As an Apple Stan, I don’t understand what you’re referring to. MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas, I’m not really sure what you could be referring to when you say “stagnation”. Every OS ever released has issues at launch, not sure if that’s what you mean by “regression”.

But man… windows has been garbage for the better part of 2 decades now.

The question is not whether MacOS is ahead of Windows. As an Apple user since the Apple IIe, I agree it's still the best OS by a mile.

But that has basically always been true, at least since Mac OS X. (I liked the earlier OSes too, but they really did crash all the time and have no memory protection, so arguably Windows had some compelling advantages.)

The interesting question is whether recent MacOS releases are ahead of their previous versions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. Maybe dark mode?

The hardware keeps better, and the experience of third-party apps I care about (VS Code and Ableton) is superior to Windows. But the OS and first-party apps seem completely stagnant.

Which, arguably, is OK. Maybe the OS should just be a commodity. But I have to imagine that there are user experience improvements they could make at the OS but I certainly haven't seen any.

After two decades of relentless effort, Apple has finally managed to make Spotlight as broken and useless as Windows Search where it doesn't find local files and just returns web results.

I bought a MacBook last year. The amount of stupid bugs is insane. Safari eating text input, Safari simply not connecting to internet after several days (while chrome is working well). I have to restart my Mac more often than I had to restart my last Windows machine, because it simply grinds to a halt (with a frickin' M4 Max processor)

It's telling that to defend Apple against the charge of stagnation you immediately attacked Windows.

macOS daily driver for last 5 years because the hardware is better; I can stay unplugged for almost my entire workday.

Lots of things irk me about macOS UX. Finder's lack of tree view sidebar really irks me. Having to disable the silly animations and sounds when I get a new machine irks me. The absolutely terrible window tiling system irks me. When I minimize a window, I can no longer tab into it. The settings dialog's weird behavior with respect to resizing on both axes irks me. Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and the secondary monitors end up with limited refresh rate options. Meanwhile, I can just plug just about any dock into my 5 year old Windows laptop and multiple monitors just work. Still can't find anything as good as IrfanView (as old and dated as it is, it made working with image libraries a breeze).

Finder and the poor external monitor support somehow irks me the most because now I end up typing into the CLI 90% of the time because the navigation experience is so bad and for me this is a work machine and the difficulty in using 3+ monitors is silly.

I get being an Apple Stan (love the hardware), but the software UX is 100% bottom of the barrel stuff. Basic OS stuff like Explorer is just light years ahead of Finder.

Windows 7 is the last good one. And that is only... Oh, almost 20 years ago. Never mind.

If light years means not inundate the OS with ads, shove AI down our throats and redesign every app with regressed UX, then sure.

Snapping and switching windows is light-years ahead of Windows? It only recently became a little more reasonable, and even then they still kept that idiotic full screen mechanic.

> MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas

At least Windows dignifies you with an error message (even if a hex code and badly tanslated text) when something is wrong. macOS mocks you with a dumb and utterly useless message like "Something went wrong, try again" or "A USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it". Or just flat out not showing the button for the thing you're looking for if prerequisites aren't filled (iPad screen extending, unless the iPad is on the same Apple ID, and has been restarted since, the button just isn't there and there is nothing you can do to debug it other than tryingn to guess what is missing).

Also, Windows allows you to install whatever with a clear UX (this might be dangerous for random crap from the internet vs having to jump through a weird non-existing UX to get it to open, or flat out being blocked from using downloaded libaries).

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