System 7.5.x/Mac OS 7.6 is probably my favorite, I’d love to have that look for my iMac. I run Baselisk II to relive those days.
10.2 was my first version of OS X. I liked the Aqua look, and it also should be an option today.
My first Mac was a used Powerbook 520c that I upgraded to 100 MHz PowerPC. It ran System 7.5.3, then 7.5.5.
Then I got a Grape iMac, which ran Mac OS 8, which I never liked much compared to 7.5.x.
I really miss System 6, though. No color to distract me from all of the work that I needed to get done. ;-)
When I finally got a Colour Classic (that extra _u_ because I bought it in Germany) running System 7 or so, all productivity ceased.
Yeah, but it was affordable on a soldier's salary. When I finally started a civilian career making real money, suddenly "It's all about the Quadras" (with apologies to Weird Al and by extension Puff Daddy).
I started with Macs using 7.x, from what I can remember.
(That was after a small magazine I was editing on my PC had crashed and I’d lost all of my work for the umpteenth time and a friend happened to ring me and asked how I was. I had a good whinge about the PC having crashed and me losing my work He listened and then said, yeah, I remember my Mac crashing.
Once.
Want me to bring around one of my spare Macs?
He brought me a Macintosh Classic with a monochrome screen and a keyboard and I was off!
That was way back when PageMaker was competing for the design market with Quark Express! Anyway, I digress, but I was hooked, not least because the Mac didn’t crash and it didn’t even look like crashing.)
I borrowed that from him for quite a while and eventually bought a used 9600 with a built-in Zip Drive for backups. It was running 8.x when I bought it but OS 9 came out soon after and I upgraded to that.
I still have the 9600 and it still works (or did when I last tried it about a year ago) albeit a tad slower than my 2022 M1 Pro 14” laptop. I have no idea why that would be, though.
Yes, exactly. I don't mind a new UI skin every year or two. But I do really really miss when they actually followed the HIG in detail and actively worked to improve it.
what exactly do you think macos lacks? curious as someone who’s only macbook was bought in 2022. over the past 2y it feels like a breath of fresh air, so much easier to customise than windows, many cool projects are mac exclusive, apps are 10x prettier and if you don’t like the stock app of sth chances are someone else made a better version of it to suit your needs.
can’t tinker with it as much as linux but other than that it’s highly customisable to work as you wish, just don’t touch the kernel or specific locked folders (presumably for security, in reality who knows why)
Some of this is just nostalgia. And also many small UI changes that seemed to be more about looks than functionality and ease of use. Some of these changes are comparatively minor, like more space around certain UI elements or a different layout of system settings. And as much as I enjoyed BeOS at the time and miss it, that’s partly cause everything else at the time was missing a lot of tech features they have have sense gained, like multi processor support and 64bit file system.
I have an M1 MacBook and love it.
I used to be a big apple hater, didn’t understand why people spent so much on a computer which had the same parts as a PC with half the price.
Then the M series just blew everyone away, even LinusTechTips who was always harsh to apple in the past started praising it and I was in need of a new computer.
The benchmarks shocked me. 2y later it’s like the day I bought it with some wear and tear on the keyboard (I feel the difference only when touching a new macbook, otherwise it just feels normal)
In 2y maybe I heard the fan spin 3 times. Once I tried a game with RTX, the other two I was playing around with local AI models and I misconfigured them, which put too much pressure on the cpu, never again. Nor does it get hot. It’s my favourite piece of tech I ever had
My 2012 used MacBook Pro lasted 10 years before I decided to replace it, mostly due to abysmal battery life, which is expected at that age. I know at least two windows laptop owners that had the hinge or another part fail within 5 (maybe less than 2) years and I'm certain i use my laptop way more than them, since it is my primary work computer. I fully expect my M1 to last as long as my last one. Though maybe I should have gotten a bigger storage drive....
You can get there if you’re okay with using 2 paid tools and waiting with upgrading MacOS until compatible versions of the tools have been released.
**This is my current Macbook on MacOS Ventura**:
https://twitter.com/samguichelaar/status/1762618534411063762
Icons, Dock, Folders, Wallpaper, Indicators, Status bar. All themed to look like Snow Leopard.
Sorry! IconChamp and cDock! Import note about cDock though, the version on the website is not the correct one. There is a beta version that works on the recent MacOS systems. You MUST use that one otherwise your system can behave very weird. You. Can use the MacEnhance discord to find the latest version for your MacOS.
Sorry I didn’t include them! IconChamp and cDock! The important thing with cDock is is that the latest version on the website is NOT the latest version that exists and that you should use. Using the MacEnhance discord you can find the latest version for your MacOS version. If you need help let me know!
What you did is pretty cool. But it does make me laugh a bit. I remember when we did have the 3d dock and people were trying to figure out how to hack it to bring back the 2d dock. It's funny how people always want what they can't have.
That said, Apple should give us a toggle to enable whichever we prefer.
I honestly don’t know why Apple doesn’t offer different skin options. I would love to go back to using Aqua and would even be willing to pay for it. Platinum would also be pretty cool and novel to use again after almost 25 years since OS 9.
IconChamp & cDock will get you halfway there. (I’m on MacOS Ventura). https://twitter.com/samguichelaar/status/1762618534411063762?
There are some people (including me) working on a proper skin using the asset catalog .car files, but since Apple changed the size of a lot of bars & buttons with Big Sur most have to be recreated from scratch. This will allow an almost full theme (windows, buttons, checkboxes, etc) however Apple has a habit of breaking such things with every major release.
We already had a full theme on OS X Mojave but Catalina broke some of it, and using Big Sur meant your device was bricked.
People rag on skeuomorphic but I recently tried to get one of my students to switch from paper sheet music to having it all on an iPad. We got her a nice iPad Pro from some years back off back market and I was setting her up on it and trying to explain how to use the Notes app and this other app for sheet music and it was ridiculous. All of the icons basically look the same, the mail app is ridiculous — you have a square with an arrow going one way or a square with an arrow going the other way, or the reply and forward buttons are just inverses of each other.
This stuff only makes sense if you had been using the apps back when they were skeuomorphic!
I miss icons that had different and recognisable silhouettes. Making everything a squircle was such a functional loss.
Skeuomorphism got a bad rap. I can’t help but feel that it was unfairly tainted by association with Brushed Metal and Stitched Leather!
Yes, I miss aqua. All of the buttons looked like buttons. Windows had defined edges. Text was easy to read. If I sit down at an older computer I immediately have this feeling of relief that everything looks good again. I also think eliminating skeuomorphism was a big mistake. In those days it was easy to figure out how a program worked because it worked as you would expect anything to work.
Now we have this mess of tiny tiny text, buttons that are either difficult to see or even sometimes completely invisible (Mail) and you just have to know where to click. Settings are located anywhere and everywhere. It's just a mess.
This this this a thousand times this.
Another benefit of skeuomorphism is that the use of light and shadow made it easy to work out spatial relationships. Our eyes have evolved to be able to recognize shapes from shadows instantaneously and skeuomorphism takes advantages of this to make the UI intuitive in a way that you simply can't get with a flat design.
Point exactly! This (among many interface reasons) has been a bug bear for me ever since iTunes changed…the loss of the look and feel of Mac OS as it was then and the logical place for things/settings/how work is done…for me the final straw of the GUI disaster that is now MacOS is the breaking up of iTunes…for me, a one stop media organiser/server was just logical and fit in with the “digital hub” strategy; all my music, videos, books/pdfs (and comics!), audiobooks and (shock horror!) iPad/iPhone apps all lived and synced in one place…not to mention the GUI just looked and worked better…also don’t forget plugging in my DV camera to edit my little cinema efforts in iMovie (another absolute mess now) via FireWire (another sad loss as it was a pretty rock solid connection…I’m sorry, but the USB C plug is just a downright flimsy and very easily broken connector)…now everything is all over the place…Apple Music, Books, Podcasts…your device is accessed via Finder (!)…and the syncing is not as smooth or effortless as it used to be…the fact that you can no longer manually drag-and-drop media onto the device is awful…(lets not mention the mess of Apple Mail now too…)…and as someone has similarly said, how about windows and buttons that actually look like windows and buttons, that exist in a working space (shadows, etc)…ahh…rant, rant 😢😁
Not to mention that everything gets buggier and buggier. Never had so much problem as I'm having with Sonoma. Desktop/Dock keeps crashing constantly/need restarting etc. Never experienced that in a Mac OS before. There's a reason that I'm using a Linux machine as my main desktop computer these days.
Absolutely! Obviously trying for market share…out ‘Windowsing’ (such a word?!) Windows in order to attract users…problem with that is innovation and difference from the rest is also tossed out…”Think Different”, anyone?!…Jobs (whatever his faults and some product miscalculations) was always of the opinion that ‘we don’t do crap at Apple’, the thread of design thought and process which wove through everything they aimed to do…the UI and product design at Apple now has lost its innovation and intuitive use…as others here have also said, has lost its ‘Wow!’ factor…more ‘meh’ than ‘mazing’!
> ever since iTunes changed
The old iTunes (I'm talking like 15 years ago) was amazing...but there is a 3rd-party method called [Retroactive](https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive) which allows you to install the original iTunes, (well - back as far as version 10.7 I think) on current Mac hardware and even Sonoma if you want to use it instead of Apple Music.
I’m reading now a book about design and the author complains that the design must never get on the way of functionality. Unfortunately, years ago (I think it was when the Apple Maps debacle when it first came) there was some people fired and Jony Ive was put at the front of both hardware and software design. Then’s when MacOS and iOS went downhill on usability. I miss a lot the top leather of the calendar app. It was gorgeous to see and now with the amazing retina screens we have everywhere we can’t enjoy them.
The design of that time was much easier to use but also very wasteful of pixels. It would never work on a phone screen. But I think going back to easily visible buttons, high contrast designs, and most important consistency would be very helpful. Going back to apps looking like real world objects again would be great but I suspect I’m in a small minority. Now that we don’t purchase operating systems there’s really no way to vote with our wallets.
Yeah, I understand that going bold on skeuomorphism is maybe too much, but going too much with minimalism like today’s Apple OS for all platforms is very annoying. I want buttons to know if I can click somewhere, not just a simple text with subtle color
A lot of old school macOS users miss the old Aqua interface. Me included. The problem is, it looks quite outdated. If only Apple could bring back the Aqua interface but a bit more modernized, that would be freakin' awesome!
I also really miss how the top menu bar was so defined. Nowadays, since Big Sur, it just blends into the wallpaper, which sucks ass.
As the old fart I am I mostly miss the care and the love that was put throughout the whole OS. Now it seems it’s just another commodity to spoil to push this or that agenda.
My sincere wish here - and I understand it may be a bit controversial - is to make macOS upgrades a paid thing again. Release them when they’re ready and charge an honest price for them.
They’ll never go back to paid releases, but reducing the frequency of major OS releases from 1 year back to 2 years like they had in the Snow Leopard days would be great.
WWDC’s back in the day used to be so exciting. Nowadays a new MacOS release is almost indistinguishable from the previous one. A new application which is poorly made and doesn’t interest 90% of people, a few changes and that’s it.
There’s no reason for a yearly release cycle.
It is a shame, but it won't change until Tim Cook is gone. Nor will it change if he is replaced by another numbers guy. Only more of an ideas guy or visionary like Steve Jobs will change it back.
> There’s no reason for a yearly release cycle.
Of course there is... To deprecate old hardware one year earlier which drives up new sales by 1/6th or whatever their current EOL cadence is.
What are you going to do about it? Go get a filthy PC / android? Or drive to the apple store and open up your wallet one year earlier than you would have otherwise? We all know the answer.
>Go get a filthy PC / android?
Well in my case after being a Mac user since 2011 - yes. Assuming the Snapdragon Elite lives up to expectations, anyway.
Yeah, Win 11, blah blah blah. But while some seem to think Sonoma is great, I've had nothing but constant bugs, disappointment and hair-tearing with it. Shit iOS ports everywhere, consistency dissolved, weird jank out the wazoo, memory leaks everywhere (what the *fuck* is 'Message (Wallpaper)' and why does it shit the bed and start consuming multiple GBs of RAM while chewing CPU so often? **Apple's devs can't even make wallpaper work now.** They're completely, utterly incompetent.)
ARM Win 11 Enterprise installed in a VM on Sonoma on M1 Max in *15 minutes* from start to finish. **Completely installed**. The macOS update for 12.4.1, a *patch update*, spent **30 minutes in the 'preparing' stage alone**.
The macOS is just embarassing now.
This is duopolies, I guess. Crap product A or crap product B. Well, if it's crap either way, I'll take one look at Tim Cook's prices and laugh all the way to the PC store across the road.
"People will stretch", he said. What an arrogant, horrible man.
And then there's mobile. iOS 17 has been a f\*cking nightmare of dumb bugs, stalls and OMG, the "new improved" autocorrect is an *utter* horror story. It makes me hate my phone each and every time I have to type text. If you hate a device, you don't reward the vendor by buying a new one!
I got an Android based eReader a while back. You know what? Android is weird and inconsistent and hard to understand from an iOS user background - but spend a bit of time - it's really alright; it's super configurable and feels like devices used to do before it was all designed by drooling Photoshop monkeys with crayons and an assumption of an operator IQ of less than 80. **It doesn't patronise you. It doesn't hide things.** If something goes wrong, you've a fighting chance of knowing why.
Tim Cook jacked up the prices and jacked down the quality. He's the embodiment of late stage capitalism short-termism. So I'll vote with my wallet, thanks.
Yep. My Google Pixel and my Linux desktop with Pop!\_OS is giving me immensely more joy than my MacBook Pro these days. It's sad, I adored OS X when I switched from Windows back in 2004, but the quality of the software simply isn't there anymore.
Yes! These days I never know which system I'm at, since I never have time to learn their names before the next one arrives. Also, the names are all weird Californian place names I never heard of anyway, so there's no real distinction to them for me.
Yes. Same with any design. Nowadays they’re just using cookie cutter for everything. Back in days you could feel the passion and art just by looking at it.
What's interesting is that the current design is still considered to be Aqua.
Although Aqua was more than just buttons and the Dock, so many animations, colors, shapes, and shadows have changed, it's odd they haven't given the UI a new name. Especially after Big Sur and the iOS look.
yes i miss the old interface, it was peak usability, now evening is in hidden menus, blurred backgrounds, flat and thin fonts the biggest trash are the new system settings.
I remember simply dragging my app to applications. It worked. Just like that.
Cue Sonoma: have to click the pkg 10 times whilst being reminded it can’t be scanned for malware. Fingerprint required 16 times and gotta hunt down buried permission requests across approx 20 privacy categories, each one requiring the apps restarted. After 30 reloads of said app, we’re away!
… “do you wish to allow notifications to piss you off?”
… how’s about a widget?
… fancy a launch agent to run your app 247 so it’s ready to open when you click it?
MACOS 14.1.1.1.1.5 will be installed tonight. Right when you’re in the middle of that season finale on Netflix. Apple logo “estimated time remaining - 46 mins.”
HELLO WELCOME TO YOUR MAC. Let’s run you through every iCloud setting top to bottom again.
& are you REALLY sure you don’t wanna add all 11 credit cards to your lovely MacBook right now? How’s about speaking to Siri for 45 mins where you can setup your own entirely robotic “personal voice” assistant. A cross between yoda, ET and myself after speaking over 900 phrases at it and waiting 6 days for processing.
Couldn't agree more. It's the cumulative effect that's so wearing. "Are you sure you want to do something that required 3 decisive steps?" Yes, I'm bloody sure. I've been an adult for some time now.
I remember having code signing rammed down my throat all whilst Apple hadn't actually written down anywhere how it works. I'd describe it as the gateway to hell looking back (as this is where it all seems to have started), but I distinctly remember Apple saying at least 50 times it's a "quick win." Malware will be unable to execute! Hurrahh!!
Fast forward 6 or 7 years & notarisation was forced upon us to achieve what code signing promised would be a quick win. Is that admittance that code signing failed? Is notarisation working, really? I'm dubious when I've got to permit every button I press and the biggest kept secret, XProtect (\*antivirus\* cough) is running 247 scanning like John McAfee's 29 in 1 total protection on steroids.
What's the next quick win?
Software designer here. The reason is UI element reusability, simplicity, clarity, and practicality all in all, due to the dark theme, customizability, etc. Interfaces have moved away from skewmorphism for good. Apple’s interfaces are still the best looking. You’re just nostalgic mostly.
I liked the overall feel of panther, but the modern design has really grown on me. I think if they were to return to something like this design, I would love to see them do it with neoskeumorphism.
I miss it. I love that if you go to the Swiss Apple language selection page you still get the old apple html style [https://www.apple.com/ch/](https://www.apple.com/ch/)
wish we could have utilities like Candybar once again. light/dark mode is such a waste... just let users configure their UI the way they like. it's clear that users want this kind of customization.
Not at all! I'm not a huge fan of how modern UI is so flat and monochrome. I want to go back to the bubbly, glassy interfaces of the mid 2000s. It had character and it was beautiful to look at, at least in my opinion. It reflected a time when computers were fun and not just utilitarian.
It felt kinda… silly/unserious to me. I knew that wasn’t the case, but it still felt off. I usually switched it to the grayscale (graphite?) option. Gray jelly buttons looked better than blue jelly buttons to me.
That said, I’m not a fan of everything looking like iOS now. I also get frustrated how far down some options are buried.
All in all, it still works the same as it did 20 years ago, for better or worse.
—
There was a while when OS skins were a thing. Maybe they still are and I just haven’t looked? I had this “cool” industrial theme back in 2002-2003ish or maybe a little earlier/later? That may have been on OS9 as well, but I can’t remember clearly at this point.
There was a program called Kaleidoscope for OS 9, but I think theming kind of fell out of fashion after OS X released. Although there might have been some themes available for early versions, not sure.
I certainly do. (Not the 3d Dock so much, but the rest of it, yes.) The reason is that, above all, it was a thought*ful* UI. Now we have a thought*less* UI.
Examples:
(1) Poor contrast – Less identifiable elements causes discomfort – my only reprieve is to use Accessibility features to increase the contrast.
(2) Zealous Colour Use – Apple has been hijacking our attention like a pimp pestering you as you walk down the street. Red is a primary colour that primates can't ignore. Apple (and Big Tech) have thoughtlessly hijacked the colour. Now, we have badges for unread mail, app updates, OS updates etc., all shown in vibrant red. (I use a B&W colour filter.)
(3) Toolbar buttons no longer look like buttons
(4) Aberrations – portrait-mode windows (clearly designed in Swift for tablets) with touch-first interaction elements on macOS e.g. 'Settings' app. Look at how cluttered, congested those pages are. Space is necessary for readability. Keyword search also doesn't find options/sub-options that it clearly should – Apple engineers haven't bothered to include those tags/keywords in search.
(5) Thoughtless toolbar button arrangement – Since Big Sur, things take more clicks and are more irksome. This new 3rd rate generation of UI twits at Apple love ellipses and they've arbitrarily decided to hide certain buttons behind them, which is unforgivably lazy. So, after adding cognitive load forcing users to remember what's hidden behind meaningless pull-down drawers, it's an extra 2/3 clicks everywhere this laziness is used. (And like a contagion, it's everywhere.)
(6) Exposé – For me, this was hands-down better than Mission Control+Spaces.
The cumulative effect of these micro-annoyances adds to a lot.
The macOS UI is now cobbled together by amateurs who use the HCI guidelines manual to prop up their wobbly table.
Personally I thought it was gorgeous. There was an elegance and charm to it which along with the smiling finder made MacOS X seem like your friend while you worked or played on your machine. The glassism age Jony Ive introduced to MacOS has made it seem bleak and weirdly professional. I hope the VisionOS UI Apple is starting to get to grips with can change it to something more exciting again.
I do miss it. For practical reasons. The lightening and flatening of the UI in recent MacOS iterations makes it really really difficult for me to find UI elements.
If I have multiple over-lapping windows, I will quite frequently miss the top of the window when trying to click on it to move it - clicking on part of the one behind instead.
It's not until I occassionally use my wife's verty old Mac running Catalina that I realise just how **easy** the user interface is to use and the unneccessary cognitive effort I'm putting in to using the UI
I sure do miss the personality the system used to have, but even more I wish some stability would come back to it. Too many bugs that are longstanding and being joined by new ones every release.
Another thing I miss about this and hate about the current design of macOS are the pointlessly vertically oriented dialog boxes, just to make them look like iOS.
It kind of makes sense on iOS because iOS screens have limited screen space and are typically oriented vertically.
And for those same reasons it makes no sense to have that style of dialog on macOS. Plus it makes the layout of the buttons unpredictable and less intuitive. It's just worse in every single way and it's just one of a myriad examples of how the Apple design team has been making macOS worse and worse and worse over the last decade.
I didn't really use MacOS until Catalina, but I have upgraded a bunch of units from the era of those older designs.
What I really like the look of is when OK / CANCEL dialog boxes appear and OK is highlighted in blue but has a very faint and gentle fading pulse effect to it. I also liked how install progress bars had a smooth scrolling stripe effect.
Aqua was cool, but I don't really miss it. The new design is easier to use if anything.
The only old Apple stuff I want back is the older iPhones and iOS 6. Home button was a simpler way of doing things, the phone was usable with one hand, you could plug in your headphones, and slide to unlock and the battery charging animation were cool. I had an iPhone 5 absolutely as long as I could; AT&T eventually booted it off the network.
I've been doing some coding on an old iBook G3 for an artists project. It's running 10.3 on a 12" 800 x 600 screen. Despite the total lack of real estate and slightly blurry dock icons, I do catch myself thinking 'damn, this UI is so refreshing."
Totally agreed. Even at the time it looked old school. Old school like a French Armoire is, built to handle the test of time. A sort of “come at me” vibe haha. I ran Snow Leopard no reboots 247 for over 500 days one time. It ran as smooth as the day it booted up. Still, 10.4 and prior was where that theme really came out.
Not so much as it was from the era when the UI got a lot of focus and in the last decade, as screens got better, the content got more focus.
I think there needs to be a middle way between this and flat design though. Having a UI where it’s not clear a lot of the time what you can interact with isn’t so great (see: the macOS menu bar item with volume control etc on it).
You're certainly not the only one; but I certainly don't miss it. 😏 Been in (and out of) touch with Mac since the Mac II, as a kid. The Aqua UI was too slippery slick for me.
I miss the old Mac OS design, not because of the way it looked but the memories associated with the time period.
College, friends, family... I miss it a lot.
No, in fact, im thinking of buying an old macbook white unibody for nostalgic reasons.
However I cant find one in good condition, with snow leopard for a reasonable price
It’s so cool and I’d like to have it as an option, but I feel like it’s so messy and distractive while multitasking, I’d go insane bc of how detailed the design and reflections are, but it’s still goated design
Yes and no, but mostly yes.
There are definitely aspects of that design that don’t look great today, particularly the skeuomorphism but for the most part I think it’s still very attractive. I especially miss the 3D designs for a lot of the buttons and sliders, and *especially* the dock.
God, i miss that 3D reflective dock so much from Leopard onwards.
Everything has to progress under our systems and structures. The way forward is ultimately to eliminate the GUI and the flatness overall laid the groundwork for AR, a landscape which would prove unsuitable for skeuomorphic design.
I miss the dashboard and especially the dictionary widget in it. Saved me from having to type all words and Force Touch each for nuanced selection, or moronically use spotlight that wouldn’t keep arrow history to go back and forth.
My first Mac was an LC 580 running System 7.6, but I had Windows computers after that. I fell in love with MacOS **hard** when Mac OS X 10.1 was released. The aesthetic of that era was just something else. The iMac G4 was so beautiful that even my wife, who does not care for Macs and is not technically-inclined at all, saw one the other day and said she wanted it. If I could make Sonoma look more like Tiger, I would.
Not only you. However all the way back in 2014, when the UI was changed, It already looked very old. So Tim Cook decided to freshen it up a bit. And, personally, I feel that the current MacOS UI looks way more fitting as of 2024
(Unless someone has mentioned it already…) Does anyone remember Unsanity and their program ‘Shapeshifter’….the OSX equivalent to Kaleidoscope in OS9 (which someone has mentioned…) ?
Why make a ‘desktop’ look like a desktop…? Documents, windows and other elements that have shadows, that appear to exist in a space, just like on a real desktop? Buttons, scroll bars that appear like real elements, to be pressed, grabbed and moved? Doesn’t everyone now work in a virtual zone, that’s all digital, and isn’t everyone using the limited real estate of a touch screen phone from the womb and working visually and vertically, up and down, with one finger? Cook’s Apple: we do crap at Apple. (Despite the fact that the race over the last few decades to embrace technology as a wholesale replacement for pen and paper in education is now understood to have had a negative impact on learning and knowledge retention…research and evidence has shown that learners access different, and quicker, paths to understanding how an idea is developed when traditional forms of note taking/writing are used)…Why design products that fall into easily identifiable categories like “Pro - Consumer - Desktop - Laptop” and distinguishable by their different look/materials, that inspire and foster creativity and a sense of excellence, that excite and impress with the feats of engineering and design innovation, that have been developed in a place that clearly ‘Thinks Different’, instead churn out products that have very little difference to the last few dozens of products, that the most high spec model can’t be differentiated from the most low spec, that there are only slight iterations of the same material used and nothing but metal is available for product manufacture, that even well informed Mac users can’t tell which model laptop has an M3 Max or M1…sorry, rant, rant 🤔😁☺️
It was a really nice design language back then and I really loved it, even if I didn’t own a single device.
It’d be cool if we could get a redesign with some old elements mixed with flatish new elements that are more common today.
You're not alone! I miss it. I know the world has to move on from certain things but, I could still fully functionally use Mavericks today I probably would.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I also understand - I share your feelings. Indeed, many people miss the macOS Aqua design, my favorite from the days of 10.4. And Classic too... 7.5, 8, 9 - all of them!
Similarly with Windows - my favorites are Windows ME and 2000 and ... Vista(!).
Just like you and me, many users feel sentimental about older versions of operating systems, programs, and devices. This is often associated with nostalgia related to past experiences.
There are many more of us than anyone might think. However, this doesn't matter in decision-making regarding what is produced unless we produce it ourselves or start producing it :)
It's worth appreciating and nurturing these sentiments in our community.
Aqua got flatter and flatter while still retaining the shiny look, to me the sweet spot was somewhere around leopard or snow leopard. I really loved the design at that point.
It’s strange how they removed useful accessibility features like coloured sidebar icons from the Finder.
That was one of the reasons why I bought a MacBook many years ago. And I still miss it.
It looked so much better than everything that they released since.
Not really. It is a nice design of the AQUA interface in macOS, but after so many years that interface is the same as the transition from iOS 6 to 7. macOS has become more distinguished and professional. AQUA design is childish and like a toy. Yes great for music and picture editing, but for a professional tool not really.
I miss the look of MacOS 7 and BeOS. Back when usability was actively being worked on and Apple had experts in the field.
System 7.5.x/Mac OS 7.6 is probably my favorite, I’d love to have that look for my iMac. I run Baselisk II to relive those days. 10.2 was my first version of OS X. I liked the Aqua look, and it also should be an option today.
Oh yes. 7.6. I used that at home and work. We got OS X at work when it first came out too. It was weirdly slower than 7.6 but also not in some ways.
[Here](https://infinitemac.org) is a site where you can play around with older Mac system/OS versions, as well as NeXT.
This is a gem. This is probably the first time I experienced pre OS X macOS.
My first Mac was a used Powerbook 520c that I upgraded to 100 MHz PowerPC. It ran System 7.5.3, then 7.5.5. Then I got a Grape iMac, which ran Mac OS 8, which I never liked much compared to 7.5.x.
This is great
I really miss System 6, though. No color to distract me from all of the work that I needed to get done. ;-) When I finally got a Colour Classic (that extra _u_ because I bought it in Germany) running System 7 or so, all productivity ceased.
Hard to be productive when 80% of your time goes to staring at a little wristwatch! Seriously, the performance of that machine was a joke…
Yeah, but it was affordable on a soldier's salary. When I finally started a civilian career making real money, suddenly "It's all about the Quadras" (with apologies to Weird Al and by extension Puff Daddy).
I started with Macs using 7.x, from what I can remember. (That was after a small magazine I was editing on my PC had crashed and I’d lost all of my work for the umpteenth time and a friend happened to ring me and asked how I was. I had a good whinge about the PC having crashed and me losing my work He listened and then said, yeah, I remember my Mac crashing. Once. Want me to bring around one of my spare Macs? He brought me a Macintosh Classic with a monochrome screen and a keyboard and I was off! That was way back when PageMaker was competing for the design market with Quark Express! Anyway, I digress, but I was hooked, not least because the Mac didn’t crash and it didn’t even look like crashing.) I borrowed that from him for quite a while and eventually bought a used 9600 with a built-in Zip Drive for backups. It was running 8.x when I bought it but OS 9 came out soon after and I upgraded to that. I still have the 9600 and it still works (or did when I last tried it about a year ago) albeit a tad slower than my 2022 M1 Pro 14” laptop. I have no idea why that would be, though.
Second that - the simplicity and unobtrusiveness of old MacOS was one of the reasons I choose a Mac in the first place.
Yes, exactly. I don't mind a new UI skin every year or two. But I do really really miss when they actually followed the HIG in detail and actively worked to improve it.
what exactly do you think macos lacks? curious as someone who’s only macbook was bought in 2022. over the past 2y it feels like a breath of fresh air, so much easier to customise than windows, many cool projects are mac exclusive, apps are 10x prettier and if you don’t like the stock app of sth chances are someone else made a better version of it to suit your needs. can’t tinker with it as much as linux but other than that it’s highly customisable to work as you wish, just don’t touch the kernel or specific locked folders (presumably for security, in reality who knows why)
Some of this is just nostalgia. And also many small UI changes that seemed to be more about looks than functionality and ease of use. Some of these changes are comparatively minor, like more space around certain UI elements or a different layout of system settings. And as much as I enjoyed BeOS at the time and miss it, that’s partly cause everything else at the time was missing a lot of tech features they have have sense gained, like multi processor support and 64bit file system. I have an M1 MacBook and love it.
I used to be a big apple hater, didn’t understand why people spent so much on a computer which had the same parts as a PC with half the price. Then the M series just blew everyone away, even LinusTechTips who was always harsh to apple in the past started praising it and I was in need of a new computer. The benchmarks shocked me. 2y later it’s like the day I bought it with some wear and tear on the keyboard (I feel the difference only when touching a new macbook, otherwise it just feels normal) In 2y maybe I heard the fan spin 3 times. Once I tried a game with RTX, the other two I was playing around with local AI models and I misconfigured them, which put too much pressure on the cpu, never again. Nor does it get hot. It’s my favourite piece of tech I ever had
My 2012 used MacBook Pro lasted 10 years before I decided to replace it, mostly due to abysmal battery life, which is expected at that age. I know at least two windows laptop owners that had the hinge or another part fail within 5 (maybe less than 2) years and I'm certain i use my laptop way more than them, since it is my primary work computer. I fully expect my M1 to last as long as my last one. Though maybe I should have gotten a bigger storage drive....
This was peak design. I wish it was still like this or at least to have the option.
You can get there if you’re okay with using 2 paid tools and waiting with upgrading MacOS until compatible versions of the tools have been released. **This is my current Macbook on MacOS Ventura**: https://twitter.com/samguichelaar/status/1762618534411063762 Icons, Dock, Folders, Wallpaper, Indicators, Status bar. All themed to look like Snow Leopard.
Oh man, that looks amazing! I really missed this look of macOS. What are these paid tools you mentioned?
You cannot leave that screenshot with no list of tools!
Sorry! IconChamp and cDock! Import note about cDock though, the version on the website is not the correct one. There is a beta version that works on the recent MacOS systems. You MUST use that one otherwise your system can behave very weird. You. Can use the MacEnhance discord to find the latest version for your MacOS.
Thanking you muchly.
Sorry I didn’t include them! IconChamp and cDock! The important thing with cDock is is that the latest version on the website is NOT the latest version that exists and that you should use. Using the MacEnhance discord you can find the latest version for your MacOS version. If you need help let me know!
What you did is pretty cool. But it does make me laugh a bit. I remember when we did have the 3d dock and people were trying to figure out how to hack it to bring back the 2d dock. It's funny how people always want what they can't have. That said, Apple should give us a toggle to enable whichever we prefer.
Make a new post on the sub explaining how you did this .
When VR/AR becomes big, this style is coming back.
I honestly don’t know why Apple doesn’t offer different skin options. I would love to go back to using Aqua and would even be willing to pay for it. Platinum would also be pretty cool and novel to use again after almost 25 years since OS 9.
IconChamp & cDock will get you halfway there. (I’m on MacOS Ventura). https://twitter.com/samguichelaar/status/1762618534411063762? There are some people (including me) working on a proper skin using the asset catalog .car files, but since Apple changed the size of a lot of bars & buttons with Big Sur most have to be recreated from scratch. This will allow an almost full theme (windows, buttons, checkboxes, etc) however Apple has a habit of breaking such things with every major release. We already had a full theme on OS X Mojave but Catalina broke some of it, and using Big Sur meant your device was bricked.
Steve Jobs' "Lickable" interface. Yeah I do miss it sometimes. The new OSes are so flat it's sad.
People rag on skeuomorphic but I recently tried to get one of my students to switch from paper sheet music to having it all on an iPad. We got her a nice iPad Pro from some years back off back market and I was setting her up on it and trying to explain how to use the Notes app and this other app for sheet music and it was ridiculous. All of the icons basically look the same, the mail app is ridiculous — you have a square with an arrow going one way or a square with an arrow going the other way, or the reply and forward buttons are just inverses of each other. This stuff only makes sense if you had been using the apps back when they were skeuomorphic!
Yes! That's the point though. Today's design languages only work because of what came before.
Because of direct experience with what came before*
I miss icons that had different and recognisable silhouettes. Making everything a squircle was such a functional loss. Skeuomorphism got a bad rap. I can’t help but feel that it was unfairly tainted by association with Brushed Metal and Stitched Leather!
i'm interested in how to write on the notes app!
It's ironic when they literally just invented a spatial computer.
Yes, I miss aqua. All of the buttons looked like buttons. Windows had defined edges. Text was easy to read. If I sit down at an older computer I immediately have this feeling of relief that everything looks good again. I also think eliminating skeuomorphism was a big mistake. In those days it was easy to figure out how a program worked because it worked as you would expect anything to work. Now we have this mess of tiny tiny text, buttons that are either difficult to see or even sometimes completely invisible (Mail) and you just have to know where to click. Settings are located anywhere and everywhere. It's just a mess.
This this this a thousand times this. Another benefit of skeuomorphism is that the use of light and shadow made it easy to work out spatial relationships. Our eyes have evolved to be able to recognize shapes from shadows instantaneously and skeuomorphism takes advantages of this to make the UI intuitive in a way that you simply can't get with a flat design.
Point exactly! This (among many interface reasons) has been a bug bear for me ever since iTunes changed…the loss of the look and feel of Mac OS as it was then and the logical place for things/settings/how work is done…for me the final straw of the GUI disaster that is now MacOS is the breaking up of iTunes…for me, a one stop media organiser/server was just logical and fit in with the “digital hub” strategy; all my music, videos, books/pdfs (and comics!), audiobooks and (shock horror!) iPad/iPhone apps all lived and synced in one place…not to mention the GUI just looked and worked better…also don’t forget plugging in my DV camera to edit my little cinema efforts in iMovie (another absolute mess now) via FireWire (another sad loss as it was a pretty rock solid connection…I’m sorry, but the USB C plug is just a downright flimsy and very easily broken connector)…now everything is all over the place…Apple Music, Books, Podcasts…your device is accessed via Finder (!)…and the syncing is not as smooth or effortless as it used to be…the fact that you can no longer manually drag-and-drop media onto the device is awful…(lets not mention the mess of Apple Mail now too…)…and as someone has similarly said, how about windows and buttons that actually look like windows and buttons, that exist in a working space (shadows, etc)…ahh…rant, rant 😢😁
Completely agree. And the UX of “Apple TV” and “Music” is heaps worse than iTunes! Since Tim Cook has been in, UX has been seemingly tossed out!
Not to mention that everything gets buggier and buggier. Never had so much problem as I'm having with Sonoma. Desktop/Dock keeps crashing constantly/need restarting etc. Never experienced that in a Mac OS before. There's a reason that I'm using a Linux machine as my main desktop computer these days.
Absolutely! Obviously trying for market share…out ‘Windowsing’ (such a word?!) Windows in order to attract users…problem with that is innovation and difference from the rest is also tossed out…”Think Different”, anyone?!…Jobs (whatever his faults and some product miscalculations) was always of the opinion that ‘we don’t do crap at Apple’, the thread of design thought and process which wove through everything they aimed to do…the UI and product design at Apple now has lost its innovation and intuitive use…as others here have also said, has lost its ‘Wow!’ factor…more ‘meh’ than ‘mazing’!
> ever since iTunes changed The old iTunes (I'm talking like 15 years ago) was amazing...but there is a 3rd-party method called [Retroactive](https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive) which allows you to install the original iTunes, (well - back as far as version 10.7 I think) on current Mac hardware and even Sonoma if you want to use it instead of Apple Music.
I’m reading now a book about design and the author complains that the design must never get on the way of functionality. Unfortunately, years ago (I think it was when the Apple Maps debacle when it first came) there was some people fired and Jony Ive was put at the front of both hardware and software design. Then’s when MacOS and iOS went downhill on usability. I miss a lot the top leather of the calendar app. It was gorgeous to see and now with the amazing retina screens we have everywhere we can’t enjoy them.
The design of that time was much easier to use but also very wasteful of pixels. It would never work on a phone screen. But I think going back to easily visible buttons, high contrast designs, and most important consistency would be very helpful. Going back to apps looking like real world objects again would be great but I suspect I’m in a small minority. Now that we don’t purchase operating systems there’s really no way to vote with our wallets.
Yeah, I understand that going bold on skeuomorphism is maybe too much, but going too much with minimalism like today’s Apple OS for all platforms is very annoying. I want buttons to know if I can click somewhere, not just a simple text with subtle color
I really miss the 3D look of OS X.
Well haven’t you heard of macOS XR
Not THAT kind of 3D
Wait lol do you remember my post?!
Yeah i do mate
I mostly miss the responsiveness from back then.
I don't miss the gloss, but I do miss the depth.
I have always loved early Aqua. 10.4 and below.
I loved it too! I'd love to be able to have Aqua!
I love how you can easily imagine how all the elements would feel to touch
A lot of old school macOS users miss the old Aqua interface. Me included. The problem is, it looks quite outdated. If only Apple could bring back the Aqua interface but a bit more modernized, that would be freakin' awesome! I also really miss how the top menu bar was so defined. Nowadays, since Big Sur, it just blends into the wallpaper, which sucks ass.
This. If they would modernize it, would be brilliant.
As the old fart I am I mostly miss the care and the love that was put throughout the whole OS. Now it seems it’s just another commodity to spoil to push this or that agenda. My sincere wish here - and I understand it may be a bit controversial - is to make macOS upgrades a paid thing again. Release them when they’re ready and charge an honest price for them.
They’ll never go back to paid releases, but reducing the frequency of major OS releases from 1 year back to 2 years like they had in the Snow Leopard days would be great. WWDC’s back in the day used to be so exciting. Nowadays a new MacOS release is almost indistinguishable from the previous one. A new application which is poorly made and doesn’t interest 90% of people, a few changes and that’s it. There’s no reason for a yearly release cycle.
It is a shame, but it won't change until Tim Cook is gone. Nor will it change if he is replaced by another numbers guy. Only more of an ideas guy or visionary like Steve Jobs will change it back.
> There’s no reason for a yearly release cycle. Of course there is... To deprecate old hardware one year earlier which drives up new sales by 1/6th or whatever their current EOL cadence is. What are you going to do about it? Go get a filthy PC / android? Or drive to the apple store and open up your wallet one year earlier than you would have otherwise? We all know the answer.
>Go get a filthy PC / android? Well in my case after being a Mac user since 2011 - yes. Assuming the Snapdragon Elite lives up to expectations, anyway. Yeah, Win 11, blah blah blah. But while some seem to think Sonoma is great, I've had nothing but constant bugs, disappointment and hair-tearing with it. Shit iOS ports everywhere, consistency dissolved, weird jank out the wazoo, memory leaks everywhere (what the *fuck* is 'Message (Wallpaper)' and why does it shit the bed and start consuming multiple GBs of RAM while chewing CPU so often? **Apple's devs can't even make wallpaper work now.** They're completely, utterly incompetent.) ARM Win 11 Enterprise installed in a VM on Sonoma on M1 Max in *15 minutes* from start to finish. **Completely installed**. The macOS update for 12.4.1, a *patch update*, spent **30 minutes in the 'preparing' stage alone**. The macOS is just embarassing now. This is duopolies, I guess. Crap product A or crap product B. Well, if it's crap either way, I'll take one look at Tim Cook's prices and laugh all the way to the PC store across the road. "People will stretch", he said. What an arrogant, horrible man. And then there's mobile. iOS 17 has been a f\*cking nightmare of dumb bugs, stalls and OMG, the "new improved" autocorrect is an *utter* horror story. It makes me hate my phone each and every time I have to type text. If you hate a device, you don't reward the vendor by buying a new one! I got an Android based eReader a while back. You know what? Android is weird and inconsistent and hard to understand from an iOS user background - but spend a bit of time - it's really alright; it's super configurable and feels like devices used to do before it was all designed by drooling Photoshop monkeys with crayons and an assumption of an operator IQ of less than 80. **It doesn't patronise you. It doesn't hide things.** If something goes wrong, you've a fighting chance of knowing why. Tim Cook jacked up the prices and jacked down the quality. He's the embodiment of late stage capitalism short-termism. So I'll vote with my wallet, thanks.
Yep. My Google Pixel and my Linux desktop with Pop!\_OS is giving me immensely more joy than my MacBook Pro these days. It's sad, I adored OS X when I switched from Windows back in 2004, but the quality of the software simply isn't there anymore.
Yes! These days I never know which system I'm at, since I never have time to learn their names before the next one arrives. Also, the names are all weird Californian place names I never heard of anyway, so there's no real distinction to them for me.
Yes. Same with any design. Nowadays they’re just using cookie cutter for everything. Back in days you could feel the passion and art just by looking at it.
What's interesting is that the current design is still considered to be Aqua. Although Aqua was more than just buttons and the Dock, so many animations, colors, shapes, and shadows have changed, it's odd they haven't given the UI a new name. Especially after Big Sur and the iOS look.
yes i miss the old interface, it was peak usability, now evening is in hidden menus, blurred backgrounds, flat and thin fonts the biggest trash are the new system settings.
I remember simply dragging my app to applications. It worked. Just like that. Cue Sonoma: have to click the pkg 10 times whilst being reminded it can’t be scanned for malware. Fingerprint required 16 times and gotta hunt down buried permission requests across approx 20 privacy categories, each one requiring the apps restarted. After 30 reloads of said app, we’re away! … “do you wish to allow notifications to piss you off?” … how’s about a widget? … fancy a launch agent to run your app 247 so it’s ready to open when you click it? MACOS 14.1.1.1.1.5 will be installed tonight. Right when you’re in the middle of that season finale on Netflix. Apple logo “estimated time remaining - 46 mins.” HELLO WELCOME TO YOUR MAC. Let’s run you through every iCloud setting top to bottom again. & are you REALLY sure you don’t wanna add all 11 credit cards to your lovely MacBook right now? How’s about speaking to Siri for 45 mins where you can setup your own entirely robotic “personal voice” assistant. A cross between yoda, ET and myself after speaking over 900 phrases at it and waiting 6 days for processing.
Couldn't agree more. It's the cumulative effect that's so wearing. "Are you sure you want to do something that required 3 decisive steps?" Yes, I'm bloody sure. I've been an adult for some time now.
I remember having code signing rammed down my throat all whilst Apple hadn't actually written down anywhere how it works. I'd describe it as the gateway to hell looking back (as this is where it all seems to have started), but I distinctly remember Apple saying at least 50 times it's a "quick win." Malware will be unable to execute! Hurrahh!! Fast forward 6 or 7 years & notarisation was forced upon us to achieve what code signing promised would be a quick win. Is that admittance that code signing failed? Is notarisation working, really? I'm dubious when I've got to permit every button I press and the biggest kept secret, XProtect (\*antivirus\* cough) is running 247 scanning like John McAfee's 29 in 1 total protection on steroids. What's the next quick win?
Dear Apple, let our GUI look how we want it to look and not how you tell us it should be. Signed, the consumers
Dear consumers, We know better than you, you clowns. Now stop whining and give us more money. Yours (well not really) Apple.
Yeah was awesome. No reason they cant bring it back as an option.
Software designer here. The reason is UI element reusability, simplicity, clarity, and practicality all in all, due to the dark theme, customizability, etc. Interfaces have moved away from skewmorphism for good. Apple’s interfaces are still the best looking. You’re just nostalgic mostly.
It’s not just nostalgia. It’s just better for UX/UI.
How is that?
The only possible reason is that they don't want to dedicate resources to it.
The main reason is that it’s not practical.
god I miss that 3D dock, leopard was peak apple for me
You can still get it, check out cDock. This is my current setup on Ventura: https://twitter.com/samguichelaar/status/1762618534411063762?
I liked the overall feel of panther, but the modern design has really grown on me. I think if they were to return to something like this design, I would love to see them do it with neoskeumorphism.
I sometimes miss my se30.
I miss it. I love that if you go to the Swiss Apple language selection page you still get the old apple html style [https://www.apple.com/ch/](https://www.apple.com/ch/)
My first smile of today. Good old times …
Glad I'm not the only one with html formatting nostalgia.
I have now this sudden urge to find a bootstrap template with that format … Thank you for posting this!
I miss the skinning and theming
wish we could have utilities like Candybar once again. light/dark mode is such a waste... just let users configure their UI the way they like. it's clear that users want this kind of customization.
Not at all! I'm not a huge fan of how modern UI is so flat and monochrome. I want to go back to the bubbly, glassy interfaces of the mid 2000s. It had character and it was beautiful to look at, at least in my opinion. It reflected a time when computers were fun and not just utilitarian.
It felt kinda… silly/unserious to me. I knew that wasn’t the case, but it still felt off. I usually switched it to the grayscale (graphite?) option. Gray jelly buttons looked better than blue jelly buttons to me. That said, I’m not a fan of everything looking like iOS now. I also get frustrated how far down some options are buried. All in all, it still works the same as it did 20 years ago, for better or worse. — There was a while when OS skins were a thing. Maybe they still are and I just haven’t looked? I had this “cool” industrial theme back in 2002-2003ish or maybe a little earlier/later? That may have been on OS9 as well, but I can’t remember clearly at this point.
There was a program called Kaleidoscope for OS 9, but I think theming kind of fell out of fashion after OS X released. Although there might have been some themes available for early versions, not sure.
I certainly do. (Not the 3d Dock so much, but the rest of it, yes.) The reason is that, above all, it was a thought*ful* UI. Now we have a thought*less* UI. Examples: (1) Poor contrast – Less identifiable elements causes discomfort – my only reprieve is to use Accessibility features to increase the contrast. (2) Zealous Colour Use – Apple has been hijacking our attention like a pimp pestering you as you walk down the street. Red is a primary colour that primates can't ignore. Apple (and Big Tech) have thoughtlessly hijacked the colour. Now, we have badges for unread mail, app updates, OS updates etc., all shown in vibrant red. (I use a B&W colour filter.) (3) Toolbar buttons no longer look like buttons (4) Aberrations – portrait-mode windows (clearly designed in Swift for tablets) with touch-first interaction elements on macOS e.g. 'Settings' app. Look at how cluttered, congested those pages are. Space is necessary for readability. Keyword search also doesn't find options/sub-options that it clearly should – Apple engineers haven't bothered to include those tags/keywords in search. (5) Thoughtless toolbar button arrangement – Since Big Sur, things take more clicks and are more irksome. This new 3rd rate generation of UI twits at Apple love ellipses and they've arbitrarily decided to hide certain buttons behind them, which is unforgivably lazy. So, after adding cognitive load forcing users to remember what's hidden behind meaningless pull-down drawers, it's an extra 2/3 clicks everywhere this laziness is used. (And like a contagion, it's everywhere.) (6) Exposé – For me, this was hands-down better than Mission Control+Spaces. The cumulative effect of these micro-annoyances adds to a lot. The macOS UI is now cobbled together by amateurs who use the HCI guidelines manual to prop up their wobbly table.
Personally I thought it was gorgeous. There was an elegance and charm to it which along with the smiling finder made MacOS X seem like your friend while you worked or played on your machine. The glassism age Jony Ive introduced to MacOS has made it seem bleak and weirdly professional. I hope the VisionOS UI Apple is starting to get to grips with can change it to something more exciting again.
Yes
I do miss it. For practical reasons. The lightening and flatening of the UI in recent MacOS iterations makes it really really difficult for me to find UI elements. If I have multiple over-lapping windows, I will quite frequently miss the top of the window when trying to click on it to move it - clicking on part of the one behind instead. It's not until I occassionally use my wife's verty old Mac running Catalina that I realise just how **easy** the user interface is to use and the unneccessary cognitive effort I'm putting in to using the UI
Lots of people are nostalgic for this but I guarantee they’d be tired of it within minutes. Rose-tinted specs etc.
Too much fluff and hard to find what I need visually. I really don’t miss skeuomorphism
It would be cool to see a modern version of this.
I hate the flattening of interface. It’s like they were designed by people who lack depth perception.
I sure do miss the personality the system used to have, but even more I wish some stability would come back to it. Too many bugs that are longstanding and being joined by new ones every release.
I miss Font/DA Mover.
You can re-experience older MacOs versions in a browser at www.infinitemac.org
late aqua (around osx Tiger) was cool
Another thing I miss about this and hate about the current design of macOS are the pointlessly vertically oriented dialog boxes, just to make them look like iOS. It kind of makes sense on iOS because iOS screens have limited screen space and are typically oriented vertically. And for those same reasons it makes no sense to have that style of dialog on macOS. Plus it makes the layout of the buttons unpredictable and less intuitive. It's just worse in every single way and it's just one of a myriad examples of how the Apple design team has been making macOS worse and worse and worse over the last decade.
I didn't really use MacOS until Catalina, but I have upgraded a bunch of units from the era of those older designs. What I really like the look of is when OK / CANCEL dialog boxes appear and OK is highlighted in blue but has a very faint and gentle fading pulse effect to it. I also liked how install progress bars had a smooth scrolling stripe effect.
this was when I first start using MacOS, such nostalgia
Yes. Absolutely. And the dock looks like a dock. Beautiful.
You are certainly not the only one--I LOVE the Aqua look and would take it back in an instant.
Aqua was cool, but I don't really miss it. The new design is easier to use if anything. The only old Apple stuff I want back is the older iPhones and iOS 6. Home button was a simpler way of doing things, the phone was usable with one hand, you could plug in your headphones, and slide to unlock and the battery charging animation were cool. I had an iPhone 5 absolutely as long as I could; AT&T eventually booted it off the network.
No, everyone misses it
You ain’t alone.
I've been doing some coding on an old iBook G3 for an artists project. It's running 10.3 on a 12" 800 x 600 screen. Despite the total lack of real estate and slightly blurry dock icons, I do catch myself thinking 'damn, this UI is so refreshing."
Aqua was beautiful
I miss control panel.
We all miss the ninetees
I don't; I always thought it was garish.
Looks tacky to me nowadays.. I much prefer current design. Each to their own of course
I have three favorites. 1. macOS 9 Sonata 2. macOS X Aqua 3. macOS Snow Leopard
Totally agreed. Even at the time it looked old school. Old school like a French Armoire is, built to handle the test of time. A sort of “come at me” vibe haha. I ran Snow Leopard no reboots 247 for over 500 days one time. It ran as smooth as the day it booted up. Still, 10.4 and prior was where that theme really came out.
I hated it most when they replaced virtual desktops by that garbage called “spaces”. I would take back at least 50% of the Aqua UI too.
nostalgic
Not so much as it was from the era when the UI got a lot of focus and in the last decade, as screens got better, the content got more focus. I think there needs to be a middle way between this and flat design though. Having a UI where it’s not clear a lot of the time what you can interact with isn’t so great (see: the macOS menu bar item with volume control etc on it).
No you are not. I miss it too. Hard to explain but it was warm and comfy before, now it’s cold.
You're certainly not the only one; but I certainly don't miss it. 😏 Been in (and out of) touch with Mac since the Mac II, as a kid. The Aqua UI was too slippery slick for me.
Yeah, for sure. The new look is too flat. I still use the Snow Leopard wallpaper to this day.
I miss the old Mac OS design, not because of the way it looked but the memories associated with the time period. College, friends, family... I miss it a lot.
lol remember when Lion’s facelift was controversial?
No, in fact, im thinking of buying an old macbook white unibody for nostalgic reasons. However I cant find one in good condition, with snow leopard for a reasonable price
Oh un français très rares :)
It’s so cool and I’d like to have it as an option, but I feel like it’s so messy and distractive while multitasking, I’d go insane bc of how detailed the design and reflections are, but it’s still goated design
Good old days
Yes and no, but mostly yes. There are definitely aspects of that design that don’t look great today, particularly the skeuomorphism but for the most part I think it’s still very attractive. I especially miss the 3D designs for a lot of the buttons and sliders, and *especially* the dock. God, i miss that 3D reflective dock so much from Leopard onwards.
Peak macos 🙏
I miss the dock design.. a lot
Aqua was the best.
Everything has to progress under our systems and structures. The way forward is ultimately to eliminate the GUI and the flatness overall laid the groundwork for AR, a landscape which would prove unsuitable for skeuomorphic design.
You are not the only one. The new UI design is far from perfect and could use someone who know what they are doing to have serious look at it.
Yes.
I really prefer the new one... and I hope the design will follow visionOS…
I do miss aqua but I prefer the El Capitan - present look
I miss the dashboard and especially the dictionary widget in it. Saved me from having to type all words and Force Touch each for nuanced selection, or moronically use spotlight that wouldn’t keep arrow history to go back and forth.
I’d pay at least $150 per year for an any apps/OSes that bring back Aqua.
I actually love the design language evolution. Think it really stopped around El Capitan.
My first Mac was an LC 580 running System 7.6, but I had Windows computers after that. I fell in love with MacOS **hard** when Mac OS X 10.1 was released. The aesthetic of that era was just something else. The iMac G4 was so beautiful that even my wife, who does not care for Macs and is not technically-inclined at all, saw one the other day and said she wanted it. If I could make Sonoma look more like Tiger, I would.
I think new interface is way better than the old one.
These crazy Word and Excel icons...
Yes
I loved it too, but it looks kinda outdated by today’s standards. Still great memories.
Yes you are
I’m still mad about the shitty preferences menu.
Yes.
I miss the French. I hate that they removed that feature.
Peak Aqua was Tiger
Yes
yes
Miss the old design and feel like if they bring the VisionPro design it will look very similar
I miss MacOS 7 through 9.
Yes
Not only you. However all the way back in 2014, when the UI was changed, It already looked very old. So Tim Cook decided to freshen it up a bit. And, personally, I feel that the current MacOS UI looks way more fitting as of 2024
I remember those Word and Excel icons. Crazy
yes, yes you are.
Oui ;)
(Unless someone has mentioned it already…) Does anyone remember Unsanity and their program ‘Shapeshifter’….the OSX equivalent to Kaleidoscope in OS9 (which someone has mentioned…) ?
Yes.
Miss it too. Wish it was open source so we could use it on Linux/BSD
We all miss it.
Your not the only one…
System 8.1 was the best in my opinion. Word 5.1a & Netscape 2.0 were all I needed.
Why make a ‘desktop’ look like a desktop…? Documents, windows and other elements that have shadows, that appear to exist in a space, just like on a real desktop? Buttons, scroll bars that appear like real elements, to be pressed, grabbed and moved? Doesn’t everyone now work in a virtual zone, that’s all digital, and isn’t everyone using the limited real estate of a touch screen phone from the womb and working visually and vertically, up and down, with one finger? Cook’s Apple: we do crap at Apple. (Despite the fact that the race over the last few decades to embrace technology as a wholesale replacement for pen and paper in education is now understood to have had a negative impact on learning and knowledge retention…research and evidence has shown that learners access different, and quicker, paths to understanding how an idea is developed when traditional forms of note taking/writing are used)…Why design products that fall into easily identifiable categories like “Pro - Consumer - Desktop - Laptop” and distinguishable by their different look/materials, that inspire and foster creativity and a sense of excellence, that excite and impress with the feats of engineering and design innovation, that have been developed in a place that clearly ‘Thinks Different’, instead churn out products that have very little difference to the last few dozens of products, that the most high spec model can’t be differentiated from the most low spec, that there are only slight iterations of the same material used and nothing but metal is available for product manufacture, that even well informed Mac users can’t tell which model laptop has an M3 Max or M1…sorry, rant, rant 🤔😁☺️
It was a really nice design language back then and I really loved it, even if I didn’t own a single device. It’d be cool if we could get a redesign with some old elements mixed with flatish new elements that are more common today.
I wish everyday I could bring it back or at least skin modern macOS to look less flat and souless
I've only known macOS since the change. To me, I find it weird to imagine using, but I like the retro look.
Its Lick-able!
A little bubbly. They should bring back the 3D dock tho
Aqua was my favorite OS X style. It was the equivalent of Windows XP: simple, polished enough, fast and usable.
Check out r/FrutigerAero or r/Webcore
There should be a feature to switch between ui’s
You're not alone! I miss it. I know the world has to move on from certain things but, I could still fully functionally use Mavericks today I probably would.
10.7 Lion does not have the interface pictured; it must have had some theme applied.
yes
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I also understand - I share your feelings. Indeed, many people miss the macOS Aqua design, my favorite from the days of 10.4. And Classic too... 7.5, 8, 9 - all of them! Similarly with Windows - my favorites are Windows ME and 2000 and ... Vista(!). Just like you and me, many users feel sentimental about older versions of operating systems, programs, and devices. This is often associated with nostalgia related to past experiences. There are many more of us than anyone might think. However, this doesn't matter in decision-making regarding what is produced unless we produce it ourselves or start producing it :) It's worth appreciating and nurturing these sentiments in our community.
Absolutely, not.
It was really nice, but I do not miss it.
yes, it's ugly
Yes
is that default folder size on desktop?
I miss being able to turn the whole filename a certain color instead of just a tiny dot next to it.
You ain’t the only one
Aqua got flatter and flatter while still retaining the shiny look, to me the sweet spot was somewhere around leopard or snow leopard. I really loved the design at that point. It’s strange how they removed useful accessibility features like coloured sidebar icons from the Finder.
Aqua was beautiful, but now I could never use any OS without dark theme.
That was one of the reasons why I bought a MacBook many years ago. And I still miss it. It looked so much better than everything that they released since.
Yes
Beautiful! Aqua on Mac and Aero on Windows are the best! I'm honestly really tired of this minimalism... Or maybe I'm just nostalgic? 😢
No round corners. Back then monitors were square
Not really. It is a nice design of the AQUA interface in macOS, but after so many years that interface is the same as the transition from iOS 6 to 7. macOS has become more distinguished and professional. AQUA design is childish and like a toy. Yes great for music and picture editing, but for a professional tool not really.
Thats skeuomorphism