[ftio]

Spot on. I had a similar thought.

Another major change is that the App Store is now the default way for 99% of users to download and install software. Pre-App Store (say, in the Tiger-Snow Leopard days), Mac users with even limited experience knew the `Mount DMG → Drag to Applications` ritual. At the time, it was one of the two primary ways of installing Mac software, the other being using Package Installer to run .pkg installations.

As a Certified Technical Consultant in those days, I found that almost everyone was able to do the Package Manager method; the DMG method created a lot of chaos for about 50% of people. You'd find people running Firefox or Chrome from the DMG, which they'd leave mounted and visible on their desktops in perpetuity.

As a Windows switcher (in 2006) I always felt that the drag-and-drop model was really elegant, but it was unintuitive because, to your point, I had been exposed to the installation model for so long.

[Izkata]

> As a Windows switcher (in 2006) I always felt that the drag-and-drop model was really elegant, but it was unintuitive because, to your point, I had been exposed to the installation model for so long.

https://portableapps.com/ started around that time: builds of open source programs that ran out of a directory without any installation. They were meant for flash drives, but worked just from the desktop or wherever as well.