[lbourdages]

Well, the current hardware is solid - great build quality, powerful, insane battery life.

However, software-wise, the peak was 10.6. There hasn't been the same level of quality ever since.

[xtracto]

It's simply amazing. I was looking for a ~$6000 USD 14in laptop with good specs. NOTHING compares to what Apple has right now. I looked at Framework, some gaming laptops, ThinkPads, Dells and most of them would require 16+ inches to get specs similar to a MBP 14 Ultra with 128GB unified ram and 8tb disk. ...

Apple has done an amazing job integrating all that hardware. And I say this as someone who was looking to buy a notebook to install Linux, as its my favorite OS.

So what im doing is put Ubuntu Server Arm + kde-desktop in VMware and use it as my main dev env.

[tptacek]

I would not want to be running Snow Leopard. And remember, that's a release they had to do because 10.5 was so rough!

[majormajor]

Why not? Other than "because they're old"?

Tiger and Snow Leopard in particular were very solid releases.

Heck, the aluminum Macbooks from that era are still the foundation of Apple's laptop design. And they didn't have the butterfly keyboard fiasco!

But this is a bit of a irrelevant distraction. Apple under Jobs wasn't loved for quality of hardware, it was loved for telling a better story of progress of personal computing. From the iMac "make it simpler by going back to basics, but future-looking basics" to "easier to manage, funner to use music players" through showing how smartphones and then tablets could be far more functional and usable than MS', Palm's, or Nokia's visions. The watch is the next best category-definer since then, and the iCloud cross-device stuff generally feels better-done than competitors still, but otherwise... refine, refine, refine, and slowly add more ads and upsells. Microsoft or anyone else could run that playbook, in a way that they never could match the Apple playbook from 1997 to 2011.

(One side question here is "are there new segments out there waiting to be invented?" which I don't know the answer to. But even so, "becoming just another upsell-pushing, ad-driven, software-subscription-service provider" wasn't a necessary path.)

[Gigachad]

iOS and ipadOS have gotten massively better over the years. The gap between them and macos has been slowly closing. Still a lot to go, but so much has improved.

[cortesoft]

Peak was System 7!

[musicale]

Apple's classic Mac GUIs were beautiful and discoverable, with clear, visible controls/affordances.

Running Apple's "Macintosh" screen saver reminds me that Apple used to care about every pixel. Now even basic user interface elements like the menu bar are clunky, with things like the Window menu not aligning properly (even on a wide display where there is more than enough space.) Menus getting lost behind the notch is another annoying problem.

It seems like Microsoft learned from Apple's original approach somewhat, at least for Windows 95 through Windows 7 (though I think for a while there was a dead zone below the start menu, a fairly obvious mistake), but Apple seems to have strayed from the path with an invisible, gestural interface.

[linguae]

From a UI standpoint, I agree. There’s nothing like the classic Mac interface and its associated Apple Human Interface Guidelines for GUI software. I love Jobs-era Mac OS X, but the classic Mac and its ecosystem of applications were something special.

However, when it comes to UX, stability is a major component, and this is where Mac OS X is vastly superior to cooperative multitasking, lack-of-memory-protection Mac OS 9 and below. I prefer the classic Mac UI, but Mac OS X had a better UX.

[flomo]

On the other hand, the low-point was MacOS 7.6.1 Update 2 or whatever.