The consistency of the Mac operating system

Posted: May 23, 2026

Mac OS has by and large remained familiar over the years.

At various points in my life I've used Mac computers and the experience has remained very familiar (and good!). Check for yourself with this interesting website that lets you experience vintage Mac operating systems (fun tip: you can play a lot of classic games like Snood, a game I enjoyed in College, on some of the late 90s early 2000s era versions of MacOS you can try out there).

Whereas with Windows you frequently have good and bad versions that alternate every 5 years or so, with Mac OS I find it just has felt consistent and reliable all along; from Mac OS System 7, to OSX, to just macOS as it's called now.

My first experiences with a Mac operating system were around middle and high school – using a Macintosh desktop to play the original Sim City game in seventh grade social studies class. Also, my cousin had a family Mac and when I was hanging out there we occasionally played a few games he had (Star Wars Dark Forces, and a Lucas Arts game that was like a comical version of Sim City where you design a good and a bad afterlife, ah yes, it was called Afterlife). In high school I took a poetry/creative writing class in a lab of Macintosh PCs, which is where I starting to become more familiar with the OS.

My cousin later got his own Mac for college that was truly a one-of-a-kind machine from Apple. It was the PowerMac G3 All-in-one, which had a beige color uni-body build with a transparent top, which in my memory serves kind of like the missing link between older Mac PCs and the bright and colorful translucent egg shaped first generation of iMacs. The All-in-one looked cool, but this computer was a massive beast, and I did not envy my Cousin having to lug in back and forth from home to his college dorm.

I later sold some of those original colorful iMacs when I worked at my college bookstore/computer store, and they were really cool, although the matching hockey-puck mouse was something I never got used to using. (This was around the time I purchased my first Windows computer, an eMachine, but not the model that got them into hot water for blatantly ripping off the iMac design.)

About ten years later I was taking a graphic design class in a college computer lab full of newer flat-screen LCD iMacs, the first generation of intel-based iMacs, and it was then that I started to really want to have one, but this was around the time I was working as an AmeriCorps member and really did not have the budget.

It wasn't until I had my first professional job I purchased my first Mac computer. This was quite a few years later and it was an intel-based MacBook Pro from 2017 (that I shaved more than a few dollars off using my coworkers advice, finding what he called "old new stock" (actually a never used previous year's model) on Apple's Certified Refurbished section of their online store). I figured out it was the the "old new stock" when I tried to ship it to a nearby Apple store for pickup but the option was inexplicably not available; so I called their customer service and the representative explained that since it was priced cheaper than current machines for sale in the store they would ship it to me overnight at no cost, since I couldn't pick it up at their store. That was one of the first moments I was very impressed by Apple's customer service.

This was also around the time I was working in an office where I got to use a hand-me-down 27-inch intel-based iMac, which was great. And now since I primarily work from home I am currently using a Macbook Pro with Apple silicon, and it is also a dream to use.

So in all these years I only owned that one 2017 MacBook Pro, and I really loved using it. Lately though we've purchased two new Macs. First for my wife we recently got a Macbook Air (finding a good sale price at Costco, and also getting Costco's unique deal for a 3 year purchase of Apple Care plus). This was replacing her expired hand-me-down no-longer-supported Windows 10 laptop. And just recently, with the help of my nieces and nephews, I crowd funded a MacBook Neo for my mom. It's kind of mind-blowing how good is the MacBook Neo, and at just $600! If I were going to college and just needed a good basic functional computer, this would be an awesome option. And for my mom, who was getting by with a 2012 computer that originally came with Windows 7, and would take about 20 minutes just to boot, this was a gigantic upgrade. I spent a day configuring/updating it for her and just was amazed at how nice it is - it runs incredibly well!

All this to say, Mac has been a reliably good experience. Some of their hardware choices have been quirky, but the software and customer service have been reliably good and dependable. I'm not a Windows hater by any means, in fact I think Windows 10 (once you debloated it from ads) was one of the best OS of all time. And most of the computers I've used have been Windows-based. But Mac OS has been consistently great all along, and I hope it continues to be.