However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline).

It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave.

The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".

By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.

From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".

For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.

Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.

Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?

Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.

The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.

The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.

Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.

Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.

That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date.

As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.

We already know that Apple makes about 51% of its revenue from iPhone sales. Therefore it's reasonable to assume promotion opportunities are mostly centered around iPhone hardware and hardware, rather than MacOS. Those of us who depend on MacOS are likely screwed unless something at Apple changes.

Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.

Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.

I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.

How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.

Not recommended.</rant>

It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system.

I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.

Now I return from having spent the intervening years with an Ubuntu laptop and Windows 10 desktop as my daily drivers at home and Windows 11 at work for the last year.

MacOS is so much better than any of the alternatives. Maybe the bar really is just too low but that’s my experience.

The grass is not greener on the other side.

It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now.

I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18.

Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.

Last week I finally decided to jump to Linux. While I realize that I have a few nits and annoying bugs I run in to, its hard to say if linux has any more than the mainstream offerings.

Sure it ain't perfect but it's quite better that the other 2.

As we move forward, we're probably going to discover more hidden gems in the Apple’s ecosystem because, apparently, it's a serious crisis that is not going anywhere anytime soon.

You might be also interested in these related submissions:

Apple's Software Quality Crisis (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075)

What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail?(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685551)

Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version.

[0] Mostly.

I switched away from MacOS at that time.

My last job we were given MacOS machines, I didn't experience anything that made me want to reconsider my decision to ditch MacOS as my daily driver.

They might be, but unfortunately Apple's MetricKit reporting system is extremely primitive when it comes to crashes. It can't even handle C++ exceptions, and important information like thread/queue names, CPU registers, stack area and app state are strangely absent.

The ridiculously bad crash reporting on Apple products is why I wrote KSCrash.

When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.

Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.

Seems like the author was building to a point and simply decided to end it early.

Since a few years ago, I've chosen to stay at least 1 full version behind the current version and I've never regretted that.

Reporting an error is a good thing.

I think MacOS stopped you from executing unsigned code pretending to be a pdf, which would be a very good thing.

Or do they just not care?

Apple software, on the other hand, feels like a totally different company. Stuff like Siri is miles behind the ball, things like Airplay (IME) are flaky with little recourse when they don't work, Liquid glass is slower feeling and a noticeable battery hog. Apple music still has more hiccups and random play stoppage than Spotify.

I really, really like the hardware, but apple software needs some competition. Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago.

Did you ever check Apple support forums? The issue reports just go into blackhole without response or with useless robotic replies.

I use my mac for IntelliJ and Firefox. I guess maybe my usage surface is just really, really small; but I basically never have any problems ... and then others come along and say they're having huge issues.

I see the various updates as they happen and like ... all of them are neutral or minor inconveniences that are resolved next patch, for me.

After decades using macOS and significant investment the barrier to change is significant too, even if there was some ideal thing to jump to which there is not. But like others I am chipping away at it where I can, slowly divorcing from the Apple ecosystem, going ever more heterodox. I can see people reaching tipping points at various places, might take quite awhile but the thing is once someone jumps ship you're probably never getting them back and eventually that can add up to them taking others with them. It's just such a damned waste too.

I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me.

I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..

(source - https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...)

Reporting problems to Apple is downright demoralizing. Most of the time, the bugs remain unassigned, unread, and unsolved. The few that do earn a response, are usually gaslighting.

I suspect that Apple may have hired a whole bunch of less-than-stellar people, and it’s showing. That’s depressing, because I always considered them to be the gold standard.

This saves the individual files of the site in standard format, html, js, css, etc., much like Chrome does with Webpage, Complete.

it's time for a clean slate.

Another time I had to work on (and even develop for) a Mac exposed me to System 9. Again, the interface felt unusual (in a different way), but it was very obvious that somebody had thought it through, and made things consistent and discoverable. Drag everything onto everything and see what happens! Sometimes very neat, and much richer than Windows 3.x or CDE.

I loved the first releases of OS X, it was a real Unix at the foundation, and also a really nice, beautiful GUI on top, snappy even on the translucent triangular Macs. I adopted WindowMaker on my Linux machines, and kept to it for some years. I even hoped that OpenStep would help build some semblance of a new common GUI language across the platforms. Sadly, nicer window management I was used to under Linux did not materialize on Macs yet.

Over about two decades since, I was periodically issued a Mac at work, and grew less and less happy with the direction the UI was taking. It became more and more showy and bulky, even though it kept enviable consistency and polish for quite some time. I wished that the UI could do its job and fade away, but it insisted in taking more and more screen space, larger graphics, etc. It rather stubbornly refused most customizations, like selecting a different color instead of the signature silver / platinum / gray, and the Apple's signature blue accents. Only in 2018 the bastion of gray finally fell.

Last few years made things so much... less ideal that it was finally not only me who complained, but even die-hard Mac fans. The prized consistency, coherence, and, well, integral vision started to deteriorate openly. As if there's no single person who oversees the whole GUI experience and keeps it aligned any more. Not as bad as Windows, but... And, well, still no good window management, not even window snapping (except to screen edges, since quite recently). Still no "Alt-Tab"-like switching between windows (not apps). I bet that that feature has been requested by users countless times. No, go use Showtime, or whatnot.

And, yes, the whole signed binaries thing. I understand why it may be beneficial for quite some users. But for a developer, and in general for a user of software not from App Store, it's increasingly annoying. Well, it incentivizes building stuff locally from source. Publishing binaries is effectively $99/year though, AFAICT.

Compared to that, I'm pretty happy with my Linux Xfce setup. It allows me to customize the UI to my heart's content, and it adjusts to my workflows, not the other way around. Yes, I spent some noticeable time on these customizations, but that expense is amortized over at least 20 years (yes, my configs evolved mostly uninterrupted since 2006 or so). When I have to use a Mac, I sometimes try to find equivalents to some of the niceties I have under Xfce (not the most elaborate DE), and mostly find explanations saying that it's not possible on vanilla macOS and I should not want that. Third-party or open-source software sometimes helps quite a bit though; I'm very grateful to the authors of Hammerspoon and Rectangle.

In short, I'm only a sporadic and involuntary user of macOS, and my lack of desire to switch to it only grows with time, despite the superb hardware Apple offers.

(Thank you for reading my rant.)

This isn't new. Back in GPU-gate days, I had a MBP that I could very reliably kernel panic due to that issue. But it'd pass Diagnostics so "no fix for you!"

Even when I was there with a Genius, we did this, and on a brand new install - look, here, can replicate this KP (which was basically some of the same steps people had for identifying the GPU (and everything else matched up).

Similarly on iOS, Safari bookmarks don't expose all folder names but only "Bookmarks" and "Favourites" as default. Why do I have to do another extra tap to expose a single folder that I have to save bookmark in? Why cannot at least five folder names be exposed? Another absurdity is while saving a fullpage screenshot after cropping it, you have to click the checkmark "emoji" which is otherwise blank with no description, and then comes a sub-menu to save as pdf or photo; why cannot those four options be presented as is on the main menu?

Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple.

Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software.

Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.