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Worst overall version of OS X?
- Thread starter KoolAid-Drink
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Mavericks is my least favourite but probably only because 10.8 was so good. I always look forward to a new release and don't think Apple has botched new software for OS X anywhere near as bad as they have at times with iOS.
I need to take a smug moment to point out that I thought lion was a terrible direction for OS X from the moment the first preview dropped. People at the time tried to claim the mess they made of expose and multiple screens was totally fine. I've felt vindicated as each subsequent release has steadily repaired and improved from that awful misstep.
Conceptually, lion was the only release I've really hated. For performance and bugs though, I'm going against the grain and calling out the first 6 months of snow leopard. They attempted to "improve" memory management, but the initial implementation did not work AT ALL with Adobe software. I'm not exaggerating when I say the system was unusable for me. I tried and had to roll back not once but twice. Eventually Apple patched it up and it became a solid OS though.
My first apple experience was on Tiger. Might be nostalgia, but that will always be the apple experience that blew me away the most. The visual polish blew me away at the time. That coupled with experiencing the futuristic iPhone interface 3 years later really solidified my amazement with Apple.
Conceptually, lion was the only release I've really hated. For performance and bugs though, I'm going against the grain and calling out the first 6 months of snow leopard. They attempted to "improve" memory management, but the initial implementation did not work AT ALL with Adobe software. I'm not exaggerating when I say the system was unusable for me. I tried and had to roll back not once but twice. Eventually Apple patched it up and it became a solid OS though.
My first apple experience was on Tiger. Might be nostalgia, but that will always be the apple experience that blew me away the most. The visual polish blew me away at the time. That coupled with experiencing the futuristic iPhone interface 3 years later really solidified my amazement with Apple.
1. I don't remember the negatives of Lion because late in its cycle was when MBA 2013 came out and as my first Mac, the overall experience compared to Windows 7 exceeded it.
2. That being said, I do remember Yosemite. Which literally made me want to switch to Windows 10. God dam everything took forever to load because of the new design. None of the continuity and handoff features worked and worse of all stuff would just freeze occasionally.
2. That being said, I do remember Yosemite. Which literally made me want to switch to Windows 10. God dam everything took forever to load because of the new design. None of the continuity and handoff features worked and worse of all stuff would just freeze occasionally.
I don't recall any big issues or complaints, but I also had no issues with tiger before it.
as someone who's never been a fan of the 'discount clipart' icons since ios7, i didn't hate yosemite's icon redesigns as much. they often go sort of half way between the richly rendered style apple previously used, and the flatter ios asethetic.
that in itself is a head scratcher though: apple went from a unified asethetic across their ecosystem to an inconsistent mish-mash of extremely flat, highly rendered, and everything in between. there is zero logic or consistency to how design choices are applied. but that sort of lack of attention to detail is feeling increasingly par for the course for apple.
oh, i will say, the osx maps icon is the pinnacle of marketing executive design by committee. "guys, you have to slap a badge that says '3D' on it so people know it has a 3d feature!"
as someone who's never been a fan of the 'discount clipart' icons since ios7, i didn't hate yosemite's icon redesigns as much. they often go sort of half way between the richly rendered style apple previously used, and the flatter ios asethetic.
that in itself is a head scratcher though: apple went from a unified asethetic across their ecosystem to an inconsistent mish-mash of extremely flat, highly rendered, and everything in between. there is zero logic or consistency to how design choices are applied. but that sort of lack of attention to detail is feeling increasingly par for the course for apple.
oh, i will say, the osx maps icon is the pinnacle of marketing executive design by committee. "guys, you have to slap a badge that says '3D' on it so people know it has a 3d feature!"
100% agree!
To say it with one sentence:
Solid software-engineering was transformed to endless changing like "haute-couture-fashion" of GUIs, Jony Ive being the Karl Lagerfeld of apple…. inconsistent new ideas every 5 minutes…. fire him!
i want to believe he had some good design ideas in the hardware realm. I think perhaps it was the competing visions of the people at apple in the early to mid 2000's that really benefitted apple. There may have been friction between people, but sometimes those differences push a product forwards. People saying "no" to each other and forcing each other to really defend their ideas.
Also I think apple always has done the "slow drip" of feature releases to motivate future updates, but it also felt like they had an abundance of good ideas that allowed them to spread them out. Now its like... "I don't know, lets sell it in a gold colour this time?"
One picture to prove El Capitan is still a visual clusterduck:
(Disk Utility, what else)
(Disk Utility, what else)
The first time I looked at the original iPhone, I said to myself, "Wow! That's so cooooool looking." I felt the same way about OS X when I first started using Jaguar. Steve Jobs knew what was cool and what impressed people. Jonathon Ive knows what he was taught in art/design school. There's a difference between the two. No rules dominated Steve Jobs. Only rules dominate Jony Ive.
I have an old iPhone and a newer one. I actually use the PDA features on the old iPhone more than I do on the new iPhone. I use the new iPhone as a phone only, and access its PDA features (which, in addition to looking stupid are bug filled) only when I absolutely have no choice. I can't stand to look at the Jony Ive "improved" design. I can use the old iPhone only on WiFi since it's basically deactivated (sort of like an old iPod Touch). I'm perfectly happy with Jobs' Skeuomorphism. A note pad that actually looks like a note pad vs. glaring white background with dark grey text. A compass that looks like an actual compass vs. Ive's black circle with white markers and a red arrow....this looks like something I would have done when I was learning computer science.
The same hold true for OS X. It looks like something a student designed. I've modified El Capitan to the point I can tolerate it, but that's hardly high praise. I can't even stand looking at Yosemite. It just puts me in a bad mood.
I have an old iPhone and a newer one. I actually use the PDA features on the old iPhone more than I do on the new iPhone. I use the new iPhone as a phone only, and access its PDA features (which, in addition to looking stupid are bug filled) only when I absolutely have no choice. I can't stand to look at the Jony Ive "improved" design. I can use the old iPhone only on WiFi since it's basically deactivated (sort of like an old iPod Touch). I'm perfectly happy with Jobs' Skeuomorphism. A note pad that actually looks like a note pad vs. glaring white background with dark grey text. A compass that looks like an actual compass vs. Ive's black circle with white markers and a red arrow....this looks like something I would have done when I was learning computer science.
The same hold true for OS X. It looks like something a student designed. I've modified El Capitan to the point I can tolerate it, but that's hardly high praise. I can't even stand looking at Yosemite. It just puts me in a bad mood.
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One picture to prove El Capitan is still a visual clusterduck:
(Disk Utility, what else)
Um, what's wrong with it?