I mean, yeah, this is what took it from superior to totally superior. Not sure why you see that as a negative.
Remember your history.
In the OS 6 days, Apple was competing with Amiga and Windows 3.1 as far as GUI OSs go.
At that time the Mac OS hard a far better UI (although Amiga probably was a better OS overall). As far as users were concerned, the UI WAS the OS. Amiga died, and Windows went on to become NT, which was a superior OS, although it still had a lousy GUI. Apple’s move to OS X brought their well-studied UI to a “fully buzzword-compliant” OS.
I never had any particular dog in the processor fight (I prefer Mac for the software, not the hardware, because I like having a Unix machine with a user-friendly UI), but I always found it amusing that, at the same time that Apple was switching from PowerPC to Intel in their desktops, Microsoft was switching from Intel to PowerPC in the Xbox.
I can’t really agree with this. Back in the 80s and 90s most operating systems, if they had a GUI at all, used cooperative multitasking. A single process would happily lock up the entire machine, pretty much nothing ran in the background. Macs before OSX were like, consumer Windows was, although that was partially fixed in 95 but it was only really NT and its derivatives that did it properly. OS/2 did it, but hardly anyone was using it. Amigas had been doing preemptive multitasking, where everything effectively runs in parallel, since they debuted in 1985.
Being able to easily task switch without things locking up the machine was a huge part of the user experience. At the time I found Macs and Windows machines incredibly frustrating to use because of this.
So I guess it really depends on how you define the user interface, but even then “as users were concerned, the UI WAS the OS” was very far from the truth.
That’s a nice point, although I believe it is only tangentially related to Intel vs ARM. I still remember how OS/2 was indeed far superior in that respect. it didn’t catch on for the wrong kinds of reasons, and we as consumers are the worse for it.
Also, when moving to OSX back in 2004, I was pleasantly surprised that it allowed you to watch a movie and play music simultaneously and switch windows, without any hiccups. Windows couldn’t at the time on a more expensive computer.
Oh I know, I was just commenting on a tangent which was pushing a viewpoint I really couldn’t agree with.