What is the worst OS X version you've used?

[zevrix]

I still haven't forgiven Apple for...

Well this doesn't directly answer your question about "the worst OS X version". But since you already mentioned things you haven't forgotten and haven't forgiven Apple for:

I'll never forgive Apple for what they did when they introduced iMessage. That is, they quietly started channeling SMS messages to your computer instead of your iPhone. Like WHAT THE HELL??

Suddenly, I stopped receiving any messages on my iPhone - and who the hell will look for messages on a Mac??

Took me time - and visits to my mobile service provider and the Apple store - until I realized that I also needed to disable some checkbox on BOTH my iMac and MacBook Pro to restore the ability to receive my messages on the phone.

By the time I sorted it out, I missed several important messages, which led to undesirable events (or lack of events) that were important to me back then.

So yeah, this I'll never forgive. This was also one of the main factors that made me eventually switch to Android for anything mobile.

 

[BanjoDudeAhoy]

That depends on what mac you are using and what for.
Sonoma was incredibly fast on my macbook air and macmini M1 with only 8GB RAM.

i'm trying to remember what the advances from Ventura were though.

The only thing I can think of right now are the (admittedly nice) new animated screensavers. But... I haven't been using screensavers since... idk, the early 2000s maybe?

 

[galad]

Well this doesn't directly answer your question about "the worst OS X version". But since you already mentioned things you haven't forgotten and haven't forgiven Apple for:

I'll never forgive Apple for what they did when they introduced iMessage. That is, they quietly started channeling SMS messages to your computer instead of your iPhone. Like WHAT THE HELL??

Suddenly, I stopped receiving any messages on my iPhone - and who the hell will look for messages on a Mac??

Took me time - and visits to my mobile service provider and the Apple store - until I realized that I also needed to disable some checkbox on BOTH my iMac and MacBook Pro to restore the ability to receive my messages on the phone.

By the time I sorted it out, I missed several important messages, which led to undesirable events (or lack of events) that were important to me back then.

So yeah, this I'll never forgive. This was also one of the main factors that made me eventually switch to Android for anything mobile.

That's not how it's supposed to work. The messages will be on both the Macs and on the iPhone. I guess you hit some weird bug.

Anyway, Yosemite easily win the "worst" release badge.

 

[MBAir2010]

well Monterey is annoying me!

i was watching the Tour d France on the Mini M! while searching for leader board on the MBAM1
when safari displayed 9 sync'd tabs related to the mini and 3 are form April....annoying.
THEN while closing the defected tabs i closed the TDF tab (on the MBAIr) an fthat closed the actual live tab on the mini! so i had to stand up an approach the mini refresh the website that the MBA decided to close.

that never happened.... even with iPad-Mini-MBA sync'd tabs i think, who knows anymore.

there is many other bothersome things that i just shrug off, as i did with ElCrap nowadays.

this will all end Friday (for a month) as good ol trusty Mountain Lion will solve all these annoyances!

If we can only use Yosemite on these great, but annoying M1 computers!

 

[galad]

That's the way it works on recent macOS and iOS versions, it lets close tabs remotely from another device.

 

[VitoBotta]

I have been using macs since Snow Leopard and have never really had any significant issues with any of the OS since then to be honest. I can't remember a single issue that would make me say "X was the worst version for me". I have only seen improvements from any version to its following.

 

[zevrix]

That's not how it's supposed to work. The messages will be on both the Macs and on the iPhone. I guess you hit some weird bug.

Well I'm sure by now iMessage works as expected. But back when it was introduced in 2011 (or 12) it was a total disaster. Tons of users experienced various issues (including the one I described). It resulted in a period where messaging on iPhone became totally unreliable.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Probably macOS 16: "Santa Monica MountAIns"

 

[Joeronzk]

Big Sur. My MBP is running very slowly after upgrading to it.

 

[MacGizmo]

Had to be Lion for me. Absolutely horrible OS version.

 

[platinumaqua]

I've used Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mavericks, High Sierra, Big Sur, and Monterey.

I used to dislike Leopard, but then every version after Mavericks is worse than the version before - I'm skipping them all unless I'm forced to use it.

 

[Xavier]

For me, it would be 10.5 Leopard or 10.7 Lion. They both were so over sold and massively underdelivered. And the upgrade cycle being longer back then, it really was a pain.

 

[MBAir2010]

can i say Catalina to Sonoma weere the worst? for me!
they seem like one big non-computer user system that is poison ivy in their  garden.

 

[loby]

Lion was absolutely terrible, it’s the only OS I ever downgraded. I jumped back some time after iCloud was enabled. Other than Lion, I wasn’t too happy with Yosemite.

When Lion first came out, it was rough. Snow Leopard by the end of its lifecycle was spot on stable. Lion seem to need a lot of memory. It ran excellent on my 2010 Macbook Pro with 16GB of memory, but anything less was a dog.

 

[Minghold]

Catalina was the worst for me in terms of stability, subsequent releases have been mostly stable.

Catalina was also a deliberate middle-finger to all of Apple's existing customers in multiple ways. First, the deprecation of 32bit software, which was a "feature" that nobody aside from Adobe (and Apple's Final Cut team) beancounters had ever asked for. Secondly, the mandatory APFS file-system was absolute murder on rotational hard-drives (as it cavalierly abandoned every drive-access read/write efficiency protocol hard-learned over forty years in preference to a new paradigm of telemetry-jackhammering non-adjacent SSD sectors as fast as possible) -- and Apple made A{FS kosher for every machine from 2012 to 2020, 27" iMacs to 2022, 95% of which were sold with rotational-drives. (You heard that right: a series of OEM software "updates" were expressly designed and deployed to destroy hardware inside sealed-case machines, while the OEM cynicaly refrained from offering "security" updates for the prior OSes, and this really ought to be the subject of the planet's first trillion-dollar class-action lawsuit given that it affects ten years worth of product, and merits a substantial punitive penalty given the calculated malfeasance involved.)

 

[Mac mini power user]

When Lion first came out, it was rough. Snow Leopard by the end of its lifecycle was spot on stable. Lion seem to need a lot of memory. It ran excellent on my 2010 Macbook Pro with 16GB of memory, but anything less was a dog.

I never used Lion at home (I did so at friends' place), but it was definitely one of Apple's most controversial OS X releases. It introduced a lot of window and file management changes which were not always well-received. It was indeed also quite demanding, dropping support for some of the earliest Intel Macs. Mountain Lion would in any ways be a better release.

 

[Mac mini power user]

Catalina was also a deliberate middle-finger to all of Apple's existing customers in multiple ways. First, the deprecation of 32bit software, which a feature that nobody aside from Adobe (and Apple's Final Cut team) beancounters had ever asked for. Secondly, the mandatory APFS file-system was absolute murder on rotational hard-drives (as it cavalierly abandoned every drive-access read/write efficiency protocol hard-learned over thirty years in preference to a new paradigm of telemetry-jackhammering non-adjacent SSD sectors as fast as possible) -- and Apple made it kosher for every machine from 2012 to 2020, 95% of which were sold with rotational-drives.

Yes, the hampering of hard drive-based Macs was a crime. The worst thing is that the entry-level 21.5-inch iMac was still being sold with one in 2019 IIRC.

 

[Minghold]

Yes, the hampering of hard drive-based Macs was a crime. The worst thing is that the entry-level 21.5-inch iMac was still being sold with one in 2019 IIRC.

They were still selling 27" models with them in 2019 (which means they were available "new" as late as Spring 2022). The speed difference between a 2019 i5 rotational running a buggy Monterey in APFS and an 8-core i9 w/SSD running Mojave was probably the widest performance gap in a same-year Apple lineup since it was once possible (~2006) to see Xeon Mac Pro towers and "new" (2yo inventory) PowerPC 17" white iMacs for sale simultaneousl at a retailer.

Here's the deal though: there's nothing wrong with rotational drives, so long as you're not trying to deliberately murder them. They're what "startup caches" are for. If you restart your machine once a week, you don't care about startup-time anyway. All the increased data-harvesting (i.e., greatly-increased and nigh-continuous disk-access) by Apple doesn't do SSDs any favors, either, but the user doesn't notice until they insta-croak.

Ooo.... There' a 12TB spinner drive on sale at Walmart (!) right now. Talk about missed opportunities -- Apple could (if they hadn't shot themselves in the foot in 2019) be marketing 500gbSSD/12tb Fusion drive systems right now, using (instead of APFS) a sort of HFS++ level-up file system that, in addition to startup caches, also placed browser caches and file-sharing segment caches in the SSD portion, as well as mirroring currently-open application workspace.

 

[QuarterSwede]

OS9 was a hot mess. Crashed several times while I was at school in the lab and lost progress. That thing couldn’t handle Pro Tools and other Pro apps without kernel panicking regularly. It got so bad that I had to save every 10 min or I may have lost data. Of course that could’ve been the machines we were using at fault as well. Either way it was infuriating.

In the OS X era it was definitely Big Sur. Absolutely terrible UX that wasn’t polished till later.

 

[zevrix]

In the OS X era it was definitely Big Sur. Absolutely terrible UX that wasn’t polished till later.

...and some of the changes have never been fixed. macOS still has the ugliest and most user-unfriendly alert dialogs in the entire computer world.

 

[russell_314]

I can’t honestly remember a worst version or versions of macOS like I can say with Windows. It could be because I skipped those versions. My first Mac had Leopard then I upgraded to Snow Leopard. Both of those worked absolutely fine with no issues.

When that MacBook died, I went to windows for a while.

Then I bought a 2018 Mac mini with Mojave. Since then I’ve used every subsequent version macOS. I’ve never had crashes or problems like that. When Catalina came out some of my older applications and games did not work anymore. That was annoying, but I can’t blame that on the OS. That was an app developer deficiency. Either the app didn’t have a developer anymore or the current developer wasn’t properly updating their app.

If I had to pick I would pick macOS Ventura because of Apple changing macOS system preferences to iOS system settings. It’s so weird that Apple has pushed hard with iPhone like touch interface features on macOS, but haven’t introduced a touchscreen on any of their macOS devices. Maybe they’re getting iOS, I mean macOS perfect before they introduce a touchscreen. Hopefully it’s an option that I can choose not to get 😂

 

[zevrix]

macOS Ventura because of Apple changing macOS system preferences to iOS system settings.

Well. Just for the sake of historical accuracy:

While their inspiration for this change might have been iOS, in reality Apple finally made system preferences look like the preferences panel in any other normal app on the Mac. Finally, users can see the list of all panels at all times in the sidebar instead of constantly switching back and forth between individual panels and the main view.

There's nothing iOS-specific in this approach. If anything, iOS acquired this UI from the standard look of the preferences panels of Mac apps, not the other way around.

This change was long overdue, and I submitted requests for this change to Apple way before the iPhone even existed.

Sure as hell System Settings still needs a lot of work. But it was a step in the right direction.

 

[russell_314]

Well. Just for the sake of historical accuracy:

While their inspiration for this change might have been iOS, in reality Apple finally made system preferences look like the preferences panel in any other normal app on the Mac. Finally, users can see the list of all panels at all times in the sidebar instead of constantly switching back and forth between individual panels and the main view.

There's nothing iOS-specific in this approach. If anything, iOS acquired this UI from the standard look of the preferences panels of Mac apps, not the other way around.

This change was long overdue, and I submitted requests for this change to Apple way before the iPhone even existed.

Sure as hell System Settings still needs a lot of work. But it was a step in the right direction.

It doesn’t work for me because I have to search for everything. With the other settings, I could easily find what I’m looking for.

It looks like the exact same settings menu of the iPhone. I’m not sure where the iPhone got it from but that’s what it looks like to me.

I can understand it on the iPhone because your screen space is limited, but on the Mac you have all this space and they shove the whole thing into a menu. I guess it could be worse since it’s still usable, but I would take the old one back any day of the week.

 

[zevrix]

but on the Mac you have all this space

Yes, I agree that the use of screen space on the Mac is still very poor. With all fairness, it was just as poor in the original System Preferences (only the window couldn't be even resized there, while it now at least can be vertically resized in System Settings).

One of the main problems in System Preferences was, again, that we couldn't see the list of all panels at all times. It was constant switching back and forth: open one panel, oops the setting is not there, go back to the main view, open another panel - not there again, back to the main view; found what you want but now need to open another panel - must switch again to the main view. It was a disaster.

The main problem of the new System Settings is that it doesn't expand to a third panel on the right side - for which there's plenty of room. Instead of this, we still have to open and close idiotic modal windows, which are small and non-resizable. Who knows, maybe with the advancement of ultra-AI and quantum computers, Apple will finally be able to tackle this unfatomable UI challenge.

 

[russell_314]

Yes, I agree that the use of screen space on the Mac is still very poor. With all fairness, it was just as poor in the original System Preferences (only the window couldn't be even resized there, while it now at least can be vertically resized in System Settings).

One of the main problems in System Preferences was, again, that we couldn't see the list of all panels at all times. It was constant switching back and forth: open one panel, oops the setting is not there, go back to the main view, open another panel - not there again, back to the main view; found what you want but now need to open another panel - must switch again to the main view. It was a disaster.

The main problem of the new System Settings is that it doesn't expand to a third panel on the right side - for which there's plenty of room. Instead of this, we still have to open and close idiotic modal windows, which are small and non-resizable. Who knows, maybe with the advancement of ultra-AI and quantum computers, Apple will finally be able to tackle this unfatomable UI challenge.

Maybe it’s because I use system preferences or settings differently than you. I never navigated there to change a bunch of settings with multiple windows. I knew where the settings were so I rarely needed to look for anything. I didn’t need to see all my settings at once in some menu. When I opened up system preferences, I had one purpose in mine to change one setting. With the old system I could easily see that one setting, navigate to and change it. Maybe if I was trying to change multiple settings the new system settings would be better for multitasking.

The old system did have serious flaws and it wasn’t perfect either. It was actually a mess. It was just better for what I used it for. With the new system, I have to search pretty much everything. At least the search function works well.

I think Apple doesn’t want people digging into system settings so they purposefully make it complicated and difficult to navigate. They want you to use your Mac as it came from the factory. If there’s a change that needs to be done then they’ll change the default settings so everyone will have that change. This makes customer support so much easier.

On the bright side, I don’t go into system settings very often because once I set up my Mac it’s pretty much how I like it. Occasionally, I’ll see a video of talking about a setting, but they’ll show how to navigate to it.