Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

What was your least favorite Mac OS?

  • System 1-4

    Votes: 5 4.7%
  • System 5

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • System 6.0.x

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • System 7-7.1

    Votes: 4 3.7%
  • System 7.5

    Votes: 11 10.3%
  • System 7.6

    Votes: 7 6.5%
  • System 8

    Votes: 11 10.3%
  • Mac OS 9

    Votes: 17 15.9%
  • Rhapsody

    Votes: 6 5.6%
  • Mac OS X Server 1.x

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Mac OS X Public Beta

    Votes: 9 8.4%
  • Mac OS 10.0 Cheetah

    Votes: 20 18.7%
  • Mac OS 10.1 Puma

    Votes: 6 5.6%
  • Mac OS 10.2 Jaguar

    Votes: 4 3.7%
  • Mac OS 10.3 Panther

    Votes: 2 1.9%
  • Mac OS 10.4 Tiger

    Votes: 3 2.8%

  • Total voters
    107
ahunter3 said:
MacOS 8.0 was as bad as MacOS 8.6 was good. Which makes it very difficult to vote because you've aggregated all MacOS 8 into one category.

MacOS 8.0 had an incredibly sludgy Finder, horribly unresponsive, and was crashy and buggy. MacOS 8.1 fixed it well enough that I was willing to use 8, but for the duration of 8.0 I said "to heck with this" and downgraded to 7.6.


Amen, OS 8 made me question my loyalty to Apple. I thought it was all downhill from there. As for 10.0, that was kinda like a beta so it's not fair to have a complete hate for it. :)
 
My absolute least favorite would have to be 10.0. Too intentionally crippled. (So bad, I never bothered to run it as a main system; only got a copy of it last year to make my MacOS collection complete.) The least favorite that I actually actively used on a daily basis would have to be MacOS 8. Probably partly tinted by experiences using it on a PowerBook 5300c, though. That combination made me a PC user for a few years. (I was a 'dual user' before that, until I got the 12" PowerBook G4, which made me a Mac user who occasionally used a PC, then since the eMac replaced the desktop PC, I've been a full Mac user.)

But I just can't imagine using 10.0 on a daily basis. Those poor people, stuck with a crippled OS, and having to virtualize almost everything (through Classic,) anyway. I remember the poor web designer at the company I worked for when it came out. He had an old (even for the time,) iMac that ran HORRIBLY with 10.0. I can't believe that he did web design on that poor machine. (Again, through Classic. In 128MB of RAM, as it was an early rev.a that only supported 128!)
 
iSee said:
10.0 and 10.1 were both beta software masquerading as real OS's.

I voted for 10.1 because there are even fewer excuses for a second release, but you can make a case for 10.0 because it set the trend.

10.1 in its early incarnations, yes. By 10.1.5, it was fully release-worthy, at least. 10.0 was NEVER release-worthy. It should have been 'Public Beta 2', while 10.1-10.1.4 should have been 'Public Beta 3'.
 
9.2 on my Performa crashed so much I reverted to 9.1 which also crashed just not as bad.

8.6, now that was an OS.
 
I suspect the bulk of problems with system 7 were with PowerPC machines. I ran every version of 7 on my quadra and never had any problems. The exception would be 7.0 on my Plus, which had some strange problems, like disappearing files. :rolleyes:

OS 8 and 8.5 really need their own categories.

I think my least favorite was definitely 10.0. At least Apple did the right thing and offered 10.1 as a free upgrade to 10.0 users.
 
ehurtley said:
But I just can't imagine using 10.0 on a daily basis. Those poor people, stuck with a crippled OS, and having to virtualize almost everything (through Classic,) anyway.
I'll freely admit that 10.0 wasn't ready for the masses, but I ran it exclusively on my home system from literally the day it was released.

The thing was, I had a brand new DP533 G4 with quite a bit of RAM, and OS9 just didn't take advantage of the money I'd spent on it, and was too unstable (from experience) with the apps I used for my taste. Since I had a relatively small collection of "must have" software, all of which ran natively from quite early on (Interarchy, BBEdit, Thoth, IE5), I didn't have that much of a problem with 10.0 even with all its flaws, and chalked those up to "getting used to the future".

That said, man, was I happy when 10.1 shipped.
 
8.0, mostly because I always regretted not waiting another week or two for 8.1 and getting HFS+ when I bought my beige G3. It was a hassle to back everything up and reformat the drive - no cheap burners back then, zip was the best option.
 
Makosuke said:
Question: Have 7% of the people who voted in this poll even USED Rhapsody, let alone enough to call it their least favorite MacOS?

I have a similar doubt about people who put every System 7 release in one big *bad* category - since 7 encompassed seven years and a dozen or so wildly varying releases, such as this:

trainguy77 said:
I never enjoyed system 7. It was buggy. I had nothing but problems with it.

What exactly is it? 7.0? 7.5.2? *It* should be more specific. On the flip side, in this thread's sister thread, System 7 is actually the highest ranked Classic Mac OS... :rolleyes: Whats up with that!?

I voted for OS X public beta. Not having an Apple Menu made me very upset. What exactly was supposed to happen when running applications with lots of menus (like Photoshop)?? Would it push that centered Apple logo over further?
 
OutThere said:
10.0 was the most rank so-called OS ever. Luckily it got better. :p

No, that honor would either go to MS-DOS 4.0, or Windows NT 3.51 PowerPC edition. Released after Windows 95, but still had the Windows 3.1 interface, and essentially no applications of note were ever released for it. (At least NT 4.0 for PowerPC had apps released for it, apps that weren't backward compatible with 3.51. It would be like at this point if Apple had released the Intel Macs with an Intel version of OS 9 on them instead of OS X.)

And, yes, I actually did use NT 3.51/PPC. On an IBM 'workstation'. IBM even released a short-lived line of PowerPC ThinkPad notebooks. I just wish they had publicly released OS/2 for PowerPC, which I saw shown off at a tradeshow once.
 
I've used machines from the Apple IIe to the Quad G5, and quite a few in between. I'll start from the beginning, or as much of it as I remember.

Systems 1-4 were me coming off of the Apple IIe, so the "wow factor" pretty much eliminated the bad stuff - if you were nice to those systems, they were nice to you.

System 6 was bad in a lot of ways but tolerable.

OS 7 was decent but got worse with PPC machines.

OS 8 up until 8.6 sucked some major you-know-what. 8.6 was pretty good, I thought.

OS 9 made me happy, aside from a few crashes here and there and the ugly-ass interface that Apple couldn't seem to get rid of.

I used the Public Beta of OS X and remember thinking "wow!" (You really can't hate a beta). Then 10.0 came out, and I still had to boot into OS 9 to play DVDs and burn CDs - that was a major "what the hell were they thinking?!" moment - plus it was dog slow even on a G4 tower.

10.1 was the first OS X I used regularly - not great, but it could get the job done.

10.2 was the first I enjoyed using regularly.

10.3 and 10.4 have their problems, but overall they're excellent OSs.

So, yeah - 10.0 gets my vote for worst ever.
 
dpaanlka said:
I voted for OS X public beta. Not having an Apple Menu made me very upset. What exactly was supposed to happen when running applications with lots of menus (like Photoshop)?? Would it push that centered Apple logo over further?
No, they would cover it over. It was just decoration. Here are two examples.




One of the reasons I had such a hard time moving from Rhapsody & Mac OS 8/9 was that I really liked the Apple and Applications menus. And while I never felt that Apple got the Apple menu to begin with, I thought that the solution presented in Rhapsody was a better choice than no Apple menu at all.

One of the first tasks I do when setting up a system is to configure the Apple menu in Mac OS 7/8/9, Rhapsody and Mac OS X (using FruitMenu). This is a much for the classic OS as can be seen by the default Apple menu...


AppleMen_01_TIFF_Image_12.jpg

default Apple menu of
Mac OS 8.6


In Mac OS 7/8/9 I install Divider Lines and clean up all the junk (I cover the house cleaning I do here). What I mean by the fact that Apple never got the Apple menu is that the default Apple menu flies straight in the face of Apple's own interface guide lines. Where as the Apple menu when I finish is quite a useful tool.


AppleMen_01_TIFF_Image_17.jpg

example of my customized
Apple menu in Mac OS 8.6


And when Apple released Rhapsody, they added an application called Apple Menu Options which gave the user very nice controls over the layout of the Apple menu.


AppleMen_01_TIFF_Image_20.jpg

example of my customized
Apple menu in Rhapsody


And I do pretty much the same thing with FruitMenu in Mac OS X today.


AppleMen_01_TIFF_Image_15.jpg

example of my customized
Apple menu in Mac OS X


Even though I still wish Apple had the Apple menu set up the way it was in Rhapsody, I have to admit that the current default is far less embarrassing than what new users saw back in the Mac OS 7/8/9 days.
 
Funny thing is I really never hated any of the OS's, cuz I haven't used a majority of them. I voted Cheetah because it seemed like a disaster...

I liked OS 7, it spanned through my entire childhood, even as a kid I enjoyed it because of the little games and all that jazz. OS 8 and 9 seemed very similar, and then when OSX came out, WOAH baby, what a change. I remember the shiny new eMac rolling into the library, watching this so called "Dock", the crazy animations. I was amazed by it. Took years until I'd use this so called "Mac OSX" and I'm still loving every version of it...
 
I have tried three of the OS'eses listed: 10.3, 10.4 and 8.0. I must say 8.0. Teh crash! I tried it on an iMac G3 at some museum (not a Mac museum though:D ). It socked balls to the max! I really like 10.3. Very good!:) Of course, my aboslute favorite is 10.4.7 (so far):D
 
RacerX said:
AppleMen_01_TIFF_Image_17.jpg

example of my customized
Apple menu in Mac OS 8.6

That is one slick OS 8 Apple menu... I would customize mine as well, subdividing and adding folders, but never to that extent. Now I feel like going and customizing the Apple menu to look like that on my beige running OS 9... (I like the Newton folder. Very nice.)
 
ehurtley said:
Now I feel like going and customizing the Apple menu to look like that on my beige running OS 9... (I like the Newton folder. Very nice.)
The key is DividerLines... I came across this extension back in 1997 and have been using it ever since.

I can't remember where all those icons came from though. I actually use a generic round button icon these days for most my systems (like what I used in the Mac OS X menu).
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.