The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.
"I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of 'In the beginning was the command line' is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely."
https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-...
But people still dredge this quarter century old apocrypha up and use it to pat themselves on the back for being Linux users. "I use a Hole Hawg! I drive a tank! I'm not like those other fellows because I'm a real hacker!"
I also primarily use Windows and don't have a dog in the fight you mentioned. I might actually dislike Linux more than OSX, though it has been quite a while since I've seriously used the one-button OS.
Meanwhile Windows has become those cars with two 27" screen as dashboard, which has bad user experience and full of advertisements.
It's a close analogy, because the Comet was actually the next model of Edsel. They just changed the branding. Same with Vista to 7.
Linux and the UNIX derivates are not even cousins. Not related. Not even the same species. They just both look like crabs a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation.
It's kind of ironic that you're using a post from 20 years ago to invalidate an essay from 25 years ago, about an OS that's been substantially dumbed down in the last 10 years.
Bad corporate blood will tell.
Setting aside the "more BSD/Mach than Linux", OS X pressed a lot of the same buttons that BeOS did: a GUI system that let you drop to a Unix CLI (in Be's case, Posix rather than Unix, if we're going to be persnickety), but whose GUI was sufficiently complete that users rarely, if ever, had to use the CLI to get things done. Folks who love the CLI (hi, 99% of HN!) find that attitude baffling and shocking, I'm sure, but a lot of people really don't love noodling with text-based UIs. I have friends who've used the Mac for decades -- and I don't mean just use it for email and web browsing, but use it for serious work that generates the bulk of their income (art, desktop publishing, graphic design, music, A/V editing, etc.) -- who almost never open the Terminal app.
> though it has been quite a while since I've seriously used the one-button OS
Given that OS X has supported multi-button mice since 2001, I certainly believe that. :)
So when Apple started making workstations, I got one. I've been a satisfied customer ever since.
I have no idea whatsoever what dumbing down you're referring to. The way I use macOS has barely changed in the last ten years. In fact, that's a major part of the appeal.
macOS as an operating system has been "completed" for about 7 years. From that point, almost all additions to it have been either focused on interoperation with the iPhone (good), or porting of entire iPhone features directly to Mac (usually very bad).
Another point of view is that macOS is great, but all ideas that make it great come from 20 years ago, and have died at the company since then. If Apple were to build a desktop OS today, there's no way they would make it the best Unix-like system of all time.
And since MacOS 8 before that...
This also applies to Windows, by the way (except it’s more like 20-30 years ago).
I assume if anyone associated with Microsoft compared Vista to anything other than an abject failure, it's because they are - at best - broken or defective people who were involved in the creation of Vista, and therefore not objective and not to be trusted in any way.
Dodge Viper? WTF?
It’s a zsh shell with BSD utils. 99% of my shell setup/tools on Linux just work on macOS. I can easily install the gnu utils if I want 99.9% similarity.
I very happily jump between macOS and Linux, and while the desktop experience is always potentially the best on Linux (IMO nothing compares to hyprland), in practice macOS feels like the most polished Linux distro in existence.
Do people just see, like, some iOS feature and freak out? This viewpoint always seems so reactionary. Whereas in reality, the macOS of the past that you’re pining for is still right there. Hop on a Snow Leopard machine and a Ventura machine and you’ll see that there are far, far more similarities than differences.
Mainly slowly hiding buttons and options and menus that used to be easily accessible, now require holding function or re-enabling in settings or using terminal to bring them back.
At the time I was an embedded developer at Microsoft and had been a Windows programmer in the mid 90s. It was pretty clear that there was some dunning Krueger going on here. Neal knew enough about tech to be dangerous, but not really enough to be talking with authority
If you wish Apple supported computers longer, fine. I’d personally disagree because I’ve had wonderful luck with them supporting my old hardware until said hardware was so old that it was time to replace it anyway, but would respect your different opinion. Don’t exaggerate it to make a point though.
Threre is an implicit supperiority in the text which is just as cringey now as it was at the time, but i think its still a good analogy about different preferences and relationships different people have to their computers.
I'm not sure about the analogy though, they might have been thinking of later Viper versions where the complaints would be more about cost, gas mileage, or general impracticality for daily use.
Underneath it was just Windows, but the interface ruined it
I'm typing this on a 12 year old MacBook Pro running Debian whose hardware perfectly fine, but hasn't been supported by Apple in years.
FWIW, Debian supports it fine, though NVidia recently dropped support for the GPU in their Linux drivers.
I'm going to miss it when it dies, too. Plastic Lenovos just can't compare.
However and unfortunately I feel your last statement is spot tf on! Our only hope I guess is that they have incurred enough tech debt to be unable to enshitify themselves.
For those not in the know apple is an og hacker company, their first product was literally a blue box! Why this matters and gp is correct and why linux peeps gets in a tivvy and what stephenson was getting at with the batmobile analogy is that traditionally if hackers built something consumer facing they couldn’t help themselves but to bake in the easter eggs.
The trouble with the original MacOS was that the underlying OS was a cram job to fit into 128Kb, plus a ROM. It didn't even have a CPU dispatcher, let alone memory protection. So it scaled up badly. That was supposed to be fixed in MacOS 8, "Copeland", which actually made it out to some developers. But Copeland was killed so that Apple could hire Steve Jobs, for which Apple had to bail out the Next failure.
Of course, this belief probably had no downsides or negative consequences, other than hurting my brain, which they probably did not regard as a significant problem.
https://youtu.be/WdtK9Sj8ADw?list=PLoTU9_iCGa6go3vsnxlNn1wZS...
Neal said the essay was quickly obsolete, especially in regards to Mac, but I'll always remember this reference about hermetically sealed Apple products. To this day, Apple doesn't want anyone to know how their products work, or how to fix them, to the point where upgrading or expanding internal hardware is mostly impossible.
So, "zero shared lineage" seems like a very strong statement.
Many of those ideas came from NeXT, so more like 30 years ago.
I was amazed.
As for Apple, their openness comes and goes. The Apple II was rather open, the early Macintosh was not. Macintosh slowly started opening up with early NuBus machines through early Mac OS X. Since then they seem to be closing things up again. Sometimes it was for legitimate reasons (things had to be tightened up for security). Sometimes it was for "business" reasons (the excessively tight control over third-party applications for iOS and the incredible barriers to repair).
As for the author's claims about their workings being a mystery, there wasn't a huge difference between the Macintosh and other platforms. On the software level: you could examine it at will. At the hardware level, nearly everyone started using custom chips at the same time. The big difference would have been IBM compatibles, where the chipsets were the functional equivalent of custom chips yet were typically better documented simply because multiple hardware and operating system vendors needed to support them. Even then, by 1999, the number of developers who even had access to that documentation was limited. The days of DOS, where every application developer had to roll their own hardware support were long past. Open source developers of that era were making a huge fuss over the access to documentation to support hardware beyond the most trivial level.
- The settings app is now positively atrocious, "because iPhone"
- SIP is an absolute pox to deal with.
- "Which version of Python will we invoke today" has become a fabulous game with multiple package managers in the running
- AppCompat games.
- Continued neglect for iTunes (which is now a TV player with a "if we must also provide music, fine" segment added - but it still thinks it should be a default client for audio files)
- iCloud wedging itself in wherever it can
Yes, all of those can be overcome. That's because the bones are still good, but anything that Apple has hung off those since Tim Cook is at best value neutral, and usually adds a little bit more drag for every new thing.
Don't get me wrong, I still use it - because it's still decent enough - but there's definitely a trajectory happening.
Is locking down the System folder any more problematic than app armor, and any less useful for system integrity? Putting everything from brew under /opt follows UNIX conventions perfectly fine, definitely more than using snaps in Ubuntu for basic command line utilities. And installing whatever you want on macOS is just as easy as it is on Ubuntu.
This sort of complaint just gets so boring and detached from reality, and I’m not saying that you don’t use macOS but it reads like something from someone who couldn’t possibly be using it day-to-day. For me it’s a great compromise in terms of creating an operating system where I can do anything that I would do in Linux with just as much ease if not more, but also not have to provide tech support on for my elderly parents.
[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3A...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/18kh1r5/im_shocked_t...
I have used UNIX/Linux on a daily basis for over 30 years, and OSX/MacOS daily for over 15 years. I know how UNIX systems work and where things traditionally are located. And until a few years ago MacOS was a reasonable UNIX that could be used more or less like a friendly UNIX system -- but it is becoming increasingly less so.
If you don't want SIP, it will take you a few minutes to reboot and switch it off permanently (or perhaps until the next OS upgrade). This is really the only one in the list which has to be "overcome", and personally I think that SIP enabled by default is the right choice. Anyone who needs SIP disabled can work out how to do that quickly - but it is years since I've had a reason to do it even temporarily, so I suspect the audience for this is small.
Multiple package managers and Python: that sounds like a problem caused by running multiple third party package managers.
If you want games, x86 or console is the preferred choice. Issue for some, decidely not for others. I'd much rather have the Mx processor than better games support.
iTunes - I can't comment, I don't use it.
iCloud - perfectly possible to run without any use of iCloud, and I did for many years. I use it for sync for couple of third party apps, and it's nice to have that as an available platform. It doesn't force its way in, and the apps that I use usually support other platforms as well.
A system should be heavily locked down and secure by default unless you really know what you are doing and choose to manually override that.
Modern MacOS features add an incredible level of security- it won't run non-signed apps unless you know what you're doing and override it. Even signed apps can only access parts of the filesystem you approve them to. These things are not a hassle to override, and basically make it impossible for hostile software to do things that you don't want it to.
I agree there is some conceptual inconsistency- which I see on almost all OSs nowadays, but Windows 8 being the most egregious example, where you are mixing smartphone and traditional desktop interface elements in a confusing way.
For starter, it is much less annoying from a security/notification standpoint, you can tell it to fuck off and let you do your things if you know what you are doing.
macOS isn't too bad yet but is clearly lagging behind, Apple is unwillingly to meaningfully improve some parts and seems to refuse to sherlock some apps because it clearly goes against their business interests. They make more money earning the commission on additional software sales from the App Store, a clear conflict of interest. They got complacent just like Valve with all the money from running it's marketplace.
For the most part the macOS user is of the religious zealots' type and they barely know how to do the basics, far worse than you average seasoned windows user, even though in principle macOS should be easier to handle (in practice it's not exactly true but still...).
People here who seemed to think otherwise really live in the reality distortion field and it seems to be linked to the mythical Silicon Valley "hacker". At first, I drank the kool-aid on that definition but it actually seems pretty disrespectful for "real" hacker; but whatever, I guess.
The openness and freedom to modify like an open UNIX was a major selling point, losing all that for "security" features that mostly appeal to the corporate are not great. Those features also need to be proven useful because as far as I'm concerned, it's all theory, in practice I think they are irrelevant.
The notification system is as annoying and dumb as in iOS and the nonstop "security" notification and password prompt is just a way to sell you on the biometrics usefulness; which Apple, like big morons they are, didn't implement in a FaceID way, in the place where it made the most sense to begin with: laptops/desktops. Oh, but they have a "nice", totally not useless notch.
Many of the modern Apps are ports of their iOS version, wich makes them feel almost as bad as webapps (worse if we are talking about webapps on windows) and they are in general lacking in many ways both from a feature and UI standpoint.
Apple Music is a joke of a replacement for iTunes, and I could go on and on.
The core of the system may not have changed that much (well expect your data is less and less accessible, forcibly stored in their crappy obscure iCloud folder/dbs with rarely decent exports functions) but as the article hinted very well, you don't really buy an OS, just like nobody is really buying solely an engine. A great engine is cool and all, but you need a good car around that to make it valuable and this is exactly the same for an OS. It used to be that macOS was a good engine with a great car around, in the form of free native apps that shipped with it or 3rd party ones. Nowadays unless you really need the benefits of design/video apps very optimized for Apple platforms it increasingly is not a great car.
Apps around the system aren't too bad but they are very meh, especially for the price you pay for the privilege (and the obsolescence problem already mentioned above).
It's not really that macOS has regressed a lot (although it has in some in the iOSification process) but also that it didn't improve a whole lot meanwhile price and other penalty factors increased a lot.
But I doubt you can see the light, you probably are too far in your faith.
I have less than 50 hours use on my Windows 11 machine, a midgrade Lenovo P358 rig I bought renewed because it had plenty of memory and an Nvidia T1000 card. Yet it taught me that the test of an operating system is how quickly you can navigate around, and how well it can find things, given only clues. Windows 11 is just snapper, quicker, than the latest macOS running on a new M3 Mac.
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[1]: Ironically, the heavy state subsidies for buying an electric car are, like anything else in Norway, financed by... Oil money.
There is some software that I find nice and convenient in macOS but it has gotten really hard to justify the price of the hardware considering the downsides.