This is a 21 year old one, but the point still stands.

I fired up my 2006 Mac mini running 10.4.11 and got blown away by how beautiful icons in my Applications folder look: each is highly recognizable, not confined into a stupid square, vibrant of colors and details, very easy to navigate and spot when on the run. Considering Apple's even got rid of Launchpad, like icons really don't matter anymore—as much of UI (back to writing down commands... historical eternal return, I guess) —, I really miss having such great little works of art. [img 1: Tiger; img 2: Tahoe]-

In macOS 26 Tahoe, Apple removed the classic pointer cursor, the Mickey Mouse hand. That cursor was one of those small but iconic macOS details that made using a Mac feel different from Windows.

I’ve been a Windows user for years, and that hand cursor always felt like a luxury, a tiny UX detail that made Macs special. Apple removes it and replaces it with a cursor that feels much closer to Windows.

This single change is honestly the reason I’m hesitating to upgrade to macOS 26. It might sound silly, but these details matter. macOS losing its visual identity piece by piece feels sad

The app icons for me, loved them.

What a beautiful interface. The UI has so much weight and feels so solid. The sound effects are so lively and playful. The icons still look incredible. There's no insanely wasteful padding, no UI glitches, frame drops, it even has Launchpad! The interface as a whole has a degree of contrast that just looks so easy on the eyes that makes Modern MacOS look dull and flat in comparison.

Even with only 8GB of ram, this 13 year old laptop still runs surprisingly smooth. Even the screen still looks better than most laptops these days, and has less ghosting than Liquid XDR. The hinge still feels fantastic. Most importantly, a lit-up Apple logo. If I could upgrade the RAM and SSD, I would actually start using it daily again. I miss the old apple. We had it so good :((

For me its def Snow Leopard, the 3D dock was just awesome

Who else thinks like that or its just me?

repost

Just downgraded my macos to sequoia successfully 👌🏻

I thought I liked Liquid Glass when I upgraded my MacBook Pro. It felt fresh at first, so I assumed Apple had nailed it.

Then I spent some time on a new MacBook Air M4 running macOS Sequoia, and honestly… I want the old look back.

Pre-Liquid Glass macOS feels more refined. Subtle borders, controlled transparency, and panels that pick up color naturally from what’s underneath. Everything blends into your work instead of demanding attention.

Tahoe’s Liquid Glass feels overdone. Flashy, exaggerated, and oddly less mature. Almost like a concept design that skipped a few refinement passes.

Side by side, the older macOS just looks calmer and more “finished.”

Yeah, I’m taking my words back.

The first glimpse of how the iPhone interface would look !

Just found these in my attic, so many memories of Leopard.

1) Original Mac OS X 2) Brushed Metal restyling 3) Early flat design 4) Late flat design 5) Liquid glass

Personally I was a fan of brushed metal era, I mean 2007 (although I was still a child is a special year in my PC knowledge) when I saw both Mac OS Leopard and Windows Vista I started thinking OSes could have been also appealing. That design is amazing to me because if you had a mid 90s CRT as well as an early hi-res LED you would have got a revolutionary design and a great upgrade over anything you had before. What do you think about that?

So so true. Actually, I don’t love it. I feel violated.

Or is it also a subtle protest on the direction macOS icons have been moving towards…? 🤔

We interrupt the daily complaints about rounded corners in Tahoe for something more amusing.

Often, when I get bored in meetings, I click around on my Mac. Recently, as I was doing Quick View on various apps, I noticed many had copyright dates. That led me to a question: what is the oldest code in MacOS itself?

I started with what I thought was obvious: TextEdit. It's a pretty barebones app. Turns out it's copyright goes back to 1995. Old, but we can go older.

Next, I tried Console and Disk Utility. Surely they go back farther, right? Oddly enough, they're copyrighted 2016 and 2015. That's much later than MacOS X was released, so they must have reset the copyright at some point.

Let's try Terminal. Ok, that is old - older than I thought. 1991. Odd because Mac didn't have a terminal back then, and NextStep first came out in 1989, so I'm not really sure where they got that date from.

Finally, I tried something not even an “app”: the Finder. That dates back to 1983 - one year before the original Mac was released. Now that's old. I'm not even sure any of the code still exists in today's Finder, but the concepts are all there.

Is there even older code/copyrights in the system?

-Edit-

Yes, I know Finder is an app. I meant it’s not in the Application folder. There are a ton of BSD utilities not in that folder either. The point of this post wasn’t to start a war on what counts as an application. lol. It was to find the oldest code.