What is the worst OS X version you've used?

[eyoungren]

10.0 was terrible, it was slow and lacked a lot of features that Mac OS 9 still had and looked terrible on lower res screens like the clamshell iBooks.

Yeah, Puma sucked. First really usable OS X was imho Panther.

10.0 is my vote. It showed a ton of promise over 9 - it really did feel like the future - but ultimately it was exceptionally slow and limited in functionality. 10.1 was a massive improvement.

At the time that these OS releases were happening, the company I worked for was still solidly using OS9. I knew what my problems were under OS9, quite a lot of money had already been paid out for software under OS9 and all the Mac magazines and articles I was reading then said that 10.x just was not ready to be used in any sort of production environment.

I also took exception to the fact that I was forced to create a user account and a password when installing OS X. While OS9 had some elements of that, it didn't force it on you like OS X did. I wasn't happy with that.

By mid 2004 I was in another job and installed Jaguar there and on my own Mac. I was incensed to discover that popup windows and labels had not crossed over. Labels came back in Panther, but I'm still waiting for popup windows in 2024.

I was able to produce using Jaguar and Classic however, so by the time Panther came along a lot of my headaches had been resolved. Panther takes the win however for stability. Solid OS.

 

[eyoungren]

In my era with Mac, from High Sierra to Ventura, Ventura is just a disaster for me. Horrible UI, horrible performance on Intel, just horrible.

It wasn't much better on an M2 MacBook Pro. I upgraded to Sonoma on my work Mac to hopefully fix some issues. Nope.

 

[Timpetus]

I skipped so many that my opinion is fairly meaningless, but Catalina was probably the one that broke the most things as I was playing a lot of 32 bit games on my Intel MBP at the time I updated. The best versions in my memory were Snow Leopard and High Sierra, I remember running each of those for many years after they were considered outdated. My Mini home server still runs High Sierra, and it's a 2014 base MM. It ain't broke, so I'm not gonna try to fix it!

 

[gpat]

I always see a lot of hate for 10.7 Lion on these discussions, I remember some parts of it to be quite messy, but in my opinion it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be.
I loved the all-new Mission Control so much that I overlooked the occasional bugginess.
The absolute worst was surely 10.0 (duh), followed by transitional releases such as 10.4 on Intel, 10.5 on PPC, and 11.0 on ARM.

 

[MBAir2010]

as a mac user since 1990 and buyer since 1998, these are my "worst" contributions:
1) Mavericks: slow on a Macbook Air 2010 which ate up battery life big time
2) high sierra: more spining balls than an Angel baseball game!
3) Ventura-Sonoma, since the accessibility of easy tasks is confined to terminal commands.
although the fastest introduced by , they are bunched which seems to me the same OS.
i never used Yosemite and wont use "Sick-o-you"!

All the cats were special, even Jaguar ($129) with that blue bubble interface and graphics
that looked and felt great on my Imac G3 Bondi blue with matching keyboard and mouse!

my favorite in now Mountain Lion which works great still in 2024!

enjoy your mac, no matter the year!

 

[padams35]

10.9.1 - I was so excited about Mavericks being a free upgrade that I let myself be an early adapter out of fear it was a promotion that would end. It seems to be a 50/50 gamble if the early point releases work well, and I lost that time.

10.10 - I was so poisoned by the early Marvericks memories that I let myself switch early to Yosemite, which managed to be even worse. In hindsight 10.9.5 was actually pretty good.


I like to gripe about 10.13 (early eGPU support shifting with every point release and inconvenient security) and 10.15 (for ending 32-bit app support and coinciding with a Mac Mini firmware update that broke eGPU support in Mojave) but overall I still think Yosemite was the worst. Yosemite was bloated, ugly, and had once crashed so hard it corrupted my hard drive. I really hope nothing ever tops that trifecta.

 

[MBAir2010]

In my era with Mac, from High Sierra to Ventura, Ventura is just a disaster for me. Horrible UI, horrible performance on Intel, just horrible.

i can hear this post in the voice and unique vocal structure of geddy lee!
thanks!

 

[SpotOnT]

As you said Lion and Yosemite were big duds in my book.

Of course Puma and Cheetah were completely unusable.

I haven’t really used anything newer than High Sierra, so I guess it is just those 4 that I tend to think of as horrible.

It is easier for me to remember the good ones: Panther, Snow Leopard, Sierra.

 

[bousozoku]

The 10.0 developer beta was quite slow. Even on a G3@450MHz. I'd have to go with that one.

It was mostly NeXTStep, modified to run Mac applications.

I remember when 10.3.4 came along and I could actually print but it wasn't until 10.4.11 that it really did everything it was supposed to do and did it more quickly.

I had BeOS when the original Mac OS X beta came out and BeOS was extremely fast, but it didn't do much. I was hoping that Apple could get that kind of speed on a PowerPC 604/604e.

 

[jamisonbaines]

when i clicked the thread, before reading the first post, i was thinking hmm probably lion. haha, i only started at tiger though, so not sure what went on before that. and tbh idk what’s going on since like catalina either

 

[eyoungren]

I always see a lot of hate for 10.7 Lion on these discussions, I remember some parts of it to be quite messy, but in my opinion it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be.
I loved the all-new Mission Control so much that I overlooked the occasional bugginess.
The absolute worst was surely 10.0 (duh), followed by transitional releases such as 10.4 on Intel, 10.5 on PPC, and 11.0 on ARM.

My use of Lion is probably less than 1 hour. My boss at the time bought a refurb MacPro from Apple, 2010 model. This was 2013 and the Mac came with Lion. I was only on Lion long enough to upgrade to Mountain Lion. But Mountain Lion is where I discovered the minimum size limitation of Finder windows. I traced that back to Lion because that didn't happen on Snow Leopard.

The rest of my minimal use of Lion comes from playing around with it on Macs at a local electronics store. I don't hate it (I never used it long enough to know), but it did annoy me that Apple created that limitation I mentioned.

 

[Naraxus]

What is the common denominator in almost all of these post-Snow Leopard releases?

If you guessed The Master of Disaster Craig Federighi you would be right! Craig is completely incompetent. Every new os whether it's Mac OS, iOS, and the rest have gotten consistently worse. Always introducing new bugs, and never or rarely fixing old ones, is a hallmark of Craig's "stewardship".

The sooner he's gone, the better off Macs, iPhones etc we'll all be.

 

[eyoungren]

when i clicked the thread, before reading the first post, i was thinking hmm probably lion. haha, i only started at tiger though, so not sure what went on before that. and tbh idk what’s going on since like catalina either

I came in roughly around System 7. That's only because that was about the time my mom got a Mac and brought it home AND I had to deal with Macs in Graphic Design school. I could have come in much earlier, but as a teen in the 1980s I was solidly Commodore 64/128.

My first paying job in my profession had me at OS8 and I eventually moved on to OS9. Again, at work. I was PC at home by that point. You started at Tiger, but on this end of things now I'd say you didn't miss much. OS9 turned out to be the pre-OS X system I used most and I hate it to this day. I only moved on to OS X once it got good enough to replace OS9.

 

[Zdigital2015]

El Crapitan was by far the most problematic version in all my years of OS X/macOS. Lion and High Sierra were also rough, but not like El Crapitan.

 

[StellarVixen]

Never had much problem with any. But if I had to choose one, I would say 10.15

 

[dennis264]

OMG, LION! Remember when they IOS-ified Mac OS?! How the entire OS felt changed. Everything remembered its last state... even if you quit the app. Lots changed, save as, expose, and scroll bars died. Having said that, it was still a good release.(Don't ask me about System Software 7.5.5)

 

[HuNay]

Funnily enough the worst version I’d say I’ve ever used is Monterey. You see, Safari wasn’t even aware that ProMotion existed in the early days of 14 inch Pros. I also remember it [micro-] stuttering all over the place. Not that Sonoma was that much better.

 

[Siliconguy]

If we are limited to OSX then 10.1, the version that came with a 2002 Quicksilver. Jaguar (10.2) was a definite step up, by the end it was pretty stable.

The real horror show was 7.5.2 on the brand new PCI PowerMacs. Crash after crash. 7.5.3 was slightly better, 7.5.5 would stay running pretty well. I should have upgraded to 7.6, but I was too afraid to rock the boat.

I skipped everything between 10.6.8 and Catalina as work had me on Windows 7 during that period. Now I have Mohave on a couple of rescued Macs and that seems better than Catalina was.

 

[MakeAppleAwesomeAgain]

Lion was absolutely terrible, it’s the only OS I ever downgraded. I jumped back some time after iCloud was enabled. Other than Lion, I wasn’t too happy with Yosemite.

 

[iHorseHead]

10.9.1 - I was so excited about Mavericks being a free upgrade that I let myself be an early adapter out of fear it was a promotion that would end. It seems to be a 50/50 gamble if the early point releases work well, and I lost that time.

10.10 - I was so poisoned by the early Marvericks memories that I let myself switch early to Yosemite, which managed to be even worse. In hindsight 10.9.5 was actually pretty good.


I like to gripe about 10.13 (early eGPU support shifting with every point release and inconvenient security) and 10.15 (for ending 32-bit app support and coinciding with a Mac Mini firmware update that broke eGPU support in Mojave) but overall I still think Yosemite was the worst. Yosemite was bloated, ugly, and had once crashed so hard it corrupted my hard drive. I really hope nothing ever tops that trifecta.

I thought Mavericks was great from the beginning. What was wrong with it?

 

[AlixSPQR]

That would be Jaguar, in my case. Lots of bugs, poor performance, and too few services.

 

[Ctrlos]

Although great from a features perspective, Leopard just wasn't as good on my OG White Macbook. I quickly downgraded it back to Tiger which was incredibly quick.

I used to run Quicksilver, Growl, VirtueDesktops and MenuButler on 512bm RAm with no slowdown.

You could happily run CandyBar and customise every icon in the OS and you had a great choice of browsers like Camino and Shiira.

Tiger 🥰

 

[kc9hzn]

When we come to the Apple Silicon era, then for me Big Sur was the worst. I bought an M1 MacBook Air and my MacBook used to crash constantly. Even on the desktop and out of the blue as well. It was very common for my Mac to restart randomly.. Suddenly the whole screen went purple and restarted itself. Reinstalling the OS did no good. People on this forum told me that my MacBook is broken and it's not software's fault and told me to take it back. My gut feeling told me that they'd just reinstall the OS and it'd happen again. It sounded like a lot of hassle.. When Monterey was released then the problems stopped and I haven't had an issue with my Mac till this day. Ventura ran good on M1 MacBook Air, but I'm not the fan of the Settings panel. Knowing Apple we'll never get System Preferences back.

Never used Leopard on a PowerPC, but it ran very well on Intel, so that's surprising to hear.

Leopard barely ran on PPC, it had some really high system requirements that excluded most G4 systems. I only ever used it on Intel, but I’ve always gotten the impression from PPC Leopard users that it was a bit of an afterthought. Apple wasn’t ready to nix every PPC Mac just yet (that would come soon enough), but PPC was a bit of a red-headed stepchild at this point (more so than Intel Macs are to modern macOS). 64-bit development on PPC Macs was also a huge headache, from what I understand.

 

[kc9hzn]

At the time that these OS releases were happening, the company I worked for was still solidly using OS9. I knew what my problems were under OS9, quite a lot of money had already been paid out for software under OS9 and all the Mac magazines and articles I was reading then said that 10.x just was not ready to be used in any sort of production environment.

I also took exception to the fact that I was forced to create a user account and a password when installing OS X. While OS9 had some elements of that, it didn't force it on you like OS X did. I wasn't happy with that.

By mid 2004 I was in another job and installed Jaguar there and on my own Mac. I was incensed to discover that popup windows and labels had not crossed over. Labels came back in Panther, but I'm still waiting for popup windows in 2024.

I was able to produce using Jaguar and Classic however, so by the time Panther came along a lot of my headaches had been resolved. Panther takes the win however for stability. Solid OS.

What do you mean by pop-up folders? Spring Loaded Folders are there, have been since Jaguar. So I guess that means you mean the ability to dock a Finder window as a tab/drawer to the bottom of the screen? For me, that was a neat parlor trick, but never a core part of my Mac OS Classic workflow.

 

[daneoni]

Leopard, Lion, and Ventura