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by gurneyHaleck 3474 days ago
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.