Frame of Preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004
Frame of preference
A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.
You can’t easily compare 1984 and 2025. “They don’t make them like they used to,” I know, but often that’s actually good.
Mac’s early decades were shaped by technical limitations – scarce memory, drives in need of lubrication, exhausted multitasking – that all had to be combined with awkwardly teaching everyone how to take their baby steps with computers.
And, I truly don’t love some of the control panel directions we’ve seen. I’m glad we moved away from spatial orientation, the strange horizontal icons of NeXTStep, or some of the hideous fonts.
The story of Mac settings ends here not just because web emulators for post-2004 versions aren’t yet available. It also ends here because those emulators are not necessary. After two decades of zigs and zags the pace of change slowed down quite a bit.
Not that there weren’t stories in the next twenty years. People struggled with wi-fi settings, fought over “Scroll direction: natural,” admired the literal spotlight of Spotlight, gasped at videos of hands on trackpads, and laughed at the uselessness of Screen Time. Retina displays reclaimed some of the sharpness Aqua diluted. Modern macOS’s Settings are witnesses of Apple’s 21st-century successes (Apple Pay, Touch ID, iCloud) as well as failures (Game Center, Apple Intelligence). Somewhere deep within Wallpaper, there is even a nod – although a rather cheap one – to the original Macintosh.
> Leave you with something to think about when reading the article:
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Frame of Preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004 \ stacker news
You can’t easily compare 1984 and 2025. “They don’t make them like they used to,” I know, but often that’s actually good. Mac’s early d...
