Agreed. For me personally macOS (or OS X back then) usability peaked at around ~Snow Leopard and it's been _mostly_ though not entirely downhill from there on.
Hard to pick a 'worst offender', the System Settings panel in Ventura may be a good example, it is a literal struggle every single time I need to change something, typically as a result of some setting mysteriously changing itself back to what I do not want.
This thread correctly identifies "discoverability", perhaps aka "progressive disclosure", or "some form of incrementalism" as the measure by which good user interfaces are evaluated. Operating systems such as Windows, OSX, and Linux -- inevitability -- contain much complexity, and multiple modules, not all of which are necessarily in use by the users at any given time.
Therefore, the problem of GUI design becomes one of navigating the complexity/depth-of-knowledge curve, as much as it does creating a usable set of features at each point along it.
The most egregious offenders are the latest Windows, 10 and later, IMHO. When I was a kid, (coming from the world of RISC OS which had a much shallower GUI) trying to understand the big deep Windows interface, I joined the dots by telling myself "This is how they put it together. This is how they are trying to make the things work consistently and in concert." I rarely broke out of that story-telling loop.
Now, when using Windows 10 or later, and a few clicks brings one to a Windows 2000 and before-era network dialogue box, the "fourth wall" as it were, of GUI design is broken, the story-telling loop above is replaced by a jarring feeling of bewilderment or all-too familiar frustration, and it's obvious they are shipping the org chart, and doing so over time, as much older GUI components are still available.
At the risk of sounding nihilistic, I fear that both OS X and Windows have reached their respective local maximas of design, and we won't see any changes for the better (by the above metric) any time soon.
>Operating systems such as Windows, OSX, and Linux -- inevitability -- contain much complexity.
Operating systems should be modular, allowing the user to reduce as much bloating complexity as possible and needed.
I do not need unstoppable “gamed” and “studentd” services on my computer. The sealed system implemented by Apple has actually meant the overthrow of the root user by the corporation.
Now I can’t reduce complexity, bloatware.
The only solution seems to be praying that BSD or Linux become useable one day
If the sealed system makes performance or security problems, it's a bad design, I'd rather it be optimized rather than modularized.
Modular systems have more possibilities, which means some of those possibilities might not work, and then you might find yourself unable to use an app without reconfiguring in a way that breaks some other app.
They are great for tinkerers and specialized applications, but for people who want things to Just Work, every time, no matter what, even at the cost of zero hacker friendliness, Android's model seems to completely blow Linux away.
We should still have root(I think lack of that might be part of why Android hasn't started taking over other markets), but there should be obvious and standard ways to do common things.
The commercial OSes aren't perfect, but they are popular with consumers for a reason.
I think NixOS or similar is Linux's only hope of matching that without doing containers for everything, which would likely have many of it's own problems.
Either that or we just stop using dynamic linking, which would probably make most of Linux's problems go away instantly.
I loved MacOS 8 as well. It was a nice improvement from the System 7.6.
The only thing I didn't like about MacOS was occasional system lock-up and application crashes due to real multi-threading. Back then, when your Mac crashed, it crashed hard... like your cursor didn't move. ;-)
Ah yes, Mac OS 8, I have very, very limited experience with it, mostly in the form of one/two-week bursts on taking over from a coworker whenever he went on holiday. It's loooong time ago but on the negatives I remember getting very annoyed with this app called Toaster, on the positives I remember thinking how extremely pretty everything looked (still does) and being blown away by little things like, to set the icon for a folder or document you could just copy and paste one over from another file :)
Hard to pick a 'worst offender', the System Settings panel in Ventura may be a good example, it is a literal struggle every single time I need to change something, typically as a result of some setting mysteriously changing itself back to what I do not want.