This is exactly how I feel as someone who enjoyed the Mac during the Jobs era of Mac OS X and has been quite disappointed with the state of personal computing since then. The Apple experience is not the same today as it was during the Snow Leopard days. It seems to me that the old guard at Apple is gone and that the people making the key decisions at Apple in the past decade or so are taking Apple in a different direction than what I would like, as someone who is a big fan of both the classic Macintosh and Jobs-era Mac OS X.

What I'd give for a modern OS with an interface designed with the principles of people like Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini in mind, combined with rock-solid underpinnings taking advantage of the best that OS research had to offer in the past 30 years. In other words, I want an updated Smalltalk/Lisp machine with a classic Mac interface brought up to 2020s standards regarding networking, security, and other concerns.

Modern macOS to me is a disappointment compared to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and don't get me started on the lack of user-upgradeable RAM in modern Macs. However, Windows 10/11 is even more disappointing to me compared to Windows 7, which was a nice OS and is my second favorite version of Windows, my favorite being Windows 2000. Desktop Linux seems to be in an eternal Sisyphean cycle of churn.

So, today I begrudgingly use Windows on my personal machines and macOS on my work-issued MacBook Pro, longing for a compelling alternative to appear one day that pushes personal computing forward.