Now that Apple has an existential crisis for growth and has become a services company, almost all Apple effort in software is aimed at maximizing recurring revenue and subscriptions. The UX for fitness, iCloud, IAPs, Apple TV, Arcade, Apple Pay, etc is top notch, because it makes them more money on an ongoing basis.
The Finder, not so much.
Also, a lot of the people who used to care deeply on a philosophical level about the UX of a computer for its own sake have either retired or moved on to other companies. Apple is not the same culture as it was fifteen years ago. A lot of younger people that work there don’t understand the Apple-ness of the Jobs era, and the products speak more to DJI than vegan counterculture hippies.
There is also obviously a lot of product-manager-career-driven-design going on, same as any other hip modern tech company in no danger of going out of business (cf Slack, Dropbox, etc).
Apple was, in many ways, an outgrowth of the obsessive nature of Jobs. He’s gone and it is perfectly natural that Apple would regress toward the mean of any well funded hip tech company.
- Yes, Finder is no good but it's not like it has regressed from circa 2011 - it's always been kinda non-intuitive to search for anything
- Music app is probably the worst of all
- definitely can find more
... That being said, overall performance has increased and most other parts have improved:
- the recently redesigned settings menu is better than before
- Safari has improved (I use it every day)
- misc. useful features have been added, like using an iPad as an external display
- crucially, overall stability is better than ever, in my experience
Overall, MacOS mostly "stays out of the way" and lets various apps do the work, which is arguably what a good OS should be doing.
- the iOSification of the desktop OS
Yes, that includes the incredibly shitty new preferences app. Compare what they did with the design guidelines they used to have: https://marioaguzman.github.io/design/layoutguidelines/
- Forcing shitty mobile-first Catalyst and SwiftUI apps
Prime example... Well, all of Apple's recent first-party apps: from Messages to Home to Books to...
- Hiding and removing useful functionality for the sake of "clean interface"
- The insane amount of notifications by default, and the gazillion ways to deliver them
- Shitty support of external displays
- Bloated, unstable developer tools that get worse every year
- Superfluous half-baked "solutions" like Stage Manager. Also, mobile-first
- Superfluous half-baked untested abominations like language switchers, or Caps Lock indicator
A billion other things large and small.
I remember when Jobs died I thought "Apple - Jobs = Sony". I don't think I was too wrong.
One need only look at Apple’s attention to packaging design or audio quality to know they’re still a head and shoulders above any other consumer electronics company.
Sony stopped innovating in consumer products many years ago, as far as I can tell. Maybe the days of the Walkman were different but I was too young to know what it was like then.