We've gotten a little spoiled by our Macs lately

It was Snow Leopard for me. I used its extraordinary windows management to write my thesis. I needed to have about ten windows open in each of about 10 different apps—so about 100 windows total—and be able to switch among them seamlessly. I was able to accomplish that in Snow Leopard by organizing the apps into four separate Spaces (virtual desktops) and using Expose to explode and find windows within each desktop. Neither Windows nor Linux had anything that came close. Alas, the current implementation is not as clean, simple, and intuitive.
 
theorist9 said:
I was able to accomplish that in Snow Leopard by organizing the apps into four separate Spaces (virtual desktops) and using Expose to explode and find windows within each desktop. Neither Windows nor Linux had anything that came close. Alas, the current implementation is not as clean, simple, and intuitive.
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Mission Control doesn't work for that?
 
thenewperson said:
Mission Control doesn't work for that?
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Yes, Mission Control is the current implementation. But, as I said, the current implementation is not as clean, simple, and intuitive.

One annoying thing about the current implementation is that it's bothersome even when you're not using it, since it can't be turned off. Thus, during periods of intense work when I'm rapidly navigating among windows in my current deskotop, a window occasionally gets accidentally dragged to a different desktop, so I have to stop to retrieve it. By contrast, in Snow Leopard, Spaces could be turned off, which prevented this from happening. That's an example of Apple's loss of clear thinking about UI design to which I was referring earlier
 
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Yoused said:
I just compared Macs.

An original Macintosh cost about 45% the price of a base model Honda Civic.

For the same raw dollar amount, a new M4 iMac can be configured with 24GB RAM and a 4TB SSD – that is 187,500 times as much RAM and about ten million times as much storage (though you could do the floppy-swap to have more storage, up to a point – no one could realistically function with even a hundred floppies at hand). Not to mention 57 times as many pixels at 16 million times the color depth and a difference in processing power the is profoundly difficult to measure.

They still sell Honda Civics, for about 4 times the 1984 price. But, I should concede that the iMac as configured above is $4 more that the original Macintosh.
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I'll offer this as somewhat of a counterpoint (copied from one of my posts on MR):

512 GB -> 1 TB storage upgrade pricing (+$200) has not changed in 4 1/2 years (since the 2020 iMac was introduced in Jun. 2020).*
16 GB -> 32 GB RAM upgrade pricing (+400) has not changed in at least** 7 1/2 years (since the 2017 iMac was introduced in Jun. 2017).*
*Except for effective reductions due to inflation.
**"at least" because I wasn't able to find earlier configurators.

Perhaps OEM pricing on LPDDR5X today is not significantly lower than it was on DDR4 in 2017 (I don't know, I haven't tracked those). But that's certainly not the case for storage.

Since these RAM and storage upcharges haven't come down in a long time, maybe we're now due. For higher storage and RAM amounts, the upcharges have come down, but those aren't what most consumers buy.


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Source of M1 configurator screenshot:

Source of 2020 iMac configurator screenshot:

Source of 2017 iMac configurator screenshot:
 
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