“I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel" button. If you tried to skip quickly through a setup wizard by clicking on the "next" button, you'd cancel everything on screen 4.

This perfectly summed up Microsoft's understanding of UX to me. The things MS cares about in design are entirely unrelated to the things users care about. Users want to know where the next button is without having to hunt for it. Users want to not accidentally cancel something they've already spent time on. In many ways, this encapsulated Vista as a whole. None of that OS was made for the user, it was all territorial infighting inside MS.

Sadly, I think Apple has lost this focus now too. The Touch Bar is a load of accidents waiting to happen at any given time, and the new dialog boxes with a stack of buttons below remove the ability to use muscle memory to hit the right one and need to be scanned every time.

It's amazing they effectively ignored him.

Mac OS X for its era was astounding. Think about it. The ease of the Macintosh (journalist, media people) that's it, a good looking OS and the security and Unix tools preinstalled which would be helping ex-Solaris/Sparc departments. As it was shipped with XQuartz, a Terminal by default and tons of Unix utilities, even Motif worked, so porting expensive Unix stuff between Solaris, Linux and OSX was a breeze.

Windows... well... w2k was for companies or the enterprise, people followed Windows 98SE as if it was a cult and ME was a polished turd. W98SE was crap on security, FAT32's performance for an installed OS was a nightmare, having to defrag a lot and performance degraded a lot over time. You had to format and reinstall once a month. Oh, you need to reinstall the chipset, soundcard, and video drivers? Some BSOD on the process will be guaranteed.

Linux and KDE by 2004 was nice, but broadband wasn't everywhere and setting it up was not as easy if all you got from a retailer was a Slackware/Debian DVD with an installing book. For everything else you had to be ready to learn a lot. And X.org wasn't as ready as today.

OFC my KDE3 setup from 2004 with bells and whistles like the Nvidia Geforce 2 drivers was nearly on par on OSX' features, (even with Cinelerra and JackD) but OSX set it up everything for you by default since 2001-2002.

Even Microsoft Office under OSX looked beatiful.

And today, ironically, I'm almost the opposite, by using CWM, void, OpenBSD, groff+ms, sc-im, Gnuplot and so on.

But to each its own. OSX by being a Unix helped Linux/BSD's a lot too, even if it took a huge chunk of market. CUPS polishing, (CUPS ofc worked pefectly in 2003 without Apple's support, but I think Apple gave them more support on weird printers), Bonjour, HTML->Webkit...

Some insight around this time.

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

About Linux it's to have Docker with good performances, and a development environment more similar than the production environment. I'm almost not a fan of compilation to install standard tools, its a bit slow and it feels unnecessary.

About the touchscreen support, it's simply that I like touchscreens. It think it's more convenient for some usages and I think Apple acknowledged that with their ridiculously small touch bar. I hope they will allow real professional usage on the iPad pro or bring touch screen support to the MacBook eventually. I could live without it but I still touch my MacBook screen by mistake once in a while.