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What's your favorite version of Mac OS?

What is your favorite version of Mac OS?

  • Total voters
    91
Shake 'n' Bake

Shake 'n' Bake

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Mar 2, 2009
2,186
2
Albany
I've only been a Mac person since Tiger. I've used OS 9, Panther, Tiger, and Leopard. Leopard is by far my favorite. It looks good, has some great features in the Finder and of course, Spotlight. Though OS 9 had more personalization options.

What is your favorite Mac OS?
 
Mac OS X, particularly Tiger. That was the ultimate version of Mac OS X, combining enough of the features I use to make it useable, and the unparalleled speed and reliability that I have yet to see and doubt I ever will with another version of Mac OS X.

Tiger compared to Leopard was kind of, as I see it, XP compared to Vista, to a lesser extent. Leopard has all these new features, a better looking UI, etc., but Tiger just seemed to work. No wireless problems, no router incompatibilities, no graphics problems, and just faster speed overall.

I have been using Mac OS X since Jaguar, when I upgraded my fully souped iMac G3 from Mac OS 9.2.2 to it. I waited to upgrade to Mac OS X since there was serious problems with Mac OS X before Jaguar.

I used Jaguar about 50% of the time, with Windows 2000 Professional the other 50%, since Mac OS X still, in my mind, wasn't ready to be used for a full time OS. When Panther came out, I felt by then Mac OS X was very polished, but lacked a lot of features that Windows had, so I upgraded it but still split time with now Windows XP. When Tiger came out, it was basically heaven falling from the skies. It was even more polished and reliable than Panther, but brought a lot more features than expected. I didn't upgrade it until I bought my 1st generation BlackBook, because by then the G3 era was dead, and I couldn't have been happier. Tiger has made me use Mac OS X 100% of the time, except for the occasional Windows game.

When I upgraded to Leopard, I haven't had the reliability of Tiger. Spotlight is much faster, and Mac OS X UI looks better, but besides that I don't use many of the features because I find them unnecessary. I immediately had Wireless unreliability, and still have it to some extent. Occasionally the OS will lock up for a few seconds, and RAM usage uses about 150% of the RAM Tiger uses.
 
A lot of people here probably haven't even used anything other than Mac OS X.

The classic Mac OS was pretty much crap. It didn't have protected memory, preemptive multi-tasking or anything like that. I tried using Mac OS 9 the other day via SheepSaver and it was awful.
 
I will agree with you, until Mac OS X, Windows was the better OS. Windows 95 smoked Mac OS 7. Windows 98 smoked Mac OS 8.6. Windows 2000 smoked Mac OS 9. Mac OS X smoked Windows XP.
 
I wish that Apple brought some of their classic apps, like HyperCard, into OS X. I know that OS X had classic, but it isn't the same as running it natively.
 
TSE said:
I will agree with you, until Mac OS X, Windows was the better OS. Windows 95 smoked Mac OS 7. Windows 98 smoked Mac OS 8.6. Windows 2000 smoked Mac OS 9. Mac OS X smoked Windows XP.
Click to expand...

STRONGLY beg to differ on this one.

Early Windows was merely a GUI shell for DOS (which was essentially true through NT). Mac OS's from the very beginning through OS 9 were amazing in that no command line existed; it was a real breakthrough. Not only that, the Motorola chips could address acres of memory more than what Intel was providing at the time. Remember those stupid extended memory schemes for Windows?

Then look at how early Macs handled graphics through regions, pull down menus, mouse tracking, true black and white graphics. Windows was always playing catch up.

Needless to say, I'm the vote for System 1 to 5. I still remember the excitement of my Mac 128K -- with two 400K disk drives, it was cheaper storage than any PC option. And that Imagewriter printer (in hindsight, they're called Imagewriter I's) was built like a tank.

mt

PS: +1 on wishing Hypercard made the transition to OS X.
 
I hated OS 8 and 9, but I can't really remember why ... all I remember is that is what was on my school's computers.
 
I see that most people dislike the classic OS. Maybe because all the schools had it? The control panels and Chooser weren't very intuitive.

BTW, I'm running Leopard (Mac mini), Tiger (PowerMac), and OS 9 (iMac 233 (Bondi)).
 
TSE said:
I will agree with you, until Mac OS X, Windows was the better OS. Windows 95 smoked Mac OS 7. Windows 98 smoked Mac OS 8.6. Windows 2000 smoked Mac OS 9. Mac OS X smoked Windows XP.
Click to expand...

i dont agree... i like windows xp and osx are my favorite operating systems... they both have their flaws but windows xp is very powerful
 
Couple of comparisons Mac OS with Microsoft OS :)

System 1-5 > DOS
System 6 (MultiFinder enabled) > Win 3.11
Win NT 4 > System 7 (Win 95 is debatable)
Win 98 SE > Mac OS 8
Mac OS X 10.1 > Win 2K > Mac OS 9
Mac OS X 10.3 > Win XP
Mac OS X 10.5 > Win Vista
Mac OS X 10.6 > Win 7

Ever since Mac OS 10.3, Apple has had the edge in using a very stable UNIX with the very user friendly GUI.

But a real favorite..? If you can put time onto perspective: Mac OS X Server 1.x (Rhapsody).
 
Ah, I should have clicked "Other" then maybe ... or not. If we can consider other systems then I also dig AmigaOS, Solaris, BeOS, HuMan, and IRIX very much. There is no version of Windows that I like - no matter the date.
 
Tesselator said:
Ah, I should have clicked "Other" then maybe ... or not. If we can consider other systems then I also dig AmigaOS, Solaris, BeOS, HuMan, and IRIX very much. There is no version of Windows that I like - no matter the date.
Click to expand...

I've never heard of HuMan or IRIX. When are they from, what were they mainly used for, and what type of hardware did they run on?
 
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