for writing and streaming music. Very simple:
Admittedly, I’ve run CandyBar/Shapeshifter on my lone iBook G3 running 10.4.11 to give it the Leopard UI treatment, as there’s a lot left to be desired (to my brain, at least) with the Tiger interface. Otherwise, 10.4.11 is comparably for PowerPC Macs as stable as 10.6.8 for early Intel Macs, with the added bonus that it’s also a Universal Binary. Tiger was a good plateau for all the work to get the Kodiak beta in 2000 to tidy up and be at its most stable and matured UI. Leopard changed gears, for worse or better. I treat Snow Leopard as the best refinement of Leopard, whereas other folks have chimed in on here to argue how Mavericks is the most refined UI of that period. (I’m kinda meh about the Lion-to-Mavericks era, but I understand where they’re coming from).
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If I could still use Tiger today, as a daily driver on the iBook with better specs, and support, I would. Apple should have continued to work on the SL PPC version and released that fully, to give people one more version. I get that it wasn't as powerful as Intel, or as efficient, but people still used iBooks / Powerbooks as daily drivers back 12-15 years ago (and some still use them today--well they try to).
I agree, but I’m also
heavily biased here.
I don’t see why Apple couldn’t have released SL for PPC as a retail release, though with some features left unavailable to a PPC device by dint of not having the right architecture — not unlike how recent iterations of macOS have Silicon-only features which not even the latest and last of the Intel Macs can use, yet Intel Macs can still run those macOS versions. For example, PowerPC Macs wouldn’t have had access to OpenCL, but could have had legacy support for pre-OpenCL GPUs to accommodate PowerPC users. Further, only final-edition PowerPC Macs would have had the means to keep up well with a PowerPC-accommodated retail release of Snow Leopard (namely, with features like support for PCIe, SATA, and processing speed grading).
But… welp.
