I’m not an aficionado of Windows versions but it’s clear they went down some really ugly roads, with tasteless textures, gradients, colors, and icons.
I think the thing that killed me with Windows was the infinite customizability of the UI. I wasted hours with that and when I got my first iMac (running OS X Panther) it was a relief to have something that looked good off the shelf and which I really didn’t need or want or have the ability to change.
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People want customizability but since Steve Jobs returned to Apple a ruling guide was to work hard on those look-and-feel questions and impose what they believed to be their own best good taste at the time, with only small tweaks available to users.There were '90s modpacks and skinning apps for MacOS prior to Mac OS X like Kaleidoscope , and some of the included skins were simply hideous.
Jobs made sure they could shut that down with Mac OS X. Apple worked so hard on its GUI it even sicced the legal dogs on Windows theme-makers after OSX was released…
But it’s amazing how much Apple sweated the details and got right two decades ago
This responsibility for design has been imbued into the house design for a long time. A NEW YORKER profile of Jony Ive five years ago noted:
In one of our conversations, Ive was scathing about a rival’s product, after asking me not to name it: “Their value proposition was ‘Make it whatever you want. You can choose whatever color you want.’ And I believe that’s abdicating your responsibility as a designer.”
(After the article was published it somehow came out that Ive was referring to Motorola’s eventually-ill-fated Moto Maker system, which let customers choose any combination of colors and materials to customize their phones.)
Steve Jobs got flack from the Windows-fans when in 1995 he said on 60 MINUTES, “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is, and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way… I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products”
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