[mulmen]

Off the top of my head I can think of a couple:

1) OSX was a viable operating system that was first class in the Apple ecosystem.

2) Laptops and desktops that were actually better than the competition including models geared toward power users.

[aeontech]

1) OSX is not viable any longer? Really? As evidenced by what? I mean, looking at WWDC talks, there's a ton of improvement year over year. Of course there's always more things that could be done, but remember, the core OS team is very small (especially compared to Microsoft, for example). Not to say that there isn't stagnation in some UI aspects (Finder, I'm looking at you...) but saying that the entire OS is no longer viable is a bit dramatic.

2) I don't see much competition that can even match Apple's build quality. The ones I do see, I am excited about, because that means they are striving to improve, and can challenge Apple and force them to improve more. Much better that, than having Apple rest on their laurels because nobody is even trying to get close.

[callalex]

I agree but on the viable operating system part, I think it's important not to discount the impressive research that has gone into the power saving and security aspects of the Darwin kernel, as well as innovations in saving of application state and state sharing between devices

[jasoncchild]

Thanks! I've not much personal experience of pre-iPhone Apple. I'm curious about why OSX is no longer viable.

[wl]

Mac OS X or whatever they're calling it at the moment is buggier than it used to be. 10.11 is where I really started noticing it. The OS no longer deals with memory pressure well, causing the computer to freeze up when Safari's memory usage spikes. The new USB stack in 10.11 often has me restarting the computer to get my devices working again. In addition to big things like that being broken, I'm finding more and more little things not working like they used to. I recently came across a bug that would sometimes not allow me to select a file in an open dialog with my cursor, but I could select it with the keyboard and arrow keys.

Apple really needs a Snow Sierra release to just concentrate on squashing bugs.

[FireBeyond]

I'm not so sure it's no longer viable as it is stagnant.

Looking at some of the major "features" - more emoticons and reactions in Messages... Siri.

Some were certainly nice - Apple Pay... but I don't really see PIP being used, or Continuity (which usually actually pisses me off, because I'll switch from my Mac to my phone with an image or similar on the Clipboard, and have to wait several seconds while Continuity syncs - shame, such potential).

[mulmen]

OSX/MacOS is still viable but it doesn't receive the attention it once did. It feels second-rate compared to the mobile OS. I get the feeling one day Apple is going to release the new MacBook and it will just be an iPad with a keyboard.

[gurneyHaleck]

An iPad with a keyboard. God help us all.

And looking back on ye olden MacOS 9, prior to OSX, there were things that just felt nice about the interface that no longer hold sway.

Clicking on an icon gave an immediate response. The mouse cursor felt more precise. Compare to these nightmarish touchpad/button slabs (and worse still, touchscreens), mouse movement and pointer precision were lightyears beyond the way things seem to work lately.

I have to retry things a solid 1/3 of the time, because some kind of gesture or taptic garbage tripped me up, and pushed me into an unintended outcome. I have to focus, and concentrate on finessing my hand motions and pressure or I am punished by mistakes that need an undo. When I'm in a rush, life is hell. This makes me hate life.

No zealously decorative animations meant (on an unstressed system with low CPU/RAM load) the menus flashed before you like lightning. Text was crisp, unshaded pixels, with no font smoothing. There were no transparency overlays, and so everything was high contrast. Nothing was EVER lagged by network traffic except browser images and FTP/SMB shares. (and doom deathmatches)

Most of this was also true of Windows 2000 at the time.

Had operating systems stood frozen (particularly GUIs), while terabytes of disk space, gigabytes of RAM and dozens of CPU cores had inflated our hardware resources, I've often held the belief that we'd like our computers more, and fewer people would be as obnoxiously incompetant with computers as we see. I'm probably wrong, but the idea feels right.

[rleigh]

It's poorly maintained. Large parts haven't been updated in a decade.

Take a basic command, `readlink -f`. Works everywhere except MacOS X. This comes from FreeBSD, which added `-f` years ago, but MacOS X hasn't resynched its code with FreeBSD for an age, so it's running the version from 2007 or similar. I can show you plenty of examples of this sort.

It would take very little effort to do this on a regular basis, and it could probably be automated.

This creeping incompatibility due to being outdated and unmaintained is becoming increasingly problematic. Not something a regular user cares about, but for development and technical users, it's lacking.