Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased.

It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and moved on (taoofmac.com, my blog, was started when I wrote a few very popular switcher guides, and even though I kept using the same domain name I see myself as a UNIX guy, not "just" a Mac user).

For me, Spotlight is no longer (anywhere) near as useful to find files (and sometimes forgets app and shortcut names it found perfectly fine 5 minutes ago), and there is no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage).

Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_).

I keep being tempted to write same post but named "Does all software work like shit now?", because I swear, this is not just Apple. Software in general feels more bugged as a new norm.

Most websites have an element that won't load on the first try, or a button that sometimes needs to be clicked twice because the first click did nothing.

Amazon shopping app needs two clicks every now and then, because the first one didn't do what it was supposed to do. Since 3+ years ago at least.

Spotify randomly stops syncing play status with its TV app. Been true for at least a year.

HBO app has subtitles for one of my shows out of sync and it has been for more than a year.

Games including AAA titles need few months post-release fixing before they stabilize and stop having things jerk themselves into the sky or something.

My robot vacuum app just hangs up forever once in a while and needs to be killed to work again, takes 10+ seconds after start to begin responding to taps, and it has been like that for over 2 years of owning the device.

Safari has had a bug when opening a new tab and typing "search term" too quickly, it opens URL http://search%20term instead of doing a Google search. 8 years ago I've opened a bug for that which was closed as a duplicate, and just recently experienced this bug again.

It really seems that criteria for "ready for production" is way lower now. If my first job 13+ years ago any QA noticed any of that above, the next version wouldn't be out until it is fixed. Today, if "Refresh" button or restarting the app fixes it, approved, green light, release it.

I'm done with macOS, I've migrated to Linux for my general purpose computing. With every new release of macOS, Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass, increasing Apple's control over what software can be run on macOS, forcing apps to be signed with an Apple Developer ID. While I'm happy they are taking security seriously, I'm seriously creeped out that macOS sends hashes of every executable I run to their cloud. It's starting to feel like a broader move away from the openness of personal computing and towards a more controlled, appliance-like software experience.

When Sequoia eliminated the ability to override Gatekeeper by control-clicking, it became clear to me that Apple is now employing a frog boiling strategy towards their ultimate goal -- more control of the software you can run on their hardware.

> I am not suggesting Apple has fallen behind Windows or Android. Changing a setting on Windows 11 can often involve a journey through three or four different interface designs, artifacts of half-implemented changes dating back to the last century. Whenever I find myself stuck outside of Appleland, I am eager to return “home,” flaws and all.

Hard agree with this. I sometimes have to boot up a windows laptop to play Minecraft with the kiddo, and it never stops reminding me how little I know about Windows now, how counter-intuitive everything is, how everything feels designed for a user whose mind I cannot comprehend.

Agree. Apple needs to clean up shop - MacOS has been egregiously worsening year over year. Some features like Universal Control and Continuity Camera are legitimately awesome, but they do not make up for the INSANELY slow System Settings app that gets harder to navigate with each release and which has >2s wait times for the right pane to respond to a change in the left pane. Steve Jobs would have fired the person responsible for that overhaul three years ago, it's embarrassing. Messages too needs a ground-up rewrite. Getting more elaborate emoji tapbacks doesn't make up for fundamental instability and poor syncing behavior. C'mon!

One thing that has been slowly creeping in is a little bit of a Microsoft-like "you will use our feature", like launching apple music every time I hit headphone controls, or nagging me to turn on reactions every time I start a video call. In some ways that's more annoying than the outright bugs, as they could choose not to be that way and market themselves as not being that way.

As a former Apple employee that left in part due to declining software quality (back in 2015!), and the relentless focus on big flashy features for the next yearly release cycle, I could not agree more.

I recently had to do a full reinstall of macOS on my Mac Studio due to some intermittent networking issue that, for the life of me, I could not pin down. Post-reinstall, everything's fine.

They need a Snow-IOS too.

- Ever since I've updated to the latest iOS 18, my watch complications(weather doodad) stop working randomly because they just lose the location services permission. Then in settings, the location services permission list acts like the weather app isn't installed.

- The new Mail app now automatically classifies your email, but still gives you the "All Mail" option. But the unread count badge on the app only works off of what they classify as your "Priority" mail. There's a setting to change that, so that it shows you the unread count of ALL mail, not just priority mail, but when you change that setting nothing changes. This is my biggest problem with new iOS.

- Keyboard sometimes doesn't get out the way any more when it should.

These are just off the top of my head. It used to be such a nice, polished experience. Their competition was just outclassed. Now, when my phone dies I'm going to have a good look at all the other options.

I don't think that's quite right. Snow Leopard was a lot of changes to a lot of the OS code base and wasn't great out of the gate, taking multiple dot releases, like all large-scale software updates do, to stabilize and bugfix enough to be "good."

There is no silver bullet, just a lot of lead ones and the answer to Apple's quality problem is to begin baking QA back into the process in a meaningful way after letting it atrophy for the last decade or so.

Hire more humans and rely less on automation. Trust your developers, QA, and user support folks and the feedback they push up the chain of command. Fix bugs as the arise instead of assigning them to "future" or whatever. Don't release features until they're sufficient stable.

This is all basic stuff for a software company, stuff that Apple seems to have forgotten under the leadership of that glorified accountant, Cook.

Snow Leopard was macOS moving so slowly people thought Apple were abandoning the Mac.

Apple changed how they tied OS updates to hardware sales in this era and this left a lot of Macs on Snow Leopard for half a decade. So people remember that last point update – which was as close to a low-term-stability release as Apple has ever had.

But to get there, Snow Leopard received 15 updates over 2 years and it was really just point updates to Leopard so it was more like 29 updates over 4 years without a major user facing feature. And this was after Leopard itself took over 2 years to develop.

If Apple did nothing but polish features and reduce bugs for 6 years, people would proclaim them dead. And they might actually be dead since their entire sales model is tied to cycles of development, promotion and delivery. For those of us who remember Apple getting stuck on System 7 between 1990 and 1997 and how the company nearly collapsed in that era: it would be a delay almost on that scale.

This is an interesting idea, and I am actually curious what Apple is going to do going forward. A "Snow Leopard"-esque release would be nice, but I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release. This has always made some sense to me, as after 4-6 years, you do start to feel it.

I bought an M1 Max that is now almost 4 years old and it still feels new to me. I can't really imagine a change that would happen in the next 2 years that would make this thing feel slow where an M3 would feel sufficient, so I'm curious to see if Apple really does just go hardcore on forced obsolescence going forward. I have a few M series devies now, from M1 to M3, and I honestly cannot tell the difference other than export times for video.

I can imagine some kind of architecture change that might come with an M6 or something that would force an upgrade path, but I can't see any reason other than just forcing upgrades to drop support between M1-M5. Maybe if there is a really hard push next year into 8K video? Never even tried to edit 8K, so I don't know. I'm guessing an M1 might feel sluggish?

Interesting take. I'm mostly not affected by that because I use except from the OS itself nearly no Apple software to be not trapped in the Apple golden cage ever. No photos, no Apple mail, no Apple maps, no Notes etc etc. and/but I also use no iPhone. But system settings is awful, at least I can search there to not wrap my head around it.

I actually see progress in things that matter for me as software dev like virtualisation and Docker support. And with frameworks like MLX I can even run image generation tools like FLUX locally on my Mac (search for mflux). Amazing! And Apple Silicone is a screamer... still cannot believe I have the fastest single core PC on Earth in my laptop.

I only thing I use is the calendar to see my personal and work Google calendars aggregated at the same time.

So far I'm happy with macOS. If the whole graphics industry (Adobe etc) would support Linux more I would even switch away to Linux but because I'm dealing with photography, color correction and a little video too I will never switch to Linux (the graphics system quality in macOS is way too good). Windows is unfortunately no go too because of the built-in spyware and ads in the OS (like WTF).

I consider Apple Intelligence also as a sort of spyware. I don't want to activate it ever (but it gets auto activated after updates) and I don't want it to download its stuff and waste space. If people want to use it: fine, but if I personally opt out, I opt out fully Apple!

Absolutely drives me nuts that I can't remove the music icon from the systray in Mac. And ditto on all the spotlight issues.

Also, why does it take 10 seconds for activity monitor to show information? The list goes on.

If only Mac hardware officially supported Linux, I would never touch that macOS again.

Dogfooding is a thing right? Right?!

Working for two companies I see how in the small one people manually test their changes, try to break them, even having in-code tests. At the big corpo - noone cares. Tests are green? Release to prod, close ticket and take another. Clients complain? There are 5-6 layers of people before such complain can come back to the team.

I wouldn't agree with "less glitchy" than Windows. Currently Win10 is the best one if it comes to stability, but Microsoft is already killing support for it. Windows 11 have problems even with typing into Start Menu search - basic functionality. Randomly takes input or not. So I think we are lowering the bar and the market agrees how low it should go.

It absolutely does. There are so man quality of life issues that plague the platform that don't get addressed year after year. I'm sick of albums syncing to my phone losing their artwork. With Sequoia, I'm sick of running multiple network extensions (you know like Tailscale and Little Snitch) causing network issues.

I'm sick of the random Safari crashes.

…and speaking of Snow versions, bring back those cool welcome videos when you first purchase a Mac!

I miss those. Unfortunately, since Apple doesn't do the whole space theme anymore, you'd probably get some really boring drone shots of California at best before a Setup Assistant faded into view from behind a Redwood or something.

When I started using OS X, one of the biggest draws for me was first-class native keyboard shortcuts support that was consistently followed and applied by all apps (first party and otherwise). So you could be sure that a shortcut for search across all contexts (global) would work just as well as the shortcut for a contextual search within any app. No one writes great third-party native apps anymore and even Apple's own apps completely disregard this part of their heritage. Just try searching across the AppStore, Apple Music, and the legacy Finder.

For newer Apple apps, sometimes the keyboard shortcuts simply don't exist. I believe part of the problem here is the deprecation of AppleScript, which means there's no incentive to spend time on consistency, and the other part has to do with organizational indifference towards all the wonderful UX innovations from the past.

What Apple has successfully accomplished, in collaboration with other 'big tech' companies is drastically reducing user expectations from their software. I wouldn't completely blame the AppStore's forced race to the bottom for this alone. There is still a huge market for tasteful apps that cost more (even sometimes with obnoxious subscriptions), but if even Apple isn't leading by example, why waste time on it if you could just build another simple note-taking app.

I still remember the Snow Leopard update wiped my drive clean. Talk about most solid software releases Apple ever put out. Period. Yeah right.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/10/apple-owns-up-to-odd...

With the hopes that Apple engineers are scanning this discussion:

- Using the iPhone to scan documents from Finder has recently stopped working on the second scan. I need to restart my phone to get it to work again.

- iPhone mirroring is terrible: laggy, UI glitches, drops click events, scrolling is a nightmare. This is when it actually even manages to connect.

- Often, with Airpods on, lowering the volume, shutting down the iPhone display and putting it in my pocket quickly enough will entirely turn off volume. If you happen to increase the volume instead, you'll get blasted with maximum volume in your ears.

- Use vertical tabs on Safari for one day. You'll see it actually crash a few times. Not to mention the UI glitches. - Open the App Store on macOS. It first opens empty, then the UI controls show up, then it flickers the entire UI. I am convinced it's a Web app.

- In System Settings, most of the sections you click have a delay in rendering. Nothing feels snappy in that app. I can actually click 3 sections quick enough for the second to never even be rendered.

- Sometimes dragging an application from the Dock popup menu into the Trash does nothing, even though it appears to have worked. I often find that it wasn't deleted at all, that I have to open Applications folder in Finder and hit Cmd-Backspace to delete it.

I feel like they're trying to build too many platforms most of which have become quite large. macOS, iOS, iPad OS, visionOS, watchOS, tvOS. The fact all of these systems are quite tightly linked in terms of features/syncing makes it difficult to navigate. If you want to ship every single year you need more developers, but that might make the collaboration between the systems more difficult. They need to move away from the one year cycle. It's a stupidly short period of time to ship a whole OS (or 6 whole OS's). If you want to keep them all in sync switch to two year cycles and decouple some of the apps from the core OS (e.g. Music, Safari, etc) so they can be updated as necessary outside of the cycle.

Apple needs to make all of the accessory apps (photos, music, news, maps, mail, etc..) uninstallable and able to be added later if needed through their app store.

Every MacOS update brings along this bloatware that is not easily removed.

Not just their software, the hardware is beginning to be get pretty unwieldily complicated.

From an OS / software perspective:

Have a "core" macOS that has none of the apps / integrations are baked in at an OS level.

You install the things you want, how you want - eg iMessage, Mail, and then iCloud if you want to sync it, and Photos etc.

Have a slim, fast, stable OS that I can just turn on and get going with.

From the hardware perspective, I made this comment a little while ago but what I want to be able to choose is:

- Device: Watch, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Mac

- Size: Mini, "Normal / Default" (Air), Max

- Processing Power: "Normal / Default", Pro, Ultra

- And maybe storage.

That way I can go and buy a MacBook Pro (13"?), or a MacBook Max Pro (15"), or a MacBook Mini (11"), or a normal iPad Mini Ultra, or an iMac Mini (21"?), or a Watch Pro, or a Mac Max Ultra etc.

Device + Size + Power.

It's kinda there, but not quite.

> In the 22 years since I became a “switcher”, this is the worst state I can remember Apple’s platforms being in.

Indeed, I remember three times when Apple went a bit overboard on the feature front, but dialed it back and made some of the most stable and useful OS versions:

OS 8.5/8.6 pushed a bunch of features and were the last big pushes pre-OSX, but then OS 9 fixed a TON of bugs, and added a few smaller quality of life improvements that made running 'Classic' Mac OS pretty good, for those who were stuck on it for the transitional years.

Mac OS X 10.0 rewrote _everything_, and especially 10.0 was _dog_ slow, with all the new Quartz graphics stuff in an era where GPU accelerated 3D display widgets wasn't quite prevalent. 10.1 patched in a bunch of missing features (like DVD Player—it was still a pretty useful tool back then), and fixed a couple of the most glaring problems... but 10.4 Tiger was the first OS X release that was 'fast' enough OS X was a joy to use in the same way OS 9 was at the time. At least on newer Macs.

And then of course Snow Leopard, which is the subject of the OP.

macOS 13/14/15 have progressively added more little bugs I track in my https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook project; anything from little networking bugs to weird preferences that can't be automated, or don't even work at all when you try toggling them.

That's besides the absolute _disaster_ that is modern System Preferences. Until the 'great iOSification' a few years back, Apple's System Preferences and preference pane were actually a pleasure to use, and I could usually remember where to go visually, with a nice search assistant.

Now... it's hit or miss if I can even find a setting :(

I'm still waiting for them to remove Launchpad (which seems like a half assed step towards unifying desktop and tablet systems), and I've yet to meet anyone that uses their weird new desktop management system, the thing with the windows on the left side. That just reminds me of the GUI experiments they did in the 2000s, with 3d environments and whatever Ubuntu (or gnome/kde/whichever) tried to do.

I'm hoping they're gathering usage analytics and will overhaul unused features.

Caveat, I'm probably not their average user, I do almost everything via Spotlight. I don't even use the bottom menu thing, it automatically hides and I only use it when I accidentally hid a window.

I don't think it does. Long term Apple user here (since 2007). I'm typing this on a 5 year old pile of junk with Windows 11 LTSC on it. The (M4) Mac is sitting next to me acting as an SMB server until I can be bothered to get all my stuff out of it. It's just tiring using a Mac these days. It's difficult to explain but everything feels slightly frustrating. The nice things are really nice. The whole experience is quite nice. Until you hit a problem. Then it's a complete pit of pain and misery and there just aren't enough ways out of it.

Had a few issues with iCloud syncing and data loss as well and what with being based in the UK and the general problems with geopolitics and the cloud I figured I'd try and get as much stuff out of iCloud as possible. Well there's not much advantage now. Most of it is in the ecosystem tie in, not the hardware. And on top of that the provisioned services such as Apple Music are just pain for me on a daily basis. My entire music catalogue disappeared in a puff of smoke when I was offline for nearly a week. The one thing I wanted it for!

So back to the PC. I ran out of disk space on the (soldered in SSD) Mac. I can't delete anything and macOS has leaked out about 20gb suddenly. I don't know what this is other than about 5 gig of it is Apple Intelligence despite telling it to fuck off. So it's late Friday afternoon and I need to get something done so I can have a clear weekend. I dig in the junk cupboard and find a couple of hard disks but no way of connecting them to the USB-C only Mac. Amazon solutions aren't available for delivery until Sunday. There upon I discovered the kids' "covid work PC" for when they were home studying. Despite the acceptable 16Gb of RAM it only had a meagre 256Gb disk in it. No worries. Opened it up and there's a hole for an SSD in it. It now has +500Gb SSD. Brilliant. On goes windows 11 LTSC. I'm back up running R in under an hour and have transferred all the data over.

I never went back. It feels better here. This thing is a swiss army knife. And extension of me. Not the other way round like on the Mac. The Mac feels like it feeds off me: both cash and energy. Apple need to fix that.

See my blog post "The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard": https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html

TL;DR What people remember fondly is not Mac OS X 10.6.0, which was in fact very buggy, and buggier than 10.5.8, but rather later versions of Snow Leopard after almost 2 full years of bug fixes.

See also "Snow Leopard bug deletes all user data": https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d...

The yearly release cycle is the problem. Apple needs "another Snow Leopard" only in the sense that I mentioned above, "almost 2 full years of bug fixes", although at this point, Apple has more than 2 years of technical debt.

The “Snow Leopard effect” is more about the transition to Intel from PowerPC than the OS itself.

And maybe I’m a minority but the latest macOS is not worse than previous editions, for instance I use Sequoia on a M1 Mac but also 10.4 Tiger and OS 9.2.2 on a PowerMac G4 (MDD, 2x 1.2Ghz with 2Go of RAM) and the stability is not worse on Sequoia than Tiger or 9.2.2, in fact I have encountered more crashes in 9.2.2 and Tiger than Sequoia and all macOS 11+ (except Big Sur who has rough edge on beginning on M1 device)

This is not only applied to Apple's software. The entire software and hardware market including iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Windows, etc. is pressured to release new products with more and more features every year, advertising those new features to facilitate sales. The result is, what was once a simple and cool product has become heavily bloated with unneccessary features.

In my own experience, I have noticed that Apple's software 'breaks' more on older hardware, be that Mac's, iPhones or iPads. For all the credit apple gets for supporting older devices, those devices are definitely not treated as first class citizens. For example, the touch keyboard on my (work) iPhone 12 Pro works decidedly worse than on my (private) iPhone 16 Pro. The error rate is much worse, and I believe it's due to the amount of useless features that get added with each new installment of iOS.

Whether that's intentional or not (I believe it is), Apple should focus more on delivering a stable experience, on both new and old devices.

I echo the sentiment a lot of people have already expressed. That is, using Apple products is like being a junkie. You need to use their products because there is no real alternative, but you feel kind of dirty because of their practices.To me, that sounds like it should be a huge red flag for Apple execs.

This alone says a lot about Apple's software "prowess", i.e perennial customer hostility combined with clear incompetence, (in which their "core" customer base has by now becomes participants in some kind of Stockholm syndrome scenario), that an attempted de-shittification of their OS is being hailed as (nostalgia tinted?) greatness :)

It's curious how the author mentions iMessage. No Apple user among my friends in Europe uses that. Zero. I guess in the US this is very much not so.

It's all WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal here, nowadays. I.e. they wouldn't know about bugs in iMessage as they never open it.

I'd be curious to hear about other regions of the world. Do people there use iMessage?

If we look at OSX Releases [1] ; from OS X 10.10 Yosemite in 2014. The only useful feature for me was Universal Clipboard. That is 10 years of macOS and that was about the only user features.

While the 10 years have some security, performance, drivers, file system, refactoring going on. Most of the user features were useless.

And I spend 90% of my time inside Safari, and yet Desktop Safari is still shit after all these years.

I am not excited about 99% of new macOS user features. Most of them are features for features sake. Just continue the macOS engineering work, and for once pour more resources into Safari and allow Safari support on older Mac system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history#Releases

> Apple’s iMessage and SMS tool is an essential app for communication for me and, I suspect, the vast majority of Apple users.

For the majority American Apple users, sure. But I myself hardly ever remember that this app exists.

The thing that drove me nuts in particular in Sonoma though, is their "improved" text fields. Where it would show the stupid little popup with the active keyboard layout icon next to the cursor. Clearly made by someone who doesn't actually need to use multiple keyboard layouts (gosh do I envy those people). But at least I could disable it with a defaults write command.

Oh and Mail, yes, it would sometimes stubbornly refuse to load new messages, or delay them by minutes. It worked fine the previous 10 years. It would've been free to just leave it alone.

Apple needs a Snow Apple. Fire Tim, bring in some real change.

Last week, I switched to a Mac for the first time in my life after using Windows and Linux for around 30 years. Naturally, I hate a lot of things due to old habits, and the shortcuts constantly confuse me. But what really surprises me is the number of obvious bugs in common workflows. At least five times a day, I catch myself thinking, "There's no way this is actually broken." I didn't expect macOS to be even buggier than Windows.

That said, the hardware and the absence of Windows' user-hostile nonsense bring me endless joy. I don't think I'll go back to a PC (the Mac feels like a different class of quality) but to be honest, I expected more.

It is literally insane that when I search for Photos on iOS I can't zoom in to make the thumbnails bigger. As an approaching mid-40s person this is untenable, even worse that it DOES let you zoom in prior to search.

Hard to disagree. You would think for a company obsessed with performance per watt and battery life that every release would be as fast if not faster that its predecessor and more efficient to boot.

For me, I hiched my wagon to the Apple team, years ago, and have held on, through some truly disastrous times.

I can't predict whether or not they will get past this, but I'll keep hanging on, anyway.

The code quality (the bits they let us see), however, seems to be going downhill, as is the quality of the documentation. These are things that always held up, in the past.

It's fairly discouraging. I suspect the quality of their hires has been going down. I'm not sure what it is, they want, but it doesn't seem to be quality.

What Apple needs, is to fix that weird bug where my mouse cursor stops responding to what it's hovering over. How does something so fundamentally broken make its way into an OS?

I find it incredibly developer hostile as an OS now. I don’t want to have to type a password in to use a debugger. I want to be able to download software and run it as I want, whoever wrote it, without them having to sign it. All that does is push people away from supporting Macs, particularly if they’re learning and don’t want to shell out £99 for a developer license. And you can see that because the Mac ecosystem has become dramatically less varied and stagnant.

I don't think it's just an Apple thing. I think it's just a big company thing. For example, the YouTube app has so many errors in the very common path, such as opening comments on channels and so on. I think after a while big companies simply become hollow from the inside and self-combust. Just like large animals have a cancer protection gene, I think there is a max size companies can get before they sell combust and they do not have a cancer preventing gene.

Apple got hooked on money. Behead everyone at the helm, let some fresh air in.

The article is spot on and articulated my feelings exactly. I too became a loyal Apple supporter nearly 20 years ago because "it just works". Sadly, I no longer feel this way. The operating systems on my Macbook, iphone and iPad have consistently gotten worse with each update over the last 5-10 years. Apple is losing the magic on the software front.

> I am not suggesting Apple has fallen behind Windows or Android. Changing a setting on Windows 11 can often involve a journey through three

Love how you can't find a critique of Apple without the person feeling the need to throw shade at Windows. They need to constantly reassure themselves and other fanboys it was the right decision.

And for an OS that's geared to your grandmother it sure does seem to shit the bed often.

You could argue that macOS development is too slow, not too fast and in need of a maintenance year.

Basic OS features have fallen way behind in term of UX - and of vision. Managing files and searching for information have become a chore compared to most internet- or llm-based services. Even a bug-free Finder or faster Spotlight would not bridge that gap.

All apps listed in the article feel similarly lost behind - Mail, Messages, Photos. The only exception is System Settings that does definitely need a snow version.

This is obviously true for other platforms as well.

We are possibly lacking a leap forward. Not faster horses, electric cars.

An obvious root cause of this is the lack of newcomers to the OS again. It's an oligopole that has no interest making things much improved.

Huh, I was actually on this page a few years ago, but iOS and MacOS quality has been super solid for me this past year. Anyone else feel this way? Judging by the nodding comments maybe I’m just the outlier?

> In an era when people still paid money for operating system upgrades every few years (anyone else remember standing in line for Windows 95?)

No, and I would have been too young to purchase it.

But I'd be surprised at the idea of massive demand for an upgrade to Windows 95. What we did was buy a new computer that had Windows 95 on it. Computers used to go out of date very quickly.

We kept our older computer that ran DOS. (It had Windows 3.1 installed, but the only reason you'd start that was if you wanted to play Solitaire.) It continued to run DOS just fine.

I know it doesn’t affect a lot of people, but pasting in hex mode in Calculator broke in Sequoia. Previously, any number pasted in hex mode was treated as hex (as expected) even if the number consisted only of decimal characters (say 20, which would be decimal 32). Now numbers pasted with only decimal characters are treated as decimal (pasting “20” turns into 0x14) and numbers with with at least one alpha hex char is treated as hex. The workaround is to prefix the number with “0x”, but that’s not always practical.

Wow, that 2013 WWDC video is so incredibly impactful. I had no idea I was going to experience what I did when I hit play. It resonates with me so strongly, I honestly wasn't ready for it.

Snow leopard was my favorite operating system ever. I used it on my first real computer, a horrible Asus eeepc netbook and it worked flawlessly. Best hackintosh I've ever used. Of course I used it on official hardware as well but it brings back fond memories.

https://www.svenbit.com/2011/02/install-hackintosh-on-eeepc-...

I have two Apple TV 4Ks and both started dropping Bluetooth connections every minute or so after a recent upgrade.

My headphones will cut out and when I go to pause the video I’ll be clicking frantically because the remote isn’t working either. Or I’ll be in the menu and the remote will pin to the left or right and scroll to the end of some massive YouTube list.

Reboots, resets, nothing fixes it.

My Apple Watch regularly has a glitched Home Screen too.

I defended Apple’s quality recently, right before everything started breaking for me.

I thought it was because of my MacBook pro still being an Intel One and thought that nobody at Apple cares about that anymore. But it seems also the M family suffers from it.

Mine doesn't really sleep. It's always warmish despite all my best efforts to make it actually sleep. It's always plugged in, so no biggie, but it's annoying as hell.

Reddit wisdom says it's because of my usb peripherals, but it's just a webcam, mouse, keyboard, and a yubikey.

Absolutely agree. This week, I can't get Chrome to connect to local servers.

ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE it says.

Yes, I said Yes to the new permission. Yes the check mark is on in Privacy, I mean all 20 of them that say "Google Chrome". Yes I toggled it off and on. Yes I rebooted. Still have to use a different browser to access my own local server because there is a new privacy feature that... doesn't work.

> moving the Mac to a new processor architecture (for the second of three times)

Four times kinda — maybe five if you want to count PPC32 and PPC64 separately but I usually don't since the Intel transition happened so soon afterward that there is really no PPC64 lineage to speak of.

I definitely count 32-bit and 64-bit Intel separately though due to the number of years taken to transition, all of the annoying early-Intel-Mac 32-bit EFI issues, and the need to manually opt in to the 64-bit kernel on many machines. In fact Snow Leopard was the first OS to let you do so! The “no new features” tagline was snappy but it's really not true at all :p

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/261749/in-which-ve... sez —

“Mac OS X Snow Leopard and above could only be installed on Macs with Intel processors, and introduced a number of fully 64-bit Cocoa applications (e.g. QuickTime X), and most applications were recreated to use the 64-bit x86-64 architecture (although iTunes was a notable exception to this!) This meant these applications could run in 32-bit mode on machines with 32-bit processors, and in 64-bit mode on machines with 64-bit processors. And yes, the kernel was updated so that it could run in 64-bit mode on some limited hardware, and only by default on Mac Pros, while other newer Macs were capable of running the kernel bit did not do so by default.”

Relevant articles:

- “Mac OS X v10.6: Macs that use the 64-bit kernel” https://web.archive.org/web/20121024223751/https://support.a...

- “OS X: Starting up with the 32-bit or 64-bit kernel” https://web.archive.org/web/20121024194635/http://support.ap...

- https://macperformanceguide.com/SnowLeopard-64bit.html

> Yes, they work and are still smoother and less glitchy than Windows 11, but they feel like software developed by people who don’t actually use that software

I would have to agree here (and Apple also don't seem to assess feedback for their GUI changes), but unfortunately this thread is already on a software quality meta tangent rather than listing individual annoyances so here's my short list in the hope actual bugs can be discussed:

- window focus management broken: when you minimize or close a window, another random window of that app you're closing the window of is put into front even when that window is minimized; or other completely unrelated apps get focus

- index/Spotlight not showing file locations (full paths) after searching; the fsck?

- gestures being introduced that do stuff that you hit inadvertently and leave you in a state where you don't know how to undo its effects such as the super-annoying "fullscreen" mode when dragging windows around or pressing Command-F since Sequoia. Requires you to fscking research how to leave fullscreen mode (while not as cringe as Windows help "communities", the level of talking past another is getting there, options being discussed that don't exist in Sequoia's Dock/Desktop settings)

- update or feature nagging (I don't care I could use my iPhone as a webcam right now, go away)

- sometimes difficult to find mouse pointer on large screens

- older problem but I know at least one person on the verge of leaving Mac OS because of it after 20+ years of loyalty (or outright fanboyism tbh): in a German locale, you can't switch off PC gender-neutral language which is not only pushy and annoying but also space-inefficient as fsck

No. But yes: Get rid of Siri, Make Preference pane alphabetically ordered, Get rid of Spotlight and buy Alfred, Disable notifications by default.

The surprising thing to me, is that I have been a Mac user since forever, I think Leopard was my first OS. Things have barely changed since then, there have been some subtle redesigns since then, but the desktop has remained largely static.

I don't understand why macOS has so many issues. I still encounter memory leaks and have to kill Finder or Dock every few days lest it eat all my memory.

Look snow leaopard actually added the hugest feature ever, grand central dispatch. That’s what billy always dreamed about (concurrent windows) and that is what rust craze is about, adding the same to Linux/windows. Like Apple said, snow leopard was under the hood changes. So don’t you worry you will get your snow sequoia, the ai reorganisation is exactly that.

Am I the only one who is perfectly fine with the current macOs/IOS landscape? I encounter no bugs on daily basis, if at all.

> I could walk item by item through System Settings and point out many equally inexplicable decisions. Did anyone at Apple really believe a Mac user’s life would be better if common features were buried deep in menus?

I have to agree with this, System Settings seems very inconsistent (design) and has terrible information architecture / organization.

Been looking for a windows replacement and probably will just stick to some linux distro. I had hoped Apple was better…

Speaking of, I just bought a brand new M4 Air. The thing is amazing, except I swear that Command-Tab does not work consistently sometimes, it just does nothing and I have to press it again. It's baffling, has anyone had this before? Never had this issue on any computer in the past 20 years, it's strange.

Another example was High Sierra. They completely swapped out the file system on that release, focusing primarily on under-the-hood changes, and imo was also one of the most stable macOS releases to date.

It should be noted that Snow Leopard was pretty buggy until several versions in.

Our memory is a lot rosier than the reality.

How does Apple Music not have an equivalent to Spotify Connect?! Renders Apple Music unusable, and no, we're not talking about Airplay, and no, we're not downloading iTunes Remote (can't believe it still even has 'iTunes' in its name!).

Snow Leopard was released while Steve Jobs was on medical leave. It was driven (as far as I can recall) by Bertrand Serlet. Rumour has it that Steve was furious about the "no new features" marketing when he returned from his medical leave.

Starting to really look like building different enough to be incompatible OSes for each of your products was a bad idea.

Do we really need MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, TVOS, VisionOS, does maintaining all this make the product better kind term.

Great post.

BTW, there is an (earlier) example of Snow Leopard in the Microsoft ecosystem -- that would be Windows XP, which similarly avoided major new subsystems and new applications built-into-the-OS, but was remarkably fast and stable for its time.

Open Launchpad and then try to click the spotlight icon in the menubar after. Even after returning to the desktop the system won’t allow me to click its own menubar. Reproducible on all machines, drives me insane.

Apple needs to restore primacy to the UI. MacOS and iOS used to feel non-blocking with a UI that would always respond regardless of how long a remote or long-running background task required.

Now iOS and MacOS feel sluggish and slothlike, waiting on IO, typically from a remote call. The webdevs have taken over.

Yes they need to remove cruft, and also re-hire the ruthless UI Nazis who would enforce 120hz responsiveness at all cost.

Power Mac G5 systems sold in 2006 were abandoned by Snow Leopard in 2009.

Apple could conceivably abandon intel Mac Pro systems sold in 2023 by releasing an Apple Silicon-only macOS in 2026, but three years still seems a bit aggressive.

I don’t use pretty much any of the features he listed.

But Sequoia has made some M1 Pros run poorly in my environment. It’s unacceptable the amount of resources it takes to do basic stuff that we got right of 30 years ago.

Sigh. I don't get the sentiment and the whole debate here. The author is clearly nitpicking (he is the first person who uses messages after all). But honestly, complaints about "arrange" screens button?

Nevertheless, he is probably right. Only the people who went through working on Windows, Linux both on cheap and expensive machines while dealing with all the "baggage" these environments bring can tolerate MacOS with leniency. I will never come back to anything else until I see a competitive offer from just anyone because what Apple offers is:

* Fast, silent, extremely energy efficient devices with excellent screens and audio.

* The font rendering. I honestly can't believe people who professionally work with text all their lives never mention it here. MacOS had and continues to have the best fonts and font rendering that is.

* Solid build that lasts (I own MacBook Pro and MS Surface Book 2 both from 2019 so I see how they age).

* A device that is ready to work when you open a lid or touch a keyboard button without any "waking up from sleep/hibernation" or freezing due to buggy video drivers and inability to work with GPU in hybrid mode OUT-OF-THE-BOX in 2025.

The above-mentioned is more than enough for me to tolerate any MacOS issues and the ones mentioned in the article are just laughable.

Apple offers you the full package that allows cross-device integration while Win/Linux users still rely on the Google stack or other third party "workarounds". Yes, no surprises here -- owning the hardware and software stack is a massive advantage.

I've said this many times, snow leopard is still my favourite OS today. If you could add iMessages to it, although not necessary, it would be perfect.

Of course today it would be insecure, missing security patches etc. SSL...

Can a publicly traded company be sued if they allocate more resources to QA? Could an activist investor argue that cleaning up Mac OSX is a waste of time because people will buy the computer anyway?

Ahh Apple Vision Pro.

I entirely forgot it existed! They still sell that?

Bug fixes and stability don't sell. That's why what we will receive this year is iOS redesign instead of bugfixes.

I long for a modern NeXTStep-like OS. A polished, consistent, solid operating system that is lean, clean and simply focused on getting things done. It should be predictable in every way and never get in your way. None of this SwiftUI bullshit, Animoji, AI or blurry UI. sigh

From a features perspective, they should acqui-hire either Alfred or Raycast and build that functionality into spotlight.

What's frustrating is that Apple still has the resources and talent to ship rock-solid software

I'm enjoying Sorbet Leopard on my 20 year old Dual Core PowerPC tower. Mostly just messing around with old versions of Max making weird sounds.. but when I do interact with the OS it feels great and responsive and a joy to use. Modern MacOS can feel that way if you turn off a lot of crap. I don't even sync my accounts to the OS anymore.

Apple needs to admit, a product is either new or improved. It is never new and improved.

The first thing I do when I reinstall macOS is to disable most of the ”features”, services, and apps Apple added over the last decade. I can’t imagine how cluttered my digital life would be if I’d depend on all those useless toys Apple stuffed into the OS and abandons a few years later (looking at you, Dashboard).

My initial wish for Apple was to make macOS as bulletproof, lightweight, and bug-free as possible. But now I just want to use Linux on my M1 MacBook because of all the bullshit that’s going on in the US right now. It’s only a matter of time until the Trump administration will start to dismantle the American technology sector, beginning with the softening of encryption and the death of Advanced Data Protection I currently rely on on iCloud. Mark my words.

Like I’ve said in a couple of comments before in other threads, I’d love to switch to Asahi but without native disk encryption I just can’t. If my laptop gets stolen, all my files would be visible to the thief, and that’s a risk I’m not willing to make.

Maybe they just need to stop doing a major OS release every year.

The myth of Snow Leopard is strong (while in reality a lot of fundamental things people still complaint about weren't fixed), so Apple can just as well do nothing better and hope a new myth will emerge sticking to some other current name...

what are some good alternatives to mac os? there some features like image/text copy-paste being cross device that are insanely useful that make it hard to switch

Apple is becoming like Google, everything is slightly broken and nobody cares, because fixing stuff doesn't get you promoted...

Apple should consider a LTS MacOS version, like RHEL.

How much better would life be if KDE ran on Mac?

Apple is annoyingly doing an AI sequoia.

They neither have the financial and time capacity left required for high quality, nor do they have the engineers and management to enable it anymore.

„Just get it out somehow.“

„Fixing bugs is not a KPI for our promotions and salary increases.“

Old stuff is practically abandoned. No one knows how to fix it anymore and it’s replaced instead, at best. Disdain for legacy. The only thing management gets excited about is the next shiny thing, currently tacking AI onto everything.

Can you name big companies where this did not happen?

I clicked this because I was confused why someone felt so strongly about Apple needing a winterized SUV.

I think we're at the point where it'd be better if OS's were just a thin platform, and the updates to user facing features came piecemeal to different apps instead. IE, update Finder or Safari but leave the core functionality alone outside of bug fixes or very rare major upgrades. I'm so sick of having to update my OS every year.

iPad OS is one of the worst operating systems in widespread use.

No AI please for the love of the spaghetti monster. I'm so sick of having this shit shoveled into anything I'm trying to do these days. Disabling Siri all these years was bad enough.

So far Apple has kept it as a toggle in the settings, but it's easy bloat for it to keep spreading. Does anyone need AI in a text editor? No.

Yawn, there is some variant of this story after every os release.

The articles specific gripes with macOS are Mail, Messages, and System settings. Fixing those does not require a ‘no new features’ (which was always BS) major release.

I would love to hope that articles like this one could move the needle at Apple, but I'm not holding my breath.

I've been saying this for YEARS. In fact, I just published a blog post saying this very same thing SMH. https://blog.webb.page/2025-03-27-spitball-with-claude.txt

Ok, but can we please call it "macOS Permafrost"?

I am totally invested in the Apple ecosystem, which on principle I'm against (closed systems never sat right with me), but at the time (beginning ~2015) the products and services were so well integrated and genuinely improved my life it was hard to see how things could ever get this bad. I'd still never (ever) go back to Windows, and Linux doesn't have the same feel or ease of setup as macOS, but I am genuinely, deeply concerned about this trajectory for Apple. Albeit super opinionated, but I feel that macOS was the saviour of modern aesthetic computing especially when Windows started its rapid decline post 7. I’m fine trading some frustration—like extra steps for untrusted software—if it keeps macOS secure and fast, free of Windows-level adware or telemetry. But right now, macOS has never been in a worse state.

I recently emailed Tim expressing the same concerns as the article and regarding specific issues with Messages and Mail resource usage and was surprised to get a response from Craig requesting more information and sysdiagnose files, but this is where feedback ended unfortunately.

The current state of the macOS UI is atrocious, devices don't all need the same button shape or menu UX flow across all devices as they are inherently interacted with differently. A Mac isn’t an iPad — why force the same rounded buttons and simplified menus on both? They’re interacted with differently: keyboard and mouse versus touch. I have no idea why this is so difficult for execs to understand or important for them to change. Software teams at Apple are so lucky to have the Apple Silicon innovation on the hardware side, Intel Macs would catch fire on boot-up running any of the latest releases given how atrocious the resource usage is.

While I'm here whinging, the iOS swipe keyboard is garbage (almost totally unusable now) where before it was perfect with the innovative predictive hit-box expansion pioneered by Ken Kocienda. I think that's now been replaced with AI prediction which in 2025 I don't understand why it can be so embarrassingly bad. I had to upgrade to the iPhone Max recently to hit the letters properly. Also Apple I never want to tell someone to "duck off".

Initially I was understanding, but quite frankly now I'm just pissed that it has gotten to this stage, and there is no indication of resolution from execs about these issues.

I’m starting to worry that Apple could go off the deep-end - the way of Microsoft - coasting on hardware sales while letting software quality slide (albeit seeming intentional from Microsoft's side of the fence). I get it — software isn’t where the money is, hardware drives the business - but the two are inseparable BY DESIGN. When macOS struggles with basic functionality, it undermines the value of the Mac itself.

Author calls out some truly irritating defects, and Messages is rife with them. But there are bigger ones in that application on both Mac OS and iOS.

Topping the shitlist has to be the inexplicable splitting of group threads for random people in the group, even when everyone is using an iPhone. Suddenly someone in the group gets the messages by him or herself and can't reply to the group. And this occasionally also happens in one-on-one threads: I've had years-old (maybe decades-old) threads suddenly split off into a new one with a friend of mine for no apparent reason.

There's some fundamental incompetence in Message's design, and I'm sure that the addition of RCS has made it worse because it was slapped onto a rotten core.

Oh yeah, then there's the way Messages (or, to be fair, iOS) loses all of your contacts' names if you travel outside the country. This is another brain-dead defect: Just because you're in a new country code, your iPhone suddenly can't associate U.S. numbers with your contacts. How the hell does this go unfixed for one major iOS revision, let alone 15+ years?

Oh yeah, then there's the way Calendar "helpfully" changes the times on your appointments when you travel... meaning that you'll miss all of them if you travel east, because your phone will move them hours later. I mean... who lives like that? I you're going to London on business and the next day you have a meeting at 10 a.m., your iPhone will "helpfully" change that meeting to, say, 5 p.m.

So when the author muses about whether Apple developers ever actually use this stuff in the real world, the only logical answer is no. Or they just take so little interest in the functional quality of their product that they just check in some grossly defective trash and call it a day... and refuse to fix it year after year.

Or... they're not given time and resources to fix it. I'm pretty gentle when filing bugs about Xcode, because I'm sure they are understaffed. But at this point, the neglect has (or should have) exhausted every developer's patience.

Which brings us to a bit of hypocrisy in the post: "Apple is clearly behind on the AI arms race"

NO. Apple's sad capitulation to armchair "industry observers" and "analysts" has contributed greatly to the very defects the guy complains about. Apple should not have jumped on the "AI" hype in the first place. It does not serve Apple's product line or market. They are not a search company or gatekeeper to huge swaths of the Internet. If they wanted to quietly improve Siri and get it RIGHT, fine. But now they're embarrassed, and resources that should have been spent on QA have been squandered on bullshit "AI" that failed.

Snow leopard was, as you said, necessary in anticipation of the architecture change.

Now there's no such change, but instead AI, this weird new cross-cutting but fuzzy function touching everything that no one has ever used reliably at the scale of Apple devices. AI is impossible to reliably test, and all-too-easy to get embarrassing results. I'm glad Apple recently tamped expectations.

The relatively loose concurrency model in Apple's ARM has made it rival the network in introducing new failure modes Many quality issues cited have their root causes in those two sources of indeterminacy.

Amplifying these are the organizational boundaries driving software flaws. Siri as a separate organization with its own network-dependent stack is just not viable for scattering AI. Boosting revenue with iCloud services makes all roads run through the servers in Rome, amplifying network and backend reliability issues. I also suspect outsourcing quality and the maintenance of legacy software has reduced the internal quality signal and cemented technical boundaries, as the delegates protect their work streams and play quality theater. The yearly on-schedule cadence makes things worse because they can always play for time and wait for the next train.

And frankly (to borrow a concept from Java land), Apple might be reaching peak complexity. With hundreds of apps sporting tens of settings, there is simply no way to have a fast-path to the few things different people need. Deep linking is a workaround, but it's up to the app or user to figure that out. (And it makes me livid: I can't count how many important calls I've missed by failing to turn off "Silence unknown callers", with the Phone app settings buried 3 layers deep ON MY PHONE)

A short-term solution I think is not a rewrite but concierge UI setup: come to the store, tell the "geniuses" exactly what you need, and make shortcuts + myUI or whatever is necessary to enable them to make it happen. Then automate that process with AI.

That's something they can deliver continuously. Their geniuses can drive feature-development, and it can be rolled out to stores weekly and -- heavens! -- rolled back just as quickly. Customers and employees get the excitement of seeing their feature in action.

The model of sensitive form-factor designers working in quiet respectful collaboration to produce new curves every year is just wrong for today's needs. All those people standing around at Apple stores should instead be spending an hour or more with each existing customer designing new features, and they should be rewarded for features that take, and especially for features that AI can incorporate.

On the development side, any one should be able to contribute to any new feature, and be rewarded for it. At least for this work, there would be no more silos, and no massive work streams creating moral hazards.

The goal is to make software and a software development process that scales and adapts. It may start at 5% of new UI features, but I hope it infects and challenges the entire organization and stack.

Granted, it will take a famously hub organization and turn it into a web of hubs, but that in itself may be necessary for Apple to build the next generation of managers.

Look for how today's challenges can help you build tomorrow's organizations.

Apple has gone from Company I loved to the one I hate! They are the new Microsoft! They have hired a bunch of idiots in their security team who are driving their user base insane! They can completely lock you out of all your devices with no recourse! I am starting to move away from this pathetic company”s products!