Just going to add in here, following up on @eyoungren ’s experience:
As a former graphic artist (first career) and also as a scholar (after first career), the ability to unlock PDFs from, respectively, clients and from the occasional time I’d find a citation reference I couldn’t access from within the university’s subscriptions (to most, but not all of the journal distributors), the means to open and annotate for both, respectively, client assets and for my own research, was essential, pivotal for getting the job done.
I know it may seem fatuous to you, dpny, but this was the original purpose, design, and function of the PDF, or portable document format: basically, it was the invention of “digital paper”, arising from Adobe’s postscript encoding for laser printers, and it delivered on the portability to afford the user that portability. This came in especially handy when working with postscript-encoded vectors embedded within a PDF.
And yes, one didn’t start running into many PDFs anywhere until Acrobat 2.1 became 3.0, back in the mid ’90s. All the password security garbage was, as with the security fixes for the world wide web itself, an afterthought… a kludge.
So if we’re going to have a conversation about security and password123s, then we should probably open this discussion to how most technologies online and with modern tech generally is just kludge atop kludge, producing heavy payloads atop jenga foundations.
But from my vantage, it’s a banal and boring discussion to have. You‘re welcome to it, of course.
A bit. When the announcement arrived, I owned two Macs — one of which I’d purchased new, a Power Mac G4, in ’99.
From my vantage then, my frustration was in knowing that, as with the 68K/FAT/PPC transition, a whole lot of what I regarded as “static” software (that is: software which really didn’t require updates very often since their core functions were unchanged… FTP clients come to mind here) would need to be re-purchased, somewhat needlessly so.
Upgrades for my existing hardware would be, definitively, coming to a halt. And, frankly, I was dubious of what Intel had on queue back then as far as chip platforms: the 32-bit stuff leading into Yonah; Itanium (heavy heavy); and the new Xeons (lighter, but still spendy af and fairly energy-hungry like, frankly, the PPC970s). I was disappointed because I had grown up with both 68K and PowerPC architectures — with the latter having been an active user from very start to finish. I had watched them and worked with them throughout their lifetimes.
Without working on the software development side, I nevertheless did know the G5 design with IBM and deployment was a dog’s breakfast. I was, frankly, looking forward to the AIM alliance co-operating a bit better for a lighter, better planned and integrated, 64-bit roadmap for what would have become the eventual PowerPC G6 series — one which would appear in both laptop and desktop form.
Then again, I was not privy to the inner workings of Silicon Valley or its constant and petty drama, so I wasn’t up to speed with the way Apple — or, more to the point, Jobs — had been snubbing and neglecting (for want of a better, less snarky word) their working relationship with Motorola/Freescale.
It wouldn’t be until over three years after the WWDC announcement before I finally started to use an Intel Mac. During the intervening time, I had traded one PowerPC Mac for another PPC model, and bought an open box new iBook G4 to become my daily driver for most of those last two years before moving on to that first Intel Mac. I thought then — and still think now — the iBook G4 case’s ruggedness was better made and more resilient to breakage than the A1181 MacBooks (and time has, more or less, bore this to be so). I also know the iBook G4’s case made access to consumables (namely, the hard drive) to be a pest, but the MacBook need not have been of cheaper case materials.
By the time I bought a second Intel Mac, in 2009, many of the teething pains had been worked out, and the coincident arrival of Snow Leopard made me, at first, a reluctant convert, but over the course of Snow Leopard being refined, made me realize just how solid and stable Snow Leopard was. It was more that Snow Leopard made me a convert — though probably more a convert of Snow Leopard than of, merely, Intel Macs.
Anyhow, tl;dr: I can say I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the WWDC announcement in June 2005, from whom I heard the news, and basically the time of day and the sidewalk on which we were walking. Which is to say: yes, as a longtime user and consumer of Macs, I felt a bit like a bait-and-switch had just taken place.
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