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!"
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.
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.
This also applies to Windows, by the way (except it’s more like 20-30 years ago).
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.
Many of those ideas came from NeXT, so more like 30 years ago.
[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 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.