My dad went to school near Cupertino and got a student prerelease of the first Mac in '84. I've been in this ecosystem as long as I've been alive.

As many others have said elsewhere in these comments, Apple has been stagnating in quality for a long time. Even the Jobs-era iPhones were buggier than anyone inside the Reality Distortion Field (and most of the tech press at the time) would admit. I'd have to really squint to think of anything good that came from bringing iPhone tech to the Mac.

All that said, the sorts of things I need a computer for have been a mostly-solved problem, by Apple, for most of this millennium. There were year-on-year improvements in the early years of X, but I can't tell you the last Mac feature that made me go "OMG I want that."

Unfortunately, the "by Apple" part of that sentence is load-bearing. So far as I can tell, desktop Linux is still largely the work of hobbyists on GitHub. I don't expect there to be a unified design philosophy, and I do expect it to need constant tweaking to get each package to work how I'd like and to keep them working with one another.

Even if Apple's desktops have been stagnating for at least as long as they've been naming them after landmarks, I don't know of an alternative that's worth the effort of switching.

> the sorts of things I need a computer for have been a mostly-solved problem, by Apple, for most of this millennium.

For a long time now, I find that Apple and Microsoft get in the way and solve the wrong problems. The Walled Garden, GateKeeper, the "Recall" misfeature, invasive CoPilot LLM bling, abusive telemetry exfiltration...

I use Linux exactly because it solves (or provides a solution for) the problems that are important to me.

> I can't tell you the last Mac feature that made me go "OMG I want that."

I can tell you that I look at the OS and often say, "OMG I don't want that!"

I don't think it's fair to characterise Jobs-era iPhones as buggy; they were significantly less buggy than Android, Meego and Symbian.

I think only BlackBerry OS was more polished, but it had significantly fewer things that people actually wanted.

There were bugs, sure, but I was working at Nokia at the time and what was cooking us was not "the luxury brand experience" (because, that comes later): it was that Apple had gotten the software of a mini-computer right, and they executed on it really well.

Android distributors tended to throw much more powerful hardware at the problem to achieve similar results to the consistency of experience.

Linux development is mostly funded by corporations working on the server side. The desktop is an afterthought, and it very much shows. They haven’t even managed to fully expunge X yet. NeXT showed people how to put a proper UI on top of Unix in 1989!