Having learned nothing the last time I upgraded my operating system without waiting for the .01 update, I just went ahead and installed Yosemite.

I’ve never been a big fan of the looks of OS X, I still miss the classic Mac OS with its cute personality and customisable features. I’ve been reading John Siracusa’s long review, and he’s not the only critic to refer to the good old days of Mac Extensions and the way you could switch them on and off. Remember Conflict Catcher? Ah…

I learned to become a power user by reading books like The Macintosh Bible and the monthly Mac magazines. I learned to switch off menu blinking to save processor cycles, to turn off extensions that did nothing because no applications supported them (hello, QuickDraw GX) and to allocate blocks of memory to programmes to make them run better. And remember RAM disks? Zapping the PRAM? Man, I miss those days.

OS X has always looked too garish, and yet the toned-down Graphite theme seems too dull. I’ve never liked the lozenges in the top left of the window, and I hate the fact that I’ve not been able to turn off or delete shit that I don’t use.

I quite understand why the OS has become less accessible to power users: it’s in the name of making it more accessible to non-power users, and turning the computer into an appliance. In principle, I approve of this noble goal. In reality, I want access to the file system, the system folders, and I want to know where my stuff is.

iCloud Drive is a step forward, inasmuch as it allows me to see files in a folder structure. On the other hand, I’m not supposed to know where the iCloud Drive folder itself resides. My system comes with a ton of fonts that I hate and will never use, but while Font Book allows me to turn (some of) them on and off, I’m not supposed to just delve into the System and fucking delete them forever.

The new icons are flat and dull. The use of Helvetica as a system font is an insult to my aesthetic sensibilities. The toolbar icons in most apps are dreadful. Tiny little diagrams surrounded by acres of white space. I know the whole thing is supposed to look better on a retina display, but I have a retina display, and it still looks dreadful. Why is so much space given over to white? Or grey? Why not have a bigger T to add a text box and no white space at all? Fucking zen master fucking Jony Ive has gone too far. Look at that Shape icon. A tiny green square in a much bigger white rectangle.  If I switched to the icon-only view, would a new user even be able to guess what clicking there would do? Or the difference between adding a text box and bringing up the Fonts window? What’s the difference between T and A? One’s a tit and one’s an ass, and the person responsible for this design is both.

I like the idea of Continuity, though in reality I’m unlikely to use it much. I like to create Keynote files on my MacBook and I really hate doing so on either an iPad or an iPhone. I still don’t rate the iPad for productivity, and I still hate typing on my iPhone, even though it’s the biggest one you can get. So I’m an old stuck-in-the-mud and Apple can replace me with hundreds of others who don’t object. But still, I feel the need to record my objection. I’ve been hatin’ on the OS X since 2001 and nothing in Yosemite is changing my mind. In fact, it’s actually worse.

That retina iMac though.