and what's funny linux is getting less flexible as the time goes. Almost every major distro is the same these days, many even down to package manager. RedHat OS? IBM TUX? It's getting there. At least you still can customize a lot of the things manually, but it has been feeling hostile to it for some years now. Back in the day I would just install a WM and made a few scripts, now I need to glue so much stuff to get most programs to run because they all expect a full DE dbus and systemd.
It really sounds like old Mac was like Windows in terms of being functional and practical, and not trying to be "fancy" and "beautiful" and appealing to what I might call "arts graduates," that old Mac, like Windows was an engineer's/technician's paradise. Made by engineers, for engineers.
@@justanothercomment416 With the ARM architecture it's no longer good for hosting x86 Windows/Linux VMs, and requires emulation for that now. I do literally use my Macbook as an SSH client (via Mosh for speed), with tmux on a remote LInux server and VIM for editing code. I can't stand how dev tools work on MacOS's confusing filesystem.
To prank someone I once took a screen shot of the mac desktop and used photoshop to clone stamp the trash can something like 100 times all over the place. Then I set that image as the wallpaper and used resedit to hide the actual trash can.
Are you a child? This is something wannabe nerds do to show off their "leet" skillz to their unsuspecting friends. But for real though this cheezy prank has been around for 20 years and you had the balls to rattle off the process like you were special or something lol.
It was the iPod that changed Apple forever. They were able to make a MP3 player that was extremely user restrictive, with a non replaceable battery and forcing iTunes software to use it, but it did very well for them, and that was the turning point for them. No longer giving users total freedom made sense to them anymore, instead providing a more restrictive curated experience was what they were finding success with.
I remember when my brother got an ipod for the first time and he tried to drag and drop a file onto the ipod and it wouldn't work. that's how I knew something was wrong
A friend brought an ipod over and wanted an mp3 i had, only way to add music is itunes, installed it, it renamed 20gb of mp3s from atrist-song name to random gibberish, i was so mad ive never used an apple product since
@@bobweiram6321 It was a marketing triumph no doubt, but it was possibly one of the worse MP3 players when it came to user friendliness. There were Mp3 players before Ipods that were much easier to to use, where you could just copy music to it without special software.
I started to work on a Mac as a designer in 1990, having transitioned from an Atari and PC clone. Initially I could not afford a Mac of my own so I got a magneto-optical drive and just copied the system folder over, this way I could use any Mac that was available around as mine. I lived through and experienced the '90, '00 and on. I miss those times, software now is not like it used to be.. Your presentation is excellent, the Spirit of Mac had been lost when a computer company became a consumer electronics company. That day when they downgraded labels on files and folders.
Apple started to shorten hardware support when they decided to transition Macs to Apple Silicon. We'll have to see if they lengthen the support again for M1 Macs.
Considering the big push for AI and the massive RAM requirements for it, don't count on it, at least with base model systems. I have a hard time believing macOS 5 years from now will run comfortably in 8 GB of RAM.
No they didn't. They have done a 5-8 year support window for devices for a long time. It depends on what the device is. Laptops usually get 7 years, phones 6 years, desktops, 10 years. M1 has been around for almost 4 years now. They are about 3 years out from being EOL.
Which is why it's so frustrating that the average Linux desktop environment, which used to be very distinct and dynamic, is now a wasteland of Mac OS clone themes
@@syloui They'd be more forgivable if the decorations and widgets looked anything like what they were striving to imitate. The results are more like any other WM theme but with circles around the decorations. QtCurve was one of the coolest things ever, though. So many user-created styles to pick and customize, and every regular QtWidgets program respected it. QtCurve actually still builds just fine, but HiDPI (which incidentally killed neat pixel art widgets) and Kirigami are not so friendly to it.
The original Mac used in the 1984 demo was not a production version. In order to make the demo work, they had to install additional RAM, which wasn't offered as an option until later.
For me it's the files/folders : the filesystem, the linux-mess, the multi-user-mess. Good old mac use to be : you drag and drop a system folder and you BOOT on it, bang. You drag an app and you use it bang. You trash an app and ALL is gone, bang. The mouse does better than a terminal, because bang. The editing of text is magnifiscent, simple, crisp. A computer user manages his files hierarchy, his folder tree. Apple destroyed all that when updated itunes, iphoto to NOT having a human friendly file hierarchy. Apple destroyed that when file search zapped from FILENAME to CONTENT. Today computer are not ours anymore. I don't feel ownership on all that current junk.
Deleting app data by trashing an app has never worked for me. I have data from apps I used on Tiger still in my libraries folder. I have never done a clean install since then, always restored from an Time Machine backup when setting up a new machine.
@@BleakVision Tiger has already both feet into the Darwin BSD unix ; in my comment I was telling a story of classic mac OS like 7.5.3 or 9.0.4 . For me Tiger can be considered as good too, but it's already much more complex than a classic mac os. In Tiger to delere an app if you don't have an uninstaller it need a lot of work, there are files everywhere. Also a clean install is hell since then you would have to find and re-install all the tools and apps you accumulated over the years, and always something will be missing.
Back in the pre-OSX days there was this utility named "Resedit" and you could edit various parts of any program on your Mac. I used it to edit the trash can icon and turned it into a dented trrash can.
And glorious sites like ResExcellence that cataloged how to do such things and warehoused/linked to custom GUI elements you could use. All of Our application splash screens were custom.
NeXTStep had an equivalency for this but unfortunately Apple dropped it. You used to be able to go in and modify nibs and do all kinds of things to customize NeXTStep. It was tons of fun! Also, with Display Postscript you could pull all kinds of magnificent shenanigans with aesthetic appeal. I hated the Mac as it kind of fell apart over the years. But I hate the current version of "NeXTStep" more coz altho' it was a better system in terms of extensibility+customization than the Mac, "Ample Computers" never tried to keep it fun to use.
You can still do this, except it's built into Finder since OS X. Right click on the app and open Get Info, drag an icon on top of the app icon. You can backup the original icon by clicking on the app icon and copy paste it anywhere. You're welcome.
You already had that WAY back when. The "new modern" and imho still the best and unbeaten paradigm was simply DOpus 5.5+ as desktop replacement. It... just worked. And it was as much "power user" as you were, because it WAS designed to be built-on ad nauseum. Very little past 3.1+ was put in that most "power users" weren't already using with some patch like MCP, NewMenu, etc... That's why many users didn't even bother with anything new, as 3.1 with all the good stuff was rock solid.
@@slaapliedje Looks interesting, sounds a lot like "It's 3.5, or how it should have been". Which makes (and made) a whole lot more sense than 4+. In a way, it seems to be a common trend. System was cool, needed minor fixes, got OSX/macOS. Workbench (3.1) needed some minor fixes and improvements, 3.5 was almost that, but then... 4 monstrosity. Windows 7 was the best windows ever, needed minor fixes and what not. Here, have 8, a clusterfsck, and now have 11 an even bigger one. Guess "it's the same but just better because we fixed all issues" doesn't sell as well as "ZOMG LOOK AT ALL THAT BLING!!!". ( on Linux side I'm a Slackware user so I'm obviously biased towards "don't fsck things that work well" ;) )
Almost every IT snob I know thinks I'm and idiot for saying that old Mac's in the early 90's had dominated very specific niches like music production, they just simply can't understand that running dual displays with a fully GUI music production software was only possible with a Mac. So much for knowing the proper history of IT. 1989 - Digidesign launches the first digital audio workstation system, Sound Tools, for the Apple Macintosh. The company refers to it as "the first tapeless recording studio"
It's not just that Macs were expensive, it's that they were too expensive for what you got. (And still get to this day.) The very first Mac cost the equivalent of almost $8,000. And what you got for that money was 128k of non-upgradeable RAM, a 1-bit monochrome display, one 400k floppy drive, no internal mass storage, and no provisions to add any. Hell, you didn't even get arrow keys on your keyboard because Jobs thought everyone would just use the mouse for everything. And that's a trend that has continued for the past 40 years. There were some truly awesome Mac models out there, but they always commanded equally awesome prices. The models that us mere mortals could afford were almost always hobbled by too little RAM, too small a hard drive, too slow a processor or some other artificial limitation meant to drive consumers towards the more expensive models.
One thing I think you missed is *A/UX, or Apple UNIX.* Apple had their own full-blown graphical UNIX port way before OS X. It looked just like the Macintosh System but it was a true UNIX system.
A/UX was fine I used it coz I had the employee discount at Ample Computers. In fact I used it to learn Unix. But I quickly graduated to NeXTStep in 1989, finding used systems quite affordable by that time. Very fun machine. A/UX _could_ have pulled ahead the soda-head CEO of Apple (Spindley?) kinda saw it but didn't have the vision. Steve had too much vision with NeXT... it frustrated him and it took a long time for the vision to work itself out, coz it was far ahead. I think by the time it re-shipped as MacOS, he was tired and didn't want to bother keeping it fun. Add to that a lot of the partners at NeXT included companies like Clorox, the CIA... y'know corporate guys. So I think he didn't wanna revisit what he definitely thought of as "amateur hour." He only wanted the big league. The current guys are the same and really into sameness. They will never have an independent thought in their lives (I know... Eddy Cue was my boss and altho' I liked him fine... imho people like him are at the core of the problem at Ample Computers).
They're very pretty sah clients and text editors, and a good tax write-off due to it's cost. Old school Macs had a purpose. The pros up to g4 had some use. These days, they're just shinies.
@@rnts08 Just shinies with best in class performance and power usage. But cool, continue the anti-Apple circlejerk. It gets you sick Lunduke viewer updoots
I really don't think MPW (workshop not workbench +5:45) was free, but part of a pricey developer account. It's shell wasn't csh, and very limited because it couldn't fork processes: commands were run like plugins to MPW's app process and could only run one at a time. As an example, the Make equivalent couldn't launch build commands itself, but instead had to output a build script, exit, and have the shell run the script.
YES! Hi - from a long time A500 and A3k user and software developer too. Good, to the point video! It's always hard to make others understand what they're missing when they don't even know a little about it. Nowadays Apple even goes so far as to fix window and dialog sizes and positions. It's awful. That's also why there are still active retro computer scenes. For example the C64 demo & games scene. It's exactly this freedom to do what *you* want with *your* system, right down to the bare metal!
The retro computing scenes these days really make the old machines even more enjoyable to use in some ways than they were back then. I have my old Apple IIe that I have owned since the early 90s and it now runs all my software off of a CF card instead of 5.25 floppies. I have a Mockingboard clone sound card and a 4MB RAM expansion. I can do all sorts of things on it with everything I've added on to it in the last 5 years that I never could before. It's the most stable, open-ended, and repairable machine that Apple ever produced or ever will produce.
Classic MacOS was really a marvel. It had huge limitations, but the stuff that it *could* do? Nothing else could the same way. I have so much fun just playing with my old macs running System 7-9
It was fun but unprofessional. I think NeXTStep could have been both (professional + fun) but currently is as much of a walking disaster as MacOS 9 was.
I want to address cost really quickly because I'm a budget oriented consumer and that's exactly what led me to buy a Mac mini when it was on sale for $499 with an M2. At best that would get me some mediocre i3 shitty plastic thin tower. I can honestly mount my Mac mini behind my monitor if I wanted to, let alone that the performance is superb. I use Windows 11 at work and my prior desktop had Windows 10. Both are fine, now obviously most games are not natively available for mac. That is why GeForce now exists, and I would argue that GeForce now is fantastic even if you have a PC
I really enjoy my M1 MacBook. It’s not perfect, but my battery lasts way longer than anything else and that’s my specific need being away from a charger all day. A lot of this is right on point tho. 😂😅
I think these "... sucks" videos are interesting because you have to know a lot about the system to write one. Or even appreciate one. It's like how people criticising hipsters tend to be at least hipster adjacent.
my G4s still work, and when something breaks i can replace it. let´s talk about the condition of your M1 in 23 years from today. yes i know i am comparing apples with squirrels here, but you get my point. :)
@@obineg5752 This is the issue that will eventually force me back to PCs. Though since both Windows and Linux suck way more than macOS I dunno what I'll run on them.
Yup, M1 Macbook was the hardware I've been waiting for all this time. Enough power, doesn't get hot and loud, lasts for a long time. I happen to have that specific need as well. I can work for 3 days in the wilds (I'll take a small powerbank with me and that's enough). When this becomes possible with Linux I'll switch back because I do not really like macos.. but the hardware is great.
No, until OS X Max did not have preemptive multitasking. They're pathetic cooperative "multitasking" was a joke. And it's only the ignorance and incompetence of your typical Mac user, that kept them from understanding the difference. Try to download a Stuffit file from a bulletin board to your System 7 Mac II using Ymodem-g, and then put your dialer into the background so you can edit a Microsoft Word file, and see what happens.
Every time I use a modern Mac I just get a feeling that this company just doesn't want to be in the PC business. But rather that they want to be in the ios device business. And that they only make the Mac today because some of their users demand a reasonable keyboard. There was a time when this wasn't true but it was the early intel days and Jobs was still alive. Just my .02
i wouldnt know where i would be when there was no resedit/resorcerer. it was a revelation when i discovered it with OS7. i dont use it much - but it is so important in certain situations. in 95% of the cases you can change menu items in programs, in 50% of the cases you can reskin programs totally. hacking resources helps you to adjust window and dialog sizes in programs which come with tiny, not resizable dialogs. there are literally hundreds of useful controlpanels and extensions, and when there is none for the change you wish to make, you can fix the rest by hacking the system suitcase or third party app. using MacOS9 since 25 years now and it gets better day by day. what really sucks is the hardware though. be prepared for a regular need to repair something, and learn how to come along with the CPU G4s can offer.
Amiga did that in the 80s... Also if you wanted to install a driver you just simply drag and dropped it into the right folder. You want your old video player or image editing software to support new codecs/formats? Again just simply drag and drop to the right folder on system disk and all software magically now support it.
I guess I’ve been watching Mr Lunduke long enough that I knew it wasn’t going to be an hour long diss track lol. But I do wonder if Mac will go back to longer OS support as the last of the Intel Macs are phased out.
I’d almost forgotten many of the delightful features you covered and I still occasionally use on my Mac classic when it’s faltering CRT allows. It was truly interesting and there seems to be plenty of open market space for a new computer/software/smartphone vendor that does actually innovate and do things differently.
System 7 was my first exposure to systems and networking just when that era was coming to a close to be replaced by Windows and later MacOS so I was fortunate to have had a glimpse into that old world - and this video is a great retrospective on what I missed in terms of the nitty gritty - good work!
Those 'hideous' windows shown when discussing Appearance Manager were courtesy of a utility called Kaleidoscope, by Aaron Rose. A fun little bit of code to play with.
When apple made the switch to the NeXT operating system, dubbed "Mac OSX" , Apple introduced the Carbon C API for programming. This API was great, in fact it was similar to Win32 in many ways. When apple deprecated the Carbon API and forced everyone to use Cocoa and objective C, is the day Apple died for me.
I didn't use or develop for Macs at the time but I remember Apple deprecated Carbon by saying it wouldn't be ported to 64 bit at a show. This was an issue for Adobe who had been told it would. Of course Apple's typically zealous users blamed Adobe for not having Photoshop ready sooner, even though it was clearly Apple's fault. Which reminds me of another thing I find irritating about Apple. Windows can still run Win32 applications built for NT4.0 or Win95. Macs frequently can't run apps built a few years ago because Apple deprecated some API or swapped CPU architecture again. E.g. we've had 68K to PPC to Intel 32 bit to Intel 64 bit to ARM 64 bit. You only get compatibility will one step back, not two and only for while.
That hotswapable battery thing is really good, My Panasonic Toughbook and Fujitsu Lifebook both have hotswappable batteries. But they are both from the 2000s
Finder and the general UI for MacOS sucks now and is so essoteric for no good reason now too. Do people really think the UI is good, or do they just get used to it? I'd unironically get more use from a modern Mac system just to install a Apple Silicon compatible Linux distro on it. You gotta screw up big time to make GNOME seem less obtuse and braindead than Apple's UI decisions. The only real benefit to running MacOS nowadays is their video editing and music production tools. You should do a video about Windows sucking next. The fact they removed the vertical taskbar and killed the only great feature Windows 11 had going for it (Windows Subsystem for Android) has completely soured my opinion on it.
Finder is trash. You can't even properly manage files with it (like moving and deleting files without extra steps). You are right, when GNOME can do it better than a multi-trillion dollar company...
@@comradeuro4255 I mean, yeah, GNOME has it's issues, but at least to me, you can at least use extensions to make it less painful to use. Compared to Windows where they will block system updates if you install software like StartAllBack to get a functional start menu back.
the question is what "good" means for you. go compare the windows 10 explorer in dark theme mode with my MacOS9 with window monkey, default folder, open wide, drag-any-window and various other extensions and handle 50,000 files manually. on windows you cant even find where to click-drag the window because of its completely silly design and organisation. if you want to work fast on an 2024 OS you need to use scripting.
@@obineg5752 one thing that bugs me is the lack of good defaults on a system. Dolphin, for example, seems to search contents of files or metadata by default... I just want to search for the file name! It took me longer than it should to figure that out, and where to change it. Then you have Numlock... why is that off by default? Who uses the keypad for other stuff? Only time I ever have is for dungeon crawlers for old computers... Good defaults is usually what Gnome is somewhat good for. I really dislike MacOS's defaults. I am with Lunduke, you used to be able to theme MacOS X, and make it look awesome... it was one of the few reasons I wanted to play with it. But shortly after I got one to use for work, they took that away... Flavours is dead now because they changed the API it was using and the author gave up. Even getting other filesystem support is problematic. Last time I tried to install the driver for ext3/4, it would just crash the system... pay for a filesystem driver, and causes a kernel crash... just crappy experience overall if you want to actually USE your computer...
Instead of switching to OSX I switched over to PC. Apple really made me hate them with their cutting all ties every few years. 68000, PPC, Intel, now Apple Silicon and so on. And then those incopatibilities from one OS updatr to the other. That 'Oh my, did you hit the update button? Congratulations now Pro Tools won't run any more'. I can run ancient software on my windows without any problems. It's true, today anything is more like a mac than any device from apple.
And when a PC user in the Daw-world has a problem, their solution is to propose 'get a mac'.... I then remind them of the above, and of course like a cult, they go hunting for blood...
I remember that just before the announcement of the cheese grater Mac Pro and the Apple Silicon Mac Studio, there were mock ups of a modernized Johnathan desktop where each slice of the desktop was essentially a Mac Mini that connected together by stacking them together. The concept is insanely cool, but that kind of device has always been hard to build out and support.
I bought a white MacBook in 2008, loved that machine. You could still easily change hard drive, ram and battery. I also bought Logic Studio with it. It's still usable today for music production. But in only got two updates of Mac OS X which must be some kind of record.
Good sir! I'm a Mac user in far east Asia, and I picked up my first MacBook in 2019. When I was at middle school, I had a chance to play around with Mac Plus and the Mac Classic (or even LC I ). I totally agree with your points. As an international user, I 'loved' WorldScript because it allowed me to type my mother tongue. After that, I had a little experience with PowerMacs. (Yeah, just like you said, I also had the chance to play around with the Power Mac that could accept the DOS card. ) To me, it was amazing because the machine itself had the best of both worlds. After a while, for some reason, I kinda switched to Windows, and like I said in the beginning, I got myself a MacBook Pro 2012 13inch in 2019. Well, this machine still runs like a champ for me. I mean, I could swap the battery (if I could find one...say maybe in Ali Express?) but I did upgrade the RAM to 16 gigs and I also use a Samsung Evo 2TB hard drive. Sure, the 2012 machine is kinda heavy, but it's upgradable (glad it doesn't have the tork(?) screws) , it has a DVD player and well..legacy ports like FireWire and 3.0 USB etc. The thing is that if I really wanted to, I could use OCLP (OpenCore Legacy Patcher?) to use the latest system software. However, I try to stick to the last 'official' version which is Catalina because I don't really like the 'work around' method where some features might not work...and so on. (I'm not sure, but when I ran Monterey in my 'technically not supported' MacBook, I couldn't run VMware. I mean..it says there's a pipe line error..(whatever that is...). Anyways, to me, VMWare is important because I do use a lot of Windows 7 and Windows 10. (heck, I even use Windows XP when I have to.). VMware is also good for running Linux distros. Surprisingly, the old 'Ivy Bridge' dual core processor is *still* very much 'snappy' for me, and I am still using my MacBook Pro 2012 13inch right up to today. It's a solid machine. However, I do get your point. But I just wanted to add that although 2012 MacBook is very old, it did have some upgradability. Yes~ you are right..after that, they started to make thinner MacBooks so they made it impossible to upgrade RAM; only the SSD (using some kind of adapter) could be upgraded. I mean, right now, with the M series, there is really nothing you could do. SoC
Apple has become what it sought to better than - a monolithic corporate lacking innovation and abusing its market position. Got my first mac in 1995 and it was glorious. Own an M3 but it doesn’t feel like it has the same spirit or rebelliousness.
As a long-time Mac user, this was a good reminder of many of the great things that classic Macs had going for them that simply aren't around in the same form anymore. While modern Macs certainly have their strengths, some of the old features (HyperCard, AppleScript, seamless multimonitor support) are sorely missed.
You have an interesting background kinda intense like mine... I was an early software evangelist with a Macintosh developer ID of MMCS (for MicroMac Computer Systems) and later I taught over 1,000 students in 70+ cities in a year and a half, but it was the good old days of OS 9 and G3s and the 1st fruit color iMacs. What a rush... now I'm retired and running a hobby blog called ComputerHobbyShop just for non-profit fun. Thanks Bryan for the video, you got a new sub here. (Want me to free promote you on my blog?)
Might look for your blog. Did you dable with computers in the 70s? I'm thinking we might be around the same sge. I'm returing soon. I stmrtaeted in the 70s with home addempled systems as a hobby, then later the C64, which I helped develop software for. Did a lot of 6510 machine code stuff, then later in the 80s, the Amiga and 68000 machine code. Got into PCs in the 90s and then C++ Windows development professionally, and still doing it.
Seeing this just makes me so sad.. I grew up in the 90s and System 7 was synonymous with school, particularly taking a break in the homeroom, and then highschool I did distance learning and used the iBook G4: That was my first introduction to the internet and all the potential it held.. It was a magical experience.. Since OSX Mac had slowly but surely on the road to using its way. Now Mac is a mockery of itself and it's past philosophy, just like the Hippy Boomer generation it represented.
Love it! A trip down memory lane. ResEdit is cool. I modified just about everything on Finder when I was a kid. Classic games too: Dark Castle, Crystal Quest, Captain Magneto etc.
To be fair, modern macs ain't that expensive, if you only look at the base models. And if you compare "apples to apples" - if you compare macbooks with other notebooks with a great screen, speakers, battery life and build quality. But if you want to upgrade 512gb ssd to 1tb it costs $200. And an upgrade from 8gb ram to 16gb also costs $200. This is what stupid expensive, this is what infuriating me.
Looking at the Extensions and Control Panels slide, I guess a "Classic Macintosh System Software sucks" (and in fact it did, it did so hard that Apple desperately tried to come up with a successor to stay competitive, and OS/2, BeOS were considered, eventually it was NeXTStep then - MS had Window 2000 at that time, full preemptive Multitasking and unprecedented stability - and then there had been Linux for almost a decade) is appropriate. What I see in abundance is wasted screen real estate. We don't do GUIs this way anymore and that is a good thing.
Man, I would kill to have something like Extensions and AppleScript on a Linux system. Just getting something like Automator from Mac OS X, even though it sucks more, would be amazing
Linux really needs NSBundle and NeXT PDO. Static bindings on apps are a problem and Linus+friends don't seem to be able to decide on a course of action. There are also possibilities also with AI and PDO... tho' it's early. Musk was just saying that so far AI has been useless in engineering at SpaceX and I know part of the problem with that is related to the ossification of network and DO protocols. e.g. we have websites (why?) but we do not have internet channels that we can bind to. It not 'crazy-stupid' but these guys these supposed luminaries are just lazy ne'er-do-wells they have spent the last 25 years not pushing the tech forward - now we will pay.
some of my colleagues say you are sucha linux/unix specialist you should be our mac specialist, and im like do i need it i have my hands already full with these system center automatisations :D
For me, macs really died off after 2012. I did try their later models, even the latest, but yep, they sucked. So o moved to windows, since there's some kind of linux support now, so i get almost the best of two worlds for my work and entertainment. Three things i really miss a lot are the applescript, finder with a system-wide search, even inside files and the touchpad gestures. Windows laptops got great touchpads at last, but the multi-touch gestures are still subpar, so i have to resort to using a mouse
Can confirm that the 'jet engine' Mac lived up to its name ... Had one when I was a PhD student and ran Linux on it; during boot, the fans ran at 100% until I logged in ... which was fine -- except for those times when my officemate was in and I was not.
i used a powermac g4 mdd until 2012 or so , it was excellent . i write this on my modern pc using a classic mac keyboard from my mac cube . old mac hardware is excellent and continues working to this day !
Great video I didn't know a lot of this stuff. As a video editor and a Linux lover I feel forced to use Windows and Mac in between the two at least lately I prefer Mac. Yes you can use Linux professionally kind of when it comes to video editing and graphic design DaVinci resolve sure does work to a point. But when you're doing projects day in and day out it really just isn't feasible in a realistic way. Anyway great video I don't know what else to say got a new subscriber with me.
I was forced to use Linux for a year as a cost cutting measure, and I hated it. Worst OS I'd encoundered in a decade. And unstable to boot. Eventually, the company must have realised the mess and switched us back back to Windows 7. That was some time near the end of support for Windows 7. It was some version of Ubuntu if memory serves me. I have tried unstalling Linux on some older hardware just for curiosity's sake, but it never worked.
To be honest, a lot of this is just nonsense. The original Macintoshes weren’t easily upgradable and they were ridiculously underpowered. And the old Mac OS was a buggy mess. I mean System 7.5 was great at least for that era and what it was made for. But Copland was never released and OS8 and 9 was a dead end. Many features were stripped and they had to patch it to get a somewhat workable system. OS X was the way to go.
Yep. I mean it wasn’t bad for the time but dealing with extension conflicts, having not infrequent crashes, miserable battery life, etc.. current Mac OS isn’t perfect and I don’t like the direction everything has taken but damn I have an estimated 3 hrs 47 minutes remaining with 47% battery on an M1 Pro. I can’t remember the last time it crashed and I can charge it from any USB-C PD charger. So who cares if I can swap batteries. I can buy any brand of battery bank and use that. Game porting toolkit is making it easy to run recent games with reasonable performance. Does it suck that RAM and disk are soldered? Yeah. I’d bump them up on my machine right now. But to say 80s/90s Mac OS was massively better than current Mac OS? Only call me if they actually start replacing Mac OS with iPad OS. For now I’ll build my homebrew packages and do work on a platform that actually sleeps when I close the lid and actually wakes up when I open it (every time!).
@@jamessnyder3807 battery life? in OS7 times? :) macs were used in theaters, installations, the military and the police, and musicians would use them with up to 15 PCI cards attached. in my little homestudio i have 4 monitors and close to 50 HDs. "laptops" were a fancy gimmick in these days, people who do actual work with computers had racks full of stuff from the floor to the bottom.
Still have mad love for the classic Mac OS 😍 To this day I still develope and use the classic platform to this day and will continue for many years to come 🤩
First off, I agree with most of your points. Just a few things: Applescript and Shortcuts still exist, and are just as awesome as they ever were, and more integrated than ever, especially with cross-platform support on iOS/iPadOS. My phone starts my car automatically after my alarm goes off in the morning if the temperature outside is under 50F. I just wrote an applescript to globally disable/enable the microphone with a toggle hotkey yesterday and it works perfectly. iOS 18 will allow you to do an appearance manager-esque thing by allowing you to change the colors of app icons on the home page - yes that's iOS, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it on macOS soon. I think that your nostalgia for a time where tech was exciting is clouding your view of what exists now. Tech is more mature and significantly more boring and EVERYTHING tech sucks because the number of factors you have to consider when building it is insane (especially so with all the security controls everyone implemented). It's not just macOS, it's everything everywhere all the time.
I think one thing missed. It was cool they experimented with a lot of stuff; those products never really saw the light of day. This caused Apple to hemorrhage money leading to needing to be bailed out by Microsoft. Also a lot of points, like the internet dependency, are the exact same as Linux and Windows.
The argument about it being expensive comes down to two points: 1. Apple II CS was less than half the price and could do, effectively, the same things. 2. Commodore Amiga had a sidecar that could emulate a Mac (assuming you did a few under the board things) that, again, was still cheaper than a Mac. The only reason for Apple to focus on Macintosh back in the day was because it was Steve Jobs' design and he pushed the company that way.
The themes you showed were from the beta Copeland builds that devs got. Apple stripped out those themes for os8 and os9, so unless you used a third party tool, those themes were not in retail builds.
meme=joke. just say "jokes" if it makes you feel better. During OSX days I priced a mac and equivalent PC hardware where there really wasn't much difference. Tried that again later against multiple models and realized I found an exception when I first did it. Pricing no longer dropped as machines aged by years. My experience with Mac in school (before osx) ruined my impression because it was very slow, buggy, and awkward to work with, but that was all a side effect of their attempt to have a locked down school interface using 3rd party software. Why teach computers to students when you replaced the basics like finder with that buggy garbage? As an apple certified tech, diagnostics and repairability of the hardware is a reason I strongly recommend against them. As you stated, lack of upgrades, unnecessary use of proprietary versions of nonproprietary parts, simple repairs are difficult to impossible for an average user, apple servicers aren't allowed to provide more advanced repairs...they make them throwaway devices in every way possible with known defects shipping for years and continue to degrade all these points further.
I share that sentiment. While I'm not a fan of macOS X and later versions, I have fond memories of macOS 9 and earlier iterations. In the early 2000s, I worked at a magazine publisher where Macs were prevalent for desktop publishing. Those machines consistently impressed me with their capabilities. As a programmer, I primarily used Windows (likely 95 or 98, though I can't recall the exact version) which, at the time, felt less refined in comparison. Interestingly, the situation has now reversed. The idea that Windows has become a superior alternative to Mac is a thought-provoking perspective that resonates with me.
The wackiness and flexibility is what brought me to linux,
Never knew the mac was so flexible in the past
So few remember/understand just how amazing it used to be.
@@FlameForgedSoul it was too busy crashing constantly for the rest of us
and what's funny linux is getting less flexible as the time goes. Almost every major distro is the same these days, many even down to package manager. RedHat OS? IBM TUX? It's getting there. At least you still can customize a lot of the things manually, but it has been feeling hostile to it for some years now. Back in the day I would just install a WM and made a few scripts, now I need to glue so much stuff to get most programs to run because they all expect a full DE dbus and systemd.
@@redgekKDE Plasma > Windows > MacOS
It really sounds like old Mac was like Windows in terms of being functional and practical, and not trying to be "fancy" and "beautiful" and appealing to what I might call "arts graduates," that old Mac, like Windows was an engineer's/technician's paradise. Made by engineers, for engineers.
macOS is the best SSH client money can buy.
And VM host. So you can do actual work in VMs.
It is a SSH client money can buy
correction: MacOS is the best netbook money can buy
@@justanothercomment416 With the ARM architecture it's no longer good for hosting x86 Windows/Linux VMs, and requires emulation for that now.
I do literally use my Macbook as an SSH client (via Mosh for speed), with tmux on a remote LInux server and VIM for editing code. I can't stand how dev tools work on MacOS's confusing filesystem.
The most expensive ssh client money can buy 😄😁
Felt burnt when Apple transitioned to OS X and most of the software I had purchased no longer worked.
To prank someone I once took a screen shot of the mac desktop and used photoshop to clone stamp the trash can something like 100 times all over the place. Then I set that image as the wallpaper and used resedit to hide the actual trash can.
How do you feel knowing you have a date with Satan in the future? 😂
Had similar done to me... at the same time they switched all my keyboard keys around.... many 4 letter combinations
Are you a child? This is something wannabe nerds do to show off their "leet" skillz to their unsuspecting friends. But for real though this cheezy prank has been around for 20 years and you had the balls to rattle off the process like you were special or something lol.
@@jamestillman5247 At the time, yeah I was a very young adult with the mentality of a child. This was 25 years ago.
@@emperorarasaka damned
It was the iPod that changed Apple forever. They were able to make a MP3 player that was extremely user restrictive, with a non replaceable battery and forcing iTunes software to use it, but it did very well for them, and that was the turning point for them. No longer giving users total freedom made sense to them anymore, instead providing a more restrictive curated experience was what they were finding success with.
I remember when my brother got an ipod for the first time and he tried to drag and drop a file onto the ipod and it wouldn't work. that's how I knew something was wrong
@@goatmeal1880 I tried the same thing. That's when I knew that this device was not for me
A friend brought an ipod over and wanted an mp3 i had, only way to add music is itunes, installed it, it renamed 20gb of mp3s from atrist-song name to random gibberish, i was so mad ive never used an apple product since
You all have the iPod to thank for music! It was on life support thanks to Napsters, but the iPod was so good, it was no longer worth stealing music.
@@bobweiram6321 It was a marketing triumph no doubt, but it was possibly one of the worse MP3 players when it came to user friendliness. There were Mp3 players before Ipods that were much easier to to use, where you could just copy music to it without special software.
I started to work on a Mac as a designer in 1990, having transitioned from an Atari and PC clone. Initially I could not afford a Mac of my own so I got a magneto-optical drive and just copied the system folder over, this way I could use any Mac that was available around as mine. I lived through and experienced the '90, '00 and on. I miss those times, software now is not like it used to be..
Your presentation is excellent, the Spirit of Mac had been lost when a computer company became a consumer electronics company. That day when they downgraded labels on files and folders.
Apple started to shorten hardware support when they decided to transition Macs to Apple Silicon. We'll have to see if they lengthen the support again for M1 Macs.
Considering the big push for AI and the massive RAM requirements for it, don't count on it, at least with base model systems. I have a hard time believing macOS 5 years from now will run comfortably in 8 GB of RAM.
@@saurondp Maybe pushing 5 years when they stop releasing 8gb model. Many pc users know it's better to have more ram just in case.
Oh let's see. They love to cut support for Gen 1 products early. See Core Duo Macs, iPhone and iPad for reference.
No they didn't. They have done a 5-8 year support window for devices for a long time. It depends on what the device is. Laptops usually get 7 years, phones 6 years, desktops, 10 years. M1 has been around for almost 4 years now. They are about 3 years out from being EOL.
PowerPC G3 and G4 support was dropped with Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.5. respectively. The last G3 iBooks and G4 iMacs had a short life.
The current macOS GUI is super-pretentious. I think the pretentiousness really took off from when they released iOS 7.
It's more like infantilising ... It looks like it was designed for small children.
Which is why it's so frustrating that the average Linux desktop environment, which used to be very distinct and dynamic, is now a wasteland of Mac OS clone themes
@syloui 100%, GNOME since 3 basically
@@halfsourlizard9319It’s completely form over function, basically the designers jerking themselves off, for lack of a less vulgar phrase
@@syloui They'd be more forgivable if the decorations and widgets looked anything like what they were striving to imitate. The results are more like any other WM theme but with circles around the decorations.
QtCurve was one of the coolest things ever, though. So many user-created styles to pick and customize, and every regular QtWidgets program respected it. QtCurve actually still builds just fine, but HiDPI (which incidentally killed neat pixel art widgets) and Kirigami are not so friendly to it.
The original Mac used in the 1984 demo was not a production version. In order to make the demo work, they had to install additional RAM, which wasn't offered as an option until later.
For me it's the files/folders : the filesystem, the linux-mess, the multi-user-mess. Good old mac use to be : you drag and drop a system folder and you BOOT on it, bang. You drag an app and you use it bang. You trash an app and ALL is gone, bang. The mouse does better than a terminal, because bang. The editing of text is magnifiscent, simple, crisp. A computer user manages his files hierarchy, his folder tree. Apple destroyed all that when updated itunes, iphoto to NOT having a human friendly file hierarchy. Apple destroyed that when file search zapped from FILENAME to CONTENT. Today computer are not ours anymore. I don't feel ownership on all that current junk.
Deleting app data by trashing an app has never worked for me. I have data from apps I used on Tiger still in my libraries folder. I have never done a clean install since then, always restored from an Time Machine backup when setting up a new machine.
@@BleakVision Tiger has already both feet into the Darwin BSD unix ; in my comment I was telling a story of classic mac OS like 7.5.3 or 9.0.4 . For me Tiger can be considered as good too, but it's already much more complex than a classic mac os. In Tiger to delere an app if you don't have an uninstaller it need a lot of work, there are files everywhere. Also a clean install is hell since then you would have to find and re-install all the tools and apps you accumulated over the years, and always something will be missing.
Back in the pre-OSX days there was this utility named "Resedit" and you could edit various parts of any program on your Mac. I used it to edit the trash can icon and turned it into a dented trrash can.
It's fun to open the System file and see what weird little icons and text strings are in there. Same with applications
And glorious sites like ResExcellence that cataloged how to do such things and warehoused/linked to custom GUI elements you could use. All of Our application splash screens were custom.
NeXTStep had an equivalency for this but unfortunately Apple dropped it. You used to be able to go in and modify nibs and do all kinds of things to customize NeXTStep. It was tons of fun! Also, with Display Postscript you could pull all kinds of magnificent shenanigans with aesthetic appeal. I hated the Mac as it kind of fell apart over the years. But I hate the current version of "NeXTStep" more coz altho' it was a better system in terms of extensibility+customization than the Mac, "Ample Computers" never tried to keep it fun to use.
You can still do this, except it's built into Finder since OS X. Right click on the app and open Get Info, drag an icon on top of the app icon. You can backup the original icon by clicking on the app icon and copy paste it anywhere. You're welcome.
I still miss the old classic Mac Os, I don’t miss the unstableness of it, but I miss it 😢
It was awful how it crashed all the time and you had to use MacsBug to try to figure out which extension or application was _maybe_ the instigator!
So... its time to bring back a new modern version of AmigaOS?
Yes please. AmigaOS4 is actually pretty sweet... if you can get it to be stable...
You already had that WAY back when. The "new modern" and imho still the best and unbeaten paradigm was simply DOpus 5.5+ as desktop replacement. It... just worked. And it was as much "power user" as you were, because it WAS designed to be built-on ad nauseum. Very little past 3.1+ was put in that most "power users" weren't already using with some patch like MCP, NewMenu, etc... That's why many users didn't even bother with anything new, as 3.1 with all the good stuff was rock solid.
@ErazerPT Yup! And 3.2+ has some nice things that are now built in so you don't have to install a lot of those old things anymore.
@@slaapliedje Looks interesting, sounds a lot like "It's 3.5, or how it should have been". Which makes (and made) a whole lot more sense than 4+.
In a way, it seems to be a common trend. System was cool, needed minor fixes, got OSX/macOS. Workbench (3.1) needed some minor fixes and improvements, 3.5 was almost that, but then... 4 monstrosity. Windows 7 was the best windows ever, needed minor fixes and what not. Here, have 8, a clusterfsck, and now have 11 an even bigger one.
Guess "it's the same but just better because we fixed all issues" doesn't sell as well as "ZOMG LOOK AT ALL THAT BLING!!!".
( on Linux side I'm a Slackware user so I'm obviously biased towards "don't fsck things that work well" ;) )
@@ErazerPT
Agree.
Except I am a DOpus 4.16 man.
Almost every IT snob I know thinks I'm and idiot for saying that old Mac's in the early 90's had dominated very specific niches like music production, they just simply can't understand that running dual displays with a fully GUI music production software was only possible with a Mac. So much for knowing the proper history of IT.
1989 - Digidesign launches the first digital audio workstation system, Sound Tools, for the Apple Macintosh. The company refers to it as "the first tapeless recording studio"
That's weird. The only things I knew about Macs were that people used it for music and imaging.
@@ax14pz107 Literally what was described is something most music producers do today. Macs destroy the PC platform in this space.
Macs dominate Creative Apps, Gaming apps not so much unfortunately.
The Mac transformed entire industries, including printing, video, music, and graphic design.
They must be young IT snobs, because I remember the days in the 90s when Macs were a thing in music. And I am not even an Apple guy...
i'm a windows fanboy, but i need mac and linux to be around just to keep windows competitive
It's not just that Macs were expensive, it's that they were too expensive for what you got. (And still get to this day.) The very first Mac cost the equivalent of almost $8,000. And what you got for that money was 128k of non-upgradeable RAM, a 1-bit monochrome display, one 400k floppy drive, no internal mass storage, and no provisions to add any. Hell, you didn't even get arrow keys on your keyboard because Jobs thought everyone would just use the mouse for everything. And that's a trend that has continued for the past 40 years. There were some truly awesome Mac models out there, but they always commanded equally awesome prices. The models that us mere mortals could afford were almost always hobbled by too little RAM, too small a hard drive, too slow a processor or some other artificial limitation meant to drive consumers towards the more expensive models.
One thing I think you missed is *A/UX, or Apple UNIX.* Apple had their own full-blown graphical UNIX port way before OS X. It looked just like the Macintosh System but it was a true UNIX system.
With MAC OSX 10.2, you could run the UI over A/UX, though I remember it being extremely slow compared to Mac OSX.
I really want to play with A/UX some day.
A/UX was fine I used it coz I had the employee discount at Ample Computers. In fact I used it to learn Unix. But I quickly graduated to NeXTStep in 1989, finding used systems quite affordable by that time. Very fun machine. A/UX _could_ have pulled ahead the soda-head CEO of Apple (Spindley?) kinda saw it but didn't have the vision.
Steve had too much vision with NeXT... it frustrated him and it took a long time for the vision to work itself out, coz it was far ahead.
I think by the time it re-shipped as MacOS, he was tired and didn't want to bother keeping it fun. Add to that a lot of the partners at NeXT included companies like Clorox, the CIA... y'know corporate guys. So I think he didn't wanna revisit what he definitely thought of as "amateur hour." He only wanted the big league. The current guys are the same and really into sameness. They will never have an independent thought in their lives (I know... Eddy Cue was my boss and altho' I liked him fine... imho people like him are at the core of the problem at Ample Computers).
there was also mklinux, created by Apple (linux ported to Mach 3.0, via a zillion ifdefs).
Linux Foundation uses Macs, so that figures.
They're very pretty sah clients and text editors, and a good tax write-off due to it's cost. Old school Macs had a purpose. The pros up to g4 had some use. These days, they're just shinies.
@@rnts08 Just shinies with best in class performance and power usage. But cool, continue the anti-Apple circlejerk. It gets you sick Lunduke viewer updoots
@@spht9ng
Id love to have a mac-level case in a Linux laptop too
They don't even support Linux. The Linux Foundation does not figure.
@@spht9ng If the context that was given in their explanation is true then to them they would be just "shinies" lol.
They've been going downhill for a long time. As someone who was there at the beginning, it's very sad to watch.
I like to think that someone born around 1998 or later learned that Mac is short for Macintosh from this video lol
I really don't think MPW (workshop not workbench +5:45) was free, but part of a pricey developer account. It's shell wasn't csh, and very limited because it couldn't fork processes: commands were run like plugins to MPW's app process and could only run one at a time. As an example, the Make equivalent couldn't launch build commands itself, but instead had to output a build script, exit, and have the shell run the script.
MPW was “Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop” - Not “Workbench”
YES! Hi - from a long time A500 and A3k user and software developer too. Good, to the point video! It's always hard to make others understand what they're missing when they don't even know a little about it. Nowadays Apple even goes so far as to fix window and dialog sizes and positions. It's awful. That's also why there are still active retro computer scenes. For example the C64 demo & games scene. It's exactly this freedom to do what *you* want with *your* system, right down to the bare metal!
The retro computing scenes these days really make the old machines even more enjoyable to use in some ways than they were back then. I have my old Apple IIe that I have owned since the early 90s and it now runs all my software off of a CF card instead of 5.25 floppies. I have a Mockingboard clone sound card and a 4MB RAM expansion. I can do all sorts of things on it with everything I've added on to it in the last 5 years that I never could before. It's the most stable, open-ended, and repairable machine that Apple ever produced or ever will produce.
Classic MacOS was really a marvel. It had huge limitations, but the stuff that it *could* do? Nothing else could the same way. I have so much fun just playing with my old macs running System 7-9
It was fun but unprofessional. I think NeXTStep could have been both (professional + fun) but currently is as much of a walking disaster as MacOS 9 was.
I want to address cost really quickly because I'm a budget oriented consumer and that's exactly what led me to buy a Mac mini when it was on sale for $499 with an M2.
At best that would get me some mediocre i3 shitty plastic thin tower. I can honestly mount my Mac mini behind my monitor if I wanted to, let alone that the performance is superb.
I use Windows 11 at work and my prior desktop had Windows 10. Both are fine, now obviously most games are not natively available for mac. That is why GeForce now exists, and I would argue that GeForce now is fantastic even if you have a PC
I really enjoy my M1 MacBook. It’s not perfect, but my battery lasts way longer than anything else and that’s my specific need being away from a charger all day.
A lot of this is right on point tho. 😂😅
And then the flex cable fails!
I think these "... sucks" videos are interesting because you have to know a lot about the system to write one. Or even appreciate one. It's like how people criticising hipsters tend to be at least hipster adjacent.
my G4s still work, and when something breaks i can replace it. let´s talk about the condition of your M1 in 23 years from today.
yes i know i am comparing apples with squirrels here, but you get my point. :)
@@obineg5752 This is the issue that will eventually force me back to PCs. Though since both Windows and Linux suck way more than macOS I dunno what I'll run on them.
Yup, M1 Macbook was the hardware I've been waiting for all this time. Enough power, doesn't get hot and loud, lasts for a long time. I happen to have that specific need as well. I can work for 3 days in the wilds (I'll take a small powerbank with me and that's enough). When this becomes possible with Linux I'll switch back because I do not really like macos.. but the hardware is great.
No, until OS X Max did not have preemptive multitasking. They're pathetic cooperative "multitasking" was a joke.
And it's only the ignorance and incompetence of your typical Mac user, that kept them from understanding the difference.
Try to download a Stuffit file from a bulletin board to your System 7 Mac II using Ymodem-g, and then put your dialer into the background so you can edit a Microsoft Word file, and see what happens.
Exactly.
Every time I use a modern Mac I just get a feeling that this company just doesn't want to be in the PC business. But rather that they want to be in the ios device business. And that they only make the Mac today because some of their users demand a reasonable keyboard. There was a time when this wasn't true but it was the early intel days and Jobs was still alive. Just my .02
i wouldnt know where i would be when there was no resedit/resorcerer. it was a revelation when i discovered it with OS7.
i dont use it much - but it is so important in certain situations.
in 95% of the cases you can change menu items in programs, in 50% of the cases you can reskin programs totally. hacking resources helps you to adjust window and dialog sizes in programs which come with tiny, not resizable dialogs.
there are literally hundreds of useful controlpanels and extensions, and when there is none for the change you wish to make, you can fix the rest by hacking the system suitcase or third party app.
using MacOS9 since 25 years now and it gets better day by day. what really sucks is the hardware though. be prepared for a regular need to repair something, and learn how to come along with the CPU G4s can offer.
Drag the system folder to a new drive and it will boot? That is truly impressive
Amiga did that in the 80s... Also if you wanted to install a driver you just simply drag and dropped it into the right folder.
You want your old video player or image editing software to support new codecs/formats? Again just simply drag and drop to the right folder on system disk and all software magically now support it.
the mac did that in the 80s before the amiga existed. @@bloxyman22
Yup. That kind of thing made me fall in love with Macs long after Mac OS 9 was gone. It was so cool
@@bloxyman22 Mac OS did it in the 80s too. Way before Amiga. Amiga has plenty of things to claim "first" on but that's not one of them
@@MaxOakland Interesting. I honestly did not know and is one of those features I miss the most.
Are there no project at all like the old Mac OS? (and/or the hardware) If there is, please tell me!
Finally someone with some common sense!
using macOS is a pain in the ass for those who've only used windows and linux
I guess I’ve been watching Mr Lunduke long enough that I knew it wasn’t going to be an hour long diss track lol. But I do wonder if Mac will go back to longer OS support as the last of the Intel Macs are phased out.
I’d almost forgotten many of the delightful features you covered and I still occasionally use on my Mac classic when it’s faltering CRT allows. It was truly interesting and there seems to be plenty of open market space for a new computer/software/smartphone vendor that does actually innovate and do things differently.
System 7 was my first exposure to systems and networking just when that era was coming to a close to be replaced by Windows and later MacOS so I was fortunate to have had a glimpse into that old world - and this video is a great retrospective on what I missed in terms of the nitty gritty - good work!
Did you ever use NeXTSTEP OS back in the day?
Those 'hideous' windows shown when discussing Appearance Manager were courtesy of a utility called Kaleidoscope, by Aaron Rose. A fun little bit of code to play with.
Hot Dog Linux is available.
Kaleidoscope was awesome, but my father would bug out that it was "different"
When apple made the switch to the NeXT operating system, dubbed "Mac OSX" , Apple introduced the Carbon C API for programming. This API was great, in fact it was similar to Win32 in many ways. When apple deprecated the Carbon API and forced everyone to use Cocoa and objective C, is the day Apple died for me.
and even worse when they force everyone to embrace swift instead of objective-c
I didn't use or develop for Macs at the time but I remember Apple deprecated Carbon by saying it wouldn't be ported to 64 bit at a show. This was an issue for Adobe who had been told it would. Of course Apple's typically zealous users blamed Adobe for not having Photoshop ready sooner, even though it was clearly Apple's fault. Which reminds me of another thing I find irritating about Apple. Windows can still run Win32 applications built for NT4.0 or Win95. Macs frequently can't run apps built a few years ago because Apple deprecated some API or swapped CPU architecture again. E.g. we've had 68K to PPC to Intel 32 bit to Intel 64 bit to ARM 64 bit. You only get compatibility will one step back, not two and only for while.
That hotswapable battery thing is really good, My Panasonic Toughbook and Fujitsu Lifebook both have hotswappable batteries. But they are both from the 2000s
Finder and the general UI for MacOS sucks now and is so essoteric for no good reason now too. Do people really think the UI is good, or do they just get used to it? I'd unironically get more use from a modern Mac system just to install a Apple Silicon compatible Linux distro on it. You gotta screw up big time to make GNOME seem less obtuse and braindead than Apple's UI decisions.
The only real benefit to running MacOS nowadays is their video editing and music production tools.
You should do a video about Windows sucking next. The fact they removed the vertical taskbar and killed the only great feature Windows 11 had going for it (Windows Subsystem for Android) has completely soured my opinion on it.
Finder is trash. You can't even properly manage files with it (like moving and deleting files without extra steps). You are right, when GNOME can do it better than a multi-trillion dollar company...
“do people really think the UI is good, or they just get used to it?” could say the same thing to you about GNOME
@@comradeuro4255 I mean, yeah, GNOME has it's issues, but at least to me, you can at least use extensions to make it less painful to use. Compared to Windows where they will block system updates if you install software like StartAllBack to get a functional start menu back.
the question is what "good" means for you.
go compare the windows 10 explorer in dark theme mode with my MacOS9 with window monkey, default folder, open wide, drag-any-window and various other extensions and handle 50,000 files manually.
on windows you cant even find where to click-drag the window because of its completely silly design and organisation. if you want to work fast on an 2024 OS you need to use scripting.
@@obineg5752 one thing that bugs me is the lack of good defaults on a system. Dolphin, for example, seems to search contents of files or metadata by default... I just want to search for the file name! It took me longer than it should to figure that out, and where to change it. Then you have Numlock... why is that off by default? Who uses the keypad for other stuff? Only time I ever have is for dungeon crawlers for old computers...
Good defaults is usually what Gnome is somewhat good for. I really dislike MacOS's defaults. I am with Lunduke, you used to be able to theme MacOS X, and make it look awesome... it was one of the few reasons I wanted to play with it. But shortly after I got one to use for work, they took that away... Flavours is dead now because they changed the API it was using and the author gave up.
Even getting other filesystem support is problematic. Last time I tried to install the driver for ext3/4, it would just crash the system... pay for a filesystem driver, and causes a kernel crash... just crappy experience overall if you want to actually USE your computer...
Instead of switching to OSX I switched over to PC. Apple really made me hate them with their cutting all ties every few years. 68000, PPC, Intel, now Apple Silicon and so on.
And then those incopatibilities from one OS updatr to the other. That 'Oh my, did you hit the update button? Congratulations now Pro Tools won't run any more'.
I can run ancient software on my windows without any problems.
It's true, today anything is more like a mac than any device from apple.
I'm not a Pro Tools guru, but I know if I use it, the Update button is forbidden.
And when a PC user in the Daw-world has a problem, their solution is to propose 'get a mac'.... I then remind them of the above, and of course like a cult, they go hunting for blood...
MacOS is NextSTEP but turned into consumer focused bloatware.
Sad.
Can't wait to see all the wonderful things about Mac in Lunduke OS
I remember that just before the announcement of the cheese grater Mac Pro and the Apple Silicon Mac Studio, there were mock ups of a modernized Johnathan desktop where each slice of the desktop was essentially a Mac Mini that connected together by stacking them together. The concept is insanely cool, but that kind of device has always been hard to build out and support.
Applescript still existed later on it was just renamed to Automator and was more powerful too
AppleScript does still exist too, not just as Automator.
So, Mac OS was kinda like Gentoo, but everything is opt-in by default and get rid of everything you don't need.
Where have you been all my life, subscribed, hit the bed, liked, wish i could do it a million times more!!
Damn the last bit. I miss the old Macintosh days.
I bought a white MacBook in 2008, loved that machine. You could still easily change hard drive, ram and battery. I also bought Logic Studio with it. It's still usable today for music production. But in only got two updates of Mac OS X which must be some kind of record.
THANK YOU GOD I SO NEEDED THIS VIDEO ATM :D
Great Video Bryan!
Good sir! I'm a Mac user in far east Asia, and I picked up my first MacBook in 2019. When I was at middle school, I had a chance to play around with Mac Plus and the Mac Classic (or even LC I ). I totally agree with your points. As an international user, I 'loved' WorldScript because it allowed me to type my mother tongue. After that, I had a little experience with PowerMacs. (Yeah, just like you said, I also had the chance to play around with the Power Mac that could accept the DOS card. ) To me, it was amazing because the machine itself had the best of both worlds. After a while, for some reason, I kinda switched to Windows, and like I said in the beginning, I got myself a MacBook Pro 2012 13inch in 2019. Well, this machine still runs like a champ for me. I mean, I could swap the battery (if I could find one...say maybe in Ali Express?) but I did upgrade the RAM to 16 gigs and I also use a Samsung Evo 2TB hard drive. Sure, the 2012 machine is kinda heavy, but it's upgradable (glad it doesn't have the tork(?) screws) , it has a DVD player and well..legacy ports like FireWire and 3.0 USB etc. The thing is that if I really wanted to, I could use OCLP (OpenCore Legacy Patcher?) to use the latest system software. However, I try to stick to the last 'official' version which is Catalina because I don't really like the 'work around' method where some features might not work...and so on. (I'm not sure, but when I ran Monterey in my 'technically not supported' MacBook, I couldn't run VMware. I mean..it says there's a pipe line error..(whatever that is...). Anyways, to me, VMWare is important because I do use a lot of Windows 7 and Windows 10. (heck, I even use Windows XP when I have to.). VMware is also good for running Linux distros. Surprisingly, the old 'Ivy Bridge' dual core processor is *still* very much 'snappy' for me, and I am still using my MacBook Pro 2012 13inch right up to today. It's a solid machine. However, I do get your point. But I just wanted to add that although 2012 MacBook is very old, it did have some upgradability. Yes~ you are right..after that, they started to make thinner MacBooks so they made it impossible to upgrade RAM; only the SSD (using some kind of adapter) could be upgraded. I mean, right now, with the M series, there is really nothing you could do. SoC
You're painting a picture that NOT EVERY CHANGE - makes things BETTER.
Apple has become what it sought to better than - a monolithic corporate lacking innovation and abusing its market position.
Got my first mac in 1995 and it was glorious. Own an M3 but it doesn’t feel like it has the same spirit or rebelliousness.
Why did you buy M3?
Ripped this with yt-dlp, thanks
Same as everything now - looks cool but works badly and hard to upgrade and repair.
As a long-time Mac user, this was a good reminder of many of the great things that classic Macs had going for them that simply aren't around in the same form anymore. While modern Macs certainly have their strengths, some of the old features (HyperCard, AppleScript, seamless multimonitor support) are sorely missed.
I'm just waiting for the Return of the Mac
i put 5 on it ;)
Looking forward to the ultimate Lunduke diatribe. "Everything Sucks" :)
You have an interesting background kinda intense like mine... I was an early software evangelist with a Macintosh developer ID of MMCS (for MicroMac Computer Systems) and later I taught over 1,000 students in 70+ cities in a year and a half, but it was the good old days of OS 9 and G3s and the 1st fruit color iMacs. What a rush... now I'm retired and running a hobby blog called ComputerHobbyShop just for non-profit fun. Thanks Bryan for the video, you got a new sub here. (Want me to free promote you on my blog?)
Might look for your blog. Did you dable with computers in the 70s? I'm thinking we might be around the same sge. I'm returing soon. I stmrtaeted in the 70s with home addempled systems as a hobby, then later the C64, which I helped develop software for. Did a lot of 6510 machine code stuff, then later in the 80s, the Amiga and 68000 machine code. Got into PCs in the 90s and then C++ Windows development professionally, and still doing it.
@@toby9999 yes, 70s, 80s and 90s was the era when Macs, Amigas and Commodore were coolest and PCs were boring
Seeing this just makes me so sad..
I grew up in the 90s and System 7 was synonymous with school, particularly taking a break in the homeroom, and then highschool I did distance learning and used the iBook G4: That was my first introduction to the internet and all the potential it held.. It was a magical experience.. Since OSX Mac had slowly but surely on the road to using its way. Now Mac is a mockery of itself and it's past philosophy, just like the Hippy Boomer generation it represented.
Such nostalgia
Love it! A trip down memory lane. ResEdit is cool. I modified just about everything on Finder when I was a kid. Classic games too: Dark Castle, Crystal Quest, Captain Magneto etc.
His description of the old Mac laptop reminds me of my old Lenovo T61. The best laptop ever to exist.
To be fair, modern macs ain't that expensive, if you only look at the base models. And if you compare "apples to apples" - if you compare macbooks with other notebooks with a great screen, speakers, battery life and build quality. But if you want to upgrade 512gb ssd to 1tb it costs $200. And an upgrade from 8gb ram to 16gb also costs $200. This is what stupid expensive, this is what infuriating me.
To be fair, employers bare some blame from locking it down so much.
Such as?
Huh?
7:50 it’s just like my own project’s versioning. A pipeline can be on version 5 while the framework is version 1 (2 if counting from 0).
Looking at the Extensions and Control Panels slide, I guess a "Classic Macintosh System Software sucks" (and in fact it did, it did so hard that Apple desperately tried to come up with a successor to stay competitive, and OS/2, BeOS were considered, eventually it was NeXTStep then - MS had Window 2000 at that time, full preemptive Multitasking and unprecedented stability - and then there had been Linux for almost a decade) is appropriate. What I see in abundance is wasted screen real estate. We don't do GUIs this way anymore and that is a good thing.
Man, I would kill to have something like Extensions and AppleScript on a Linux system. Just getting something like Automator from Mac OS X, even though it sucks more, would be amazing
Now I'm curious, what makes Automator better than scripts on Linux?
Linux really needs NSBundle and NeXT PDO. Static bindings on apps are a problem and Linus+friends don't seem to be able to decide on a course of action. There are also possibilities also with AI and PDO... tho' it's early. Musk was just saying that so far AI has been useless in engineering at SpaceX and I know part of the problem with that is related to the ossification of network and DO protocols. e.g. we have websites (why?) but we do not have internet channels that we can bind to. It not 'crazy-stupid' but these guys these supposed luminaries are just lazy ne'er-do-wells they have spent the last 25 years not pushing the tech forward - now we will pay.
@@digitalspecter Graphical automation mostly.
You can say the same about BMW. It happens when engineers are no longer in charge of company direction in favor of management and shareholders.
some of my colleagues say you are sucha linux/unix specialist you should be our mac specialist, and im like do i need it i have my hands already full with these system center automatisations :D
For me, macs really died off after 2012. I did try their later models, even the latest, but yep, they sucked. So o moved to windows, since there's some kind of linux support now, so i get almost the best of two worlds for my work and entertainment. Three things i really miss a lot are the applescript, finder with a system-wide search, even inside files and the touchpad gestures. Windows laptops got great touchpads at last, but the multi-touch gestures are still subpar, so i have to resort to using a mouse
AutoHotkey is great. I've only scratched the surface of AppleScript, but you might find some helpful stuff in AHK if that's an itch you still have.
did apple loose its psychedelic & spiritual roots? they lost the magic.
I never thought I'd ever hear someone mutter the words "terminate and stay resident" ever again!
Can confirm that the 'jet engine' Mac lived up to its name ... Had one when I was a PhD student and ran Linux on it; during boot, the fans ran at 100% until I logged in ... which was fine -- except for those times when my officemate was in and I was not.
I had completely forgotten making copies of PC's as the tech kid in school by dragging that system folder around.
i used a powermac g4 mdd until 2012 or so , it was excellent . i write this on my modern pc using a classic mac keyboard from my mac cube . old mac hardware is excellent and continues working to this day !
Please make a video about Serenum OS / computer.
1 guy, wrote his own compiler, language, OS, and all the tools.
And right now is working on wifi.
Might be too based even for Bryan and that's saying a lot
Great video I didn't know a lot of this stuff. As a video editor and a Linux lover I feel forced to use Windows and Mac in between the two at least lately I prefer Mac. Yes you can use Linux professionally kind of when it comes to video editing and graphic design DaVinci resolve sure does work to a point. But when you're doing projects day in and day out it really just isn't feasible in a realistic way. Anyway great video I don't know what else to say got a new subscriber with me.
I was forced to use Linux for a year as a cost cutting measure, and I hated it. Worst OS I'd encoundered in a decade. And unstable to boot. Eventually, the company must have realised the mess and switched us back back to Windows 7. That was some time near the end of support for Windows 7. It was some version of Ubuntu if memory serves me. I have tried unstalling Linux on some older hardware just for curiosity's sake, but it never worked.
@@toby9999 skill issue my friend
How did Macs compare to Atari St?
I never used an Atari, but I can say the Amiga was better than the first Macs. I've used both.
@@toby9999 were amigas or ataris ever used in corporate networking?
The fact that this was editied on iMovie got me rolling on the floor
I thought I was the only weirdo that miss the old systems metaphors, the old look and feel. Even windows 3.11 was great!
8:13 what do you mean fairly recently? Like 2001 when Macs Shipped with OS X Standard 🤣
@17:15, I believe the first Mac was just a motherboard with no case.
You're thinking of the Apple 1.
To be honest, a lot of this is just nonsense. The original Macintoshes weren’t easily upgradable and they were ridiculously underpowered. And the old Mac OS was a buggy mess. I mean System 7.5 was great at least for that era and what it was made for. But Copland was never released and OS8 and 9 was a dead end. Many features were stripped and they had to patch it to get a somewhat workable system. OS X was the way to go.
yeah this dude has some rose tinted glasses for sure
Yep. I mean it wasn’t bad for the time but dealing with extension conflicts, having not infrequent crashes, miserable battery life, etc.. current Mac OS isn’t perfect and I don’t like the direction everything has taken but damn I have an estimated 3 hrs 47 minutes remaining with 47% battery on an M1 Pro. I can’t remember the last time it crashed and I can charge it from any USB-C PD charger. So who cares if I can swap batteries. I can buy any brand of battery bank and use that. Game porting toolkit is making it easy to run recent games with reasonable performance. Does it suck that RAM and disk are soldered? Yeah. I’d bump them up on my machine right now. But to say 80s/90s Mac OS was massively better than current Mac OS? Only call me if they actually start replacing Mac OS with iPad OS. For now I’ll build my homebrew packages and do work on a platform that actually sleeps when I close the lid and actually wakes up when I open it (every time!).
@@jamessnyder3807
battery life? in OS7 times? :)
macs were used in theaters, installations, the military and the police, and musicians would use them with up to 15 PCI cards attached.
in my little homestudio i have 4 monitors and close to 50 HDs.
"laptops" were a fancy gimmick in these days, people who do actual work with computers had racks full of stuff from the floor to the bottom.
@@obineg5752 Laptops back then were used for business work, but then most folk at that time used IBM ThinkPads for that sort of thing.
Still have mad love for the classic Mac OS 😍 To this day I still develope and use the classic platform to this day and will continue for many years to come 🤩
First off, I agree with most of your points. Just a few things:
Applescript and Shortcuts still exist, and are just as awesome as they ever were, and more integrated than ever, especially with cross-platform support on iOS/iPadOS. My phone starts my car automatically after my alarm goes off in the morning if the temperature outside is under 50F. I just wrote an applescript to globally disable/enable the microphone with a toggle hotkey yesterday and it works perfectly. iOS 18 will allow you to do an appearance manager-esque thing by allowing you to change the colors of app icons on the home page - yes that's iOS, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it on macOS soon.
I think that your nostalgia for a time where tech was exciting is clouding your view of what exists now. Tech is more mature and significantly more boring and EVERYTHING tech sucks because the number of factors you have to consider when building it is insane (especially so with all the security controls everyone implemented). It's not just macOS, it's everything everywhere all the time.
I think one thing missed. It was cool they experimented with a lot of stuff; those products never really saw the light of day. This caused Apple to hemorrhage money leading to needing to be bailed out by Microsoft.
Also a lot of points, like the internet dependency, are the exact same as Linux and Windows.
awesome walk down memory lane for me - spot on and I was lucky to have experienced most of this first hand
some of the skins (Appearance manager section) belongs to the Copland project, which never reached the shelves TBH
What are the alternatives? Windows 11, that most people don't want to install, Linux, X11 or Wayland? I think most developers hate Xcode, right?
Win11 is ok to install, people dont want to be obligated to buy new hardware to install it :(
The argument about it being expensive comes down to two points:
1. Apple II CS was less than half the price and could do, effectively, the same things.
2. Commodore Amiga had a sidecar that could emulate a Mac (assuming you did a few under the board things) that, again, was still cheaper than a Mac.
The only reason for Apple to focus on Macintosh back in the day was because it was Steve Jobs' design and he pushed the company that way.
Dragging copy of system folder onto ram disk... Ah the memories
The themes you showed were from the beta Copeland builds that devs got. Apple stripped out those themes for os8
and os9, so unless you used a third party tool, those themes were not in retail builds.
Well a lot of hardcore mac users from back then did use Kaleidoscope to install those themes and many others. I certainly did.
I wasn’t sure if this would be “macOS” specific but I’m pleased to hear stories back to “Mac OS” (minus the X!)
bravo! Great video!
meme=joke. just say "jokes" if it makes you feel better.
During OSX days I priced a mac and equivalent PC hardware where there really wasn't much difference. Tried that again later against multiple models and realized I found an exception when I first did it. Pricing no longer dropped as machines aged by years.
My experience with Mac in school (before osx) ruined my impression because it was very slow, buggy, and awkward to work with, but that was all a side effect of their attempt to have a locked down school interface using 3rd party software. Why teach computers to students when you replaced the basics like finder with that buggy garbage?
As an apple certified tech, diagnostics and repairability of the hardware is a reason I strongly recommend against them. As you stated, lack of upgrades, unnecessary use of proprietary versions of nonproprietary parts, simple repairs are difficult to impossible for an average user, apple servicers aren't allowed to provide more advanced repairs...they make them throwaway devices in every way possible with known defects shipping for years and continue to degrade all these points further.
Curious where you sit on Framework's modular devices tbh
I share that sentiment. While I'm not a fan of macOS X and later versions, I have fond memories of macOS 9 and earlier iterations. In the early 2000s, I worked at a magazine publisher where Macs were prevalent for desktop publishing. Those machines consistently impressed me with their capabilities. As a programmer, I primarily used Windows (likely 95 or 98, though I can't recall the exact version) which, at the time, felt less refined in comparison. Interestingly, the situation has now reversed. The idea that Windows has become a superior alternative to Mac is a thought-provoking perspective that resonates with me.