Totally agreed regarding appearance etc.

However, the one thing I'd take issue with:

> As a programmer, I can point out all the many, many flaws with its technical architecture.

I think, since we started out on history here, we must consider the history and its context.

1. Apple does the Lisa: a cheaper Xerox Alto, minus the networking and the programming language. Multitasking, hard disk based, new app paradign. The Future but 1/4 of the price of the original.

It's not cheap enough. It flops, badly.

2. Jobs repurposes the parallel information-appliance project into a cheaper Lisa. Remove the hard disk and the slots and all expansion, seal it up, floppy only, remove the fancy new app format & keep it simple: apps and documents. Smaller screen but square pixels. Keeps most of the Lisa good stuff.

It's still expensive but it's cheap enough. It sells. It gets Pagemaker. It changes the course of the industry.

But to get a GUI OS into 128kB of RAM, they had to cut it brutally.

It worked but the result is significantly crippled, and Apple spent the next decade trying to put much of that stuff back in again.

Remarkably enough, they succeeded.

By MacOS 7.6 it had networking, network-transparent symlinks, TCP/IP, a HiColour GUI, usable multitasking, virtual memory, and more. It was actually a bloody good OS.

Yes, it was very unstable, but then, remember so was DOS, so was Windows 3.

The snag is, that time was 1997 and by then MS had surpassed Windows NT and Windows 95 with NT 4.

NT 4 had no PnP, no power management, no working 3D except vastly expensive OpenGL cards, it lost a lot of NT 3.x's stability because of the frantic desperate bodge of putting the GDI in the kernel, but it was good enough, and it made Apple look bad.

Apple was ploughing its own lonely furrow and it made a remarkably good job of it. It was just too slow.

When Jobs came back, he made a lot of good decisions.

Junk most of the models. Junk all the peripherals. Make a few models of computer and nothing else.

Junk Copland, Pink, Taligent, all that.

Meanwhile, like Win9x + NT, 2 parallel streams:

[a] Win9x parallel: salvage anything good that can be stripped out of Copland, bolt it onto MacOS 7.x, call it 8.x and kill off the clones.

[b] NT parallel: for the new project, just FFS get something out the door ASAP: Rhapsody, then Mac OS X Server. All the weird bits of NeXTstep that were to avoid Apple lawsuits (vertical menus, scrollbars on the left, no desktop icons, columnar file browser, etc.): remove them, switch 'em back to the Apple way.

Meantime, work on a snazzy facelift for the end-user version. Make the hardware colourful and see-through, and do that to the OS too.

I think, looking at the timeline and the context, all the moves make sense.

And I used MacOS 6, 7, 8 and 9. All were great. Just such a pleasure to use, and felt great. I didn't care that NT was more solid: that was a boring reliable bit of office equipment and it felt as exciting as a stapler. NT 3.51 was fugly but it worked and that's what mattered.