What versions of OS X have you used? How were they?

[Micky Do]

My first experience of OS X came with my computer, the original Mac Mini. It had Panther installed, but I bought it just after Tiger was released, so the shop did the upgrade for me free of charge. In general I was happy with Tiger…..

It was certainly better than using Windows on the PCs at work. With Office for Mac installed I could do a lot of work from home.

When the HDD and power supply failed on my original Mini, I replaced it with the early 2009 Mac Mini, which I am still using. It came with Leopard, which didn't seem to work properly. Thankfully, within a couple of months Snow Leopard came out, I did the upgrade, and was well pleased again.

Three years on the Mini got quite slow….. a clean out, an additional 4 GB of RAM (now 5 GB), and an upgrade to Mountain Lion and it was rejuvenated. A clean out and a check over last year, and all remains sweet.

I have Office for Mac installed, but seldom use it nowadays. I find iWork fine for my needs. Pages is easier to use, it opens Word documents OK, and I have had no problem exporting Pages documents in other formats.

Without any other iDevice to link to, there seems no incentive to update any further at this stage. I'll just wait until I replace the Mini in a couple or three years.

My first experience of any Mac OS was the original, wham I was a student back in the mid '80s. After I graduated in 1987 I only very occasionally used computers for the next 17 years, and those I did use had various versions of Windows. It was back to Mac when I came to need one of my own.

Note: Maximum 10 options, so grouped the early versions.

 

[throAU]

Have used everything since 10.5 extensively.

10.6 was a stand out because it still has rosetta, barring the rosetta loss, my favourites were 10.8 and 10.9.

Mountain lion because it fixed the performance issues in Lion, Mavericks because it seemed to improve the GPU switching (and therefore, battery life) a lot on my 15" macbook pro without needing to mess about with gfxcardstatus.

 

[dogslobber]

10.3 was the first usable version of OS X since before that they were too slow & unstable to use and no apps to use on them. Mac OS pre-OS X was a great OS for the 80s then the 90s occurred and well thank God for Steve returning.

 

[Fishrrman]

I've used them all, starting with System 3.3 in 1987, and "on up".

Exception:
I "held out" from using OS X until OS 10.3 (which came with a PowerMac g4/MDD in 2004).

 

[colourfastt]

I started with 10.5 with my first Macs in 2008. Was pleased with 10.5 & 10.6; after that, not so much, although 10.8 wasn't all that bad.

 

[dogslobber]

I start with 10.5 with my first Macs in 2008. Was pleased with 10.5 & 10.6; after that, not so much, although 10.8 wasn't all that bad.

10.6 was the last release under Steve's watch. That should tell you something.

 

[Micky Do]

Not many responses so far, but it seems that many who have responded have had long standing experience of OS X and pre OS X mac operating systems.

 

[garirry]

Used almost everything. Used Mac OS 9, but barely. 10.2 and 10.3 were pretty decent, but didn't use it that much. I really liked to use 10.4 and 10.5 on PPC macs, they're actually pretty fun to use. Used 10.6 quite a lot on my 2008 MacBook, but became underwhelming after upgrading to 10.7, which was way better (then upgraded to 10.8 through MPF). When I got my iMac 2009, it was running 10.8, which I actually really like, but I've grown to like 10.9 better when it came out. 10.10 was really buggy and disappointing, although I haven't used 10.11 so I can't judge that.

For reference:
iBook Clamshell: Mac OS 9, 10.2, 10.3
iMac G4: 10.3 (a bit), 10.4, 10.5
MacBook: 10.6, 10.7, 10.8
iMac: 10.8, 10.9, 10.10
I have other Macs, but eh, whatever. I'm tired so I better stop posting now.

 

[Mr. Dee]

When I had a Hackintosh, I used Tiger extensively in 2006. At a local print shop, a fellow from Mexico had a iMac G3 setup with Panther and I used it often when I visited. I briefly played with 10.1 and 10.5 on some Macs at that same print shop. That same print shop also had an old Performa with 8.0 with Adobe Photoshop 1.0, QuarkXPress 3 and 4 (I should have bought the machine as an antique). For one year 2007 to '08, I had access to a first gen MacBook Pro preloaded with Tiger too, which was fun to use. My MBP bought in November last year came with Yosemite and I recently upgraded to El Capitan.

I have been reading a lot lately about the heritage and lineage of OS X. Knowing the origin started at NeXT Step 3.3 after Apple bought NeXT which later evolved into OpenStep 4.2 then later Rhapsody then the early OS X Developer Previews. I have been itching to download all three just to experience the early prototypes of what eventually became Mac OS 10.0. Considering that OpenStep 4.2 was available on Intel, this would be the earliest version of OS X for Intel whose descendant today would be El Capitan.

 

[buttongerald]

I started out with Panther. And just kept going over the years. And here we are now at El Capitan. My favourite of all the releases has been Leopard. It was the one I was most hyped for, and the first one to be released after I had bought a new, up to date Mac and not a used one.

 

[jebug29]

I've at least played with everything from Mac OS 1 through OS X 10.11. My first experience with Mac OS was either Mac OS 8 or 9 when I was in Elementary school. We had ruby and blueberry iMacs from Kindergarten up until second grade, when most were switched out with Dell computers (although thankfully I was in the gifted program, which held onto its two iMacs until they both eventually failed).

I became extremely interested in Macs again when I was 9 and tried seeing if my school would give me one of the old iMacs in storage (which, sadly, they wouldn't). When I was 11, I began playing with the classic Mac OSes using SheepShaver and Mini vMac (of course, I was equally interested in early versions of Windows and DOS, so I dedicated a lot of time to those too). By the time I turned 13, I had begged my mother long enough that we were actually able to afford to get me a mid-2011 iMac, which is what I have now. When I got it, Snow Leopard was still fairly new, and I've upgraded to each version of OS X since. The only real hardware change I've made to the computer was upgrading the RAM from 4 to 8gb.

A few years ago I got a Macintosh SE with a 20mb (or is it 40?) external HDD, with Mac OS 6 installed on it. I haven't done much with it other than fail at trying to get it online, since there's an etherlink card installed on it, and it came with a dial-up modem. I've been really tempted to buy an SD card disk emulator, but I've never had the money (or more correctly, have never been willing to spend it).

I also have had two Powerbook G4s and one Powerbook G3 Wallstreet (now two, since I managed to rip the flex ribbon cable on the screen when working on it and had to buy another today). I've played with Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.0 Beta on the Wallstreet, and both Tiger and Leopard on the G4's. I bought an iMac G4 earlier this year with Christmas money that I had and have been using Tiger on it.

I have to say that Mac OS 6, 9, and 10.6 Snow Leopard have been my favorites. Mac OS 6 is really the best for playing the older, black and white games, while Mac OS 9 was definitely the best for color games and was the greatest of the pre-unix OSes. Snow Leopard, imo, was the best in both terms of speed and functionality in all the OS X versions. Granted, that wouldn't really have me switch back to it, since a lot of (if not most) support for it has been dropped, and new features are still being added to OS X that I don't want to miss out on (even if after 5 years I'm still peeved about Rosetta being gone).

 

[throAU]

10.6 was the last release under Steve's watch. That should tell you something.

Actually Lion came out when steve was still around. ML would have been in development "under steve"

But hey, rose tinted glasses and all, everything people don't like about apple was because steve died, right?

I did work experience with System 6 or System 7 back in the day in a desktop publishing office... but yeah, didn't get into the mac properly until OS X ran on intel, because i wanted to run VMware/Bootcamp/etc.

 

[Mr. Dee]

Actually Lion came out when steve was still around. ML would have been in development "under steve"

But hey, rose tinted glasses and all, everything people don't like about apple was because steve died, right?

I did work experience with System 6 or System 7 back in the day in a desktop publishing office... but yeah, didn't get into the mac properly until OS X ran on intel, because i wanted to run VMware/Bootcamp/etc.

Steve was hardly involved in the development of Lion, notice it was Craig who did the presentation and many others helped out with the keynote because his poor health at the time. In fact, it was launched around July 2011 when his health got even worse. By that time he was not actively involved at Apple anymore.

 

[iTom17]

I'm currently on OS X El Capitan, and it's the first version I actually use on daily basis, as it is running on my first Mac as well. But I did use OS X Mavericks and OS X Yosemite as well, both running on a virtual machine before I had a Mac.

OS X El Capitan obviously runs better. First of all, because it is made for Mac and it runs on one. Second, an OS running in VMware simply can't use all hardware resources. So even if you've got a powerful computer it's still not as fast as on a Mac. I used two cores and 4 GB RAM (had a quad-core processor and 8 GB RAM in my previous notebook). So yeah, not really much. For the RAM part, at least.

 

[bunnspecial]

I currently have computers with every version of OS X installed, including the developer previews, public beta, and OS X server. I don't have much experience with anything pre-System 6, but have used System 7-OS 9.2.2 extensively and have computers cover a pretty wide swath of these OSs currently installed.

From my experience(in recent years) 10.0 and 10.1 were absolutely horrendous, with 10.2 being the first usable version of OS X. I have a couple of computers running 10.2.8 as their primary OS-some because they can't officially be upgraded further(although there are ways around that), and some just because I haven't gotten around to upgrading them. To me, 10.4 was where it OS X really hit its stride, and it remains a solid operating system.

 

[Micky Do]

I've at least played with everything from Mac OS 1 through OS X 10.11. My first experience with Mac OS was either Mac OS 8 or 9 when I was in Elementary school. We had ruby and blueberry iMacs from Kindergarten up until second grade, when most were switched out with Dell computers (although thankfully I was in the gifted program, which held onto its two iMacs until they both eventually failed).

I became extremely interested in Macs again when I was 9 and tried seeing if my school would give me one of the old iMacs in storage (which, sadly, they wouldn't). When I was 11, I began playing with the classic Mac OSes using SheepShaver and Mini vMac (of course, I was equally interested in early versions of Windows and DOS, so I dedicated a lot of time to those too). By the time I turned 13, I had begged my mother long enough that we were actually able to afford to get me a mid-2011 iMac, which is what I have now. When I got it, Snow Leopard was still fairly new, and I've upgraded to each version of OS X since. The only real hardware change I've made to the computer was upgrading the RAM from 4 to 8gb.

A few years ago I got a Macintosh SE with a 20mb (or is it 40?) external HDD, with Mac OS 6 installed on it. I haven't done much with it other than fail at trying to get it online, since there's an etherlink card installed on it, and it came with a dial-up modem. I've been really tempted to buy an SD card disk emulator, but I've never had the money (or more correctly, have never been willing to spend it).

I also have had two Powerbook G4s and one Powerbook G3 Wallstreet (now two, since I managed to rip the flex ribbon cable on the screen when working on it and had to buy another today). I've played with Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.0 Beta on the Wallstreet, and both Tiger and Leopard on the G4's. I bought an iMac G4 earlier this year with Christmas money that I had and have been using Tiger on it.

I have to say that Mac OS 6, 9, and 10.6 Snow Leopard have been my favorites. Mac OS 6 is really the best for playing the older, black and white games, while Mac OS 9 was definitely the best for color games and was the greatest of the pre-unix OSes. Snow Leopard, imo, was the best in both terms of speed and functionality in all the OS X versions. Granted, that wouldn't really have me switch back to it, since a lot of (if not most) support for it has been dropped, and new features are still being added to OS X that I don't want to miss out on (even if after 5 years I'm still peeved about Rosetta being gone).

A Mac OS collector, it seems. Interesting story and points of view, among others. Thanks to everyone who has contributed. As expected, more folks have had experience with more recent versions, but there is a broad range of experience around.

 

[Cloudsurfer]

Been a Mac user since 10.3. I think my favorite OS was Snow Leopard, it was pretty much the last OS before all the iOS influence. OS X today feels like iOS on steroids. Still better than Windows though, which after 12 years of switching to Mac still gives me nightmares (I use Windows 8.1 on my gaming pc).

 

[nightcap965]

I've used them all, from System 3. The only Mac OS I haven't used is A/UX.

I'm not that wild about the "flat" design of recent versions of OS/X, and I have never loved the Dock, which is an offense against Apple's User Interface Guidelines and an abomination unto the Lord, but in general I've found MacOS X to be the most seamless operating system I've ever used (and I go back to CP/M). Second place is BeOS, and third is OS/2.

 

[andeify]

I first used Mac OS X when I decided to run a Hackintosh with 10.5 Leopard and have used every one since. I stopped Hackintoshing in 2014 when the PC i was using died. I purchased my first Mac, the Mac mini (2012) which came with 10.9 Mavericks iic. Then Later that year bought my MacBook Pro Retina (2014) again came with Mavericks but updated it on first day to Yosemite.

My favourite feature is sending iMessage's and Making and receiving calls while on my MBP. iCloud Tabs is another well used feature along with saving all my documents on iCloud drive so they are available on all my devices.

 

[frazzm737]

I've used every version starting with Tiger, ten years ago on my first iMac. I've been happy with each version, but I do miss the colorful icons of earlier versions.

 

[e93to]

My mid 2009 MBP is still on Snow Leopard while late 2012 iMac is on Mountain Lion.

SL: Smooth and snappy operation. I'm always amazed by how animations (Dock magnification, switching Spaces desktop, etc) are very smooth. Furthermore, the OS has proven to be stable. Crashes are few and far between (99% of the crashes are caused by Safari). And I've had only one Kernel panic. I've recently clean-installed my mid 2009 MBP for the first time in 6 years, and I was shocked that the computer didn't become any faster. After all the years of carelessly using the OS, the system did not slow down at all.

ML: I consider ML to be the complete version of SL in terms of features and functions. I love the iCloud integration for Calendar, Notes, etc. I also love the social media integration (FB, Twitter, etc). Mission Control takes Expose and Spaces one step further by combining the two with simple gesture on the Trackpad. It is a lot more, at least to me, intuitive and useful compared to what SL had to offer (many seemed to hate it at first). While the OS has been stable, it does not reach SL's stability. Crashes occur noticeably more often, and the OS mysteriously throws tantrum time to time. Furthermore, animations are not as smooth as SL. There is noticeably stutter on Dock magnification, and switching windows on Mission Control is not buttery-smooth. I run almost identical softwares/apps on both MBP and iMac, and from my observation SL seems to load things tad bit faster.

I've used Mavericks, Yosemite and El Cap on partition extensively.

Mavericks: I am tempted to update my MBP to Mavericks for newer features. However, after trying the OS on partition, I decided not to. It was unbelievably buggy and glitchy. I didn't even install any softwares on that partition at all. Trackpad would stop working. Fans wouldn't stop spinning even though Safari was the only open app. Audio would stop working.

Yosemite: I installed Yosemite on my iMac to play Tomb Raider 2013. The OS was surprisingly stable and snappy. I've never experienced wifi issue. And I've never encountered crashes.

El Cap: I've been using El Cap on my MBP extensively for the past couple of months. I've installed and used several softwares, and the OS has had no problem running those softwares. I haven't encountered crashes yet. The most shocking thing is that the OS runs smoothly and fast. Softwares launch quickly. Animations are quite smooth. I rarely see spinning beachball. How is this possible on a 6-year old MBP with hard drive....? Another shocking thing is that the computer doesn't overheat as often as on SL. I rarely hear fans spinning.

 

[\-V-/]

All of them since the very first beta when I had to upgrade the RAM on my Bondi Blue iMac to run it ... before that the earliest version that started me with Macs was OS 7 I believe. Anything earlier I never used myself at home, but at school. Lion is the only version of OS X that I don't like.

 

[estabya]

I used Mac OS 8, 9 a little bit, but never extensively. I was mainly a Windows guy then.

I worked for the school district for a while during the period of Panther/Tiger. The conversion from PPC to Intel was a nightmare when it came to setting up network images and the like.

I used Leopard on my personal systems (Powerbook G4 Aluminum and G5 Power Mac) until I switched back to Windows again for several years. I was still relatively familiar with 10.6-10.8 because I'm always the go-to guy for friends and family with computer issues.

I came back to Mac about 2 years ago, a few months after Mavericks was released. I have since run Mavericks, Yosemite, and El Capitan. Feature wise the last two versions have been amazing. The integration with my iOS devices is by far my favorite new feature. Honestly I haven't had a lot of the negative experiences with the newer versions that other people have had.

 

[colourfastt]

I've used every version starting with Tiger, ten years ago on my first iMac. I've been happy with each version, but I do miss the colorful icons of earlier versions.

this, this, THIS!!!