Past canaries of Apple's software downfall: Scripting and the new Notification Center.

The key thing to make macOS feel welcoming to everybody from noobs to the nerdiest of power users: Pretty much all functionality used to be accessible using an easy GUI, and keyboard shortcuts, and scripting and command line interface.

At some point Apple Script support started to thin out. I started to worry a bit at this point. Apps that power users care about rely on scripting support. I felt that advanced users have fallen outside the target audience of the product.

Then the new Notification Center came out. And suddenly there was no way of reacting to individual notifications from the keyboard. Two interfaces were no out! No keyboard shortcuts. No scriptability. You HAVE to use the mouse!

Core functionality was suddenly inaccessible using the PRIMARY input device!

How is it possible that the accessibility of such major OS functionality is this poor!

At this point I felt that it's not about target audiences, but about indifference. They don't much care.

Someone once said that monopolies are often never toppled - instead they just become irrelevant over time. This is what happened to Windows. The OS monopoly still exists, but it's no longer the center of anyone's attention.

The same seems to have happened to MacOS. It's as if it has become unimportant inside Apple.