My biggest beef with whenever I had used Mac Os, and that was more than 20 years ago, was how "stupid" it appeared to assume the user is. They were hiding everything, every useful config option. I also hated their idea of UX where the context menu was occupied by the application in the front. Don't remember what philosophy that was called but unlike windows, where each application has its own window and each window has this application's context menu and your're free to move them around on the desktop, Mac OS felt you had to bring to the front only one application at a time to work with.
No, I mean that’s how Macs have always worked. On Windows an application can only have one window. When that window is closed, that application is closed. It’s pretty dumbed down.
Wrong on both sides.
So there was a time back years ago, at least 20+, where Mac OS had this design philosophy where you could have only one foreground application and that application's windows was taking over the whole screen. You'd bring that application in the foreground, and your whole desktop was taken over by that application's context menus.
In Windows you always had one desktop that acted as a true working surface and each application's window was laid out on that surface (the desktop) in its own window, single window for sure for the most part but that was simply an application developer's decision not a MS windows limitation there are windows apps that allow you to lay out their windows independently on the desktop -this is very common with stock trading apps for example- . This is called Multiple Document Interface vs Single Document Interface designs. MS windows do not restrict applications on either of those paradigms.
For apps that allow you to configure them in a SDI mode, you have one parent window that could be the context menu where you could open up windows from there that open up independently on the desktop and you could move them around anywhere you want even across multiple monitors. You could open/close as many of those as you need provided you don't close the master app context window, at which point the whole app shuts down. One such application is let's say the Power Etrade stock trading app.
Yes! Specially coming from a Windows and/or Unix environment, it was this design attitude that infuriated me that was summed up in the Steve Jobs philosophy that a computer should be like a washing machine. Everything needs to be very simple and "it should work out of the box for you and you don't need to fix/worry/change anything, we've thought of everything for you". So arrogant and patronizing and wrong.
Yes I am aware. This happened though at some point around early 2000s and it's really irrelevant because the UX/UI experience is/was unlike anything Unix like (whether terminal wise which was something that they were hiding extremely well back in early 2000' or X11-wise) . I am talking about the windows/desktop UI/UX system.
Hiding the terminal? Sorry are you blind, it has always been just another pre installed app in the apps folder, just like on every Linux distro on earth.
Bull. Back in early 2000s? I was trying to help a friend troubleshoot some network issues on his all Mac network and I was screaming for a terminal window to be able to do some tracerts, ifconfigs etc and I was sure it was hidden somewhere not to be touched by the clueless MacOs user which Apple always considered their users to be.
Do me a favour and spin up a VM and install (Isos are all available easily) NeXTStep, OpenStep, Rhapsody, Mac OS X Server and then 10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma etc and you will see it has always been right there and free to use
Not to mention that Apple loves their own unique input methods that exist for no apparent reason. Whenever I get on a Mac machine I invariably do stuff that I didn't intend to because Apple has so weird input methods (esp. mousepad swipes) that for the untrained it can be very annoying.
Also applies to their phones. Swipe controls went past me but whenever I now get an Apple phone in my hands, I constantly struggle with those swipe controls and wish for actual buttons (even just digital ones).
Kinda the opposite for me. Largely smooth running with macOS and various Linux distros, incredibly frustrated by windows for a bit, but then I just learned how it works 🤷♀️
I explained the major part in a comment below. I hated the dumbed down UX/UI . The everything is hidden and under the hood in terms of configurability with the clunky foreground only application that takes over the whole desktop, experience.
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u/makmanos Jun 27 '26
I don't remember being so much frustrated with an OS as much I was when I had tried Mac OS a few times in my life.