IMHO it's difficult to compare Power Macs with today's Windows PCs.
The philosophy, the approach of each platform was different, especially in the 90s.
Before that one person returned, System 7 was licensed to third-party companies.
Not much unlike MS-DOS was licensed roughly ten years before.
This allowed for clone systems that were better, more open, more professional than the real thing.
On the other hand, Apple didn't make lot of money that way.
In other words, in the 90s, Apple wasn't Apple (as we know it).
It was more like a research institution with lots of interesting, but strange product studies going on.
It also was a time of transition.
The web was young and Macs were the reference platform when it comes to browsers.
Web designers and professionals used Macs for browsing the web with Mosaic, Netscape and Internet Explorer.
Edit : Desktop Publishing (DTP) also was a thing on the Macintosh early on.
Ventura Publisher (DOS/GEM) and Micrografx Picture Publisher (Win 3.1), successor of Astral Picture Publisher (Win 2) on PC too.
Likewise, the Mac's OS changed. The classic "System" (named Mac OS beginning with v7.5)
was showing its age, and Apple tried to replace it several times.
In the late 80s, Multi Finder was developed to allow for multitasking.
It was a neat hack upon an existing system that couldn't be replaced at the time.
In the early 90s, this was tried again with A/UX, a Unix System IV derivative with a compatibility layer for Mac applications.
It was very sophisticated, but required a gigantic amount of RAM.
After that, several projects like "Star Trek" were being explored but didn't materialize.
Likewise, "Cop Land" never really made it.
In the late 90s, when that other Steve dude returned ("Money for nothing" by Dire Straits plays in the background),
he brought with him that NeXT OS which became Mac OS X,
a custom Unix system based on the Darwin kernal. It got a sub set of the Mac OS 8 API, Carbon.
Carbon was an API that could be accessed on both Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X 10.0 onwards.
Applications using it were natively running on both platforms, without the need for several binaries or application packages.
However, Carbon also had its drawbacks. It was limited to the features of Mac OS 8/9.
Adobe was famous for relying on it for a long time, which made Apple upset. 😁
Things like Photoshop had a code base that had a long history, going back to the early 90s.
Okay, why I'm saying this? 😀
Macintosh systems have a long history and thus,
certain things seem to be odd and unlogical to us nowadays.
For example, the use of a "resource fork" in the file system.
The old System didn't use file extensions originally, but some kind of meta data.
During creation, each file got an application attribute that was defining what kind of file it is meant to be.
Hence, System/Mac OS used disk images (*.dsk,*.dmg etc) or special archives (*.sit) so often instead of more common zip/lzh files.
This was neat and advanced at the time when the Macintosh was released in the early 80s,
but seemed silly in the 2000s when people got used to PCs.
It also caused a headache once a file was copied from a Mac to a PC medium.
File systems like FAT32/NTFS can't store the resource fork data.
In a similar fashion, extensions nowadays seem to be a bad thing.
But back in the early days, it was an elegant way to add functionality to the system.
While the competition, say Ms-DOS platform, was fiddling with autoexec.bat, config.sys, TSRs etc,
on a Macitosh it merely was a matter of copying one or to files into the system/extension folder.
And when Mac OS moved to the Unix platform and became Mac OS X, this method was kept.
The Kernel Extensions (Kexts) are essentially serving the same purpose as loadable modules on Linux (modprobe..).
Without Kexts, the whole Hackintosh scene perhaps wouldn't have existed in first place.
Kexts are (were) the only way to make Mac OS X support unofficial hardware or bypass restrictions from Apple.
It comes to no surprise that Apple wants to prevent this on the shiny new M1 platform.
That's why the restrictions for Extensions are introduced exactly now, I think.
Kexts are the last bit of openness that remained.
By still supporting them on the Intel version of macOS would make the M1 port look inferrior.
Sure, Kexts are insecure and can cause stability issues - they are that way by design.
Just like VXDs were before the advent of WDM. Or the the useful, now defunct extension of old FireFox.
With great power comes great responsibility. 😉
Edit: Formatting fixed.
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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
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