In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.

For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.

Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.

Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?

So far, just annoying. But the noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.

> rush to get the next version of macOS out of the door

That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date.

As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.

While I love their hardware, this is why I will always chose a Linux distribution over anything closed source. Being able to retrieve logs of pretty much anything and change pieces of the OS as time goes on is extraordinarily resilient.

Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.

To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn).

The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.

Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.

Yeah I don’t recall ever seeing this on Windows in fact I can still run Win 95 games (yes, those exist) on Windows 11. Mostly[0] works. I can go and install games from my original CDs which shouldn’t be possible but a bit of toothpaste on them does the trick.

Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version.

[0] Mostly.

I started experiencing this several years ago with MacOS including file copies that failed with no notification from the finder.

I switched away from MacOS at that time.

My last job we were given MacOS machines, I didn't experience anything that made me want to reconsider my decision to ditch MacOS as my daily driver.

There's actually a better format than Safari web archives hidden in the Safari Debug menu: Save Page Complete.

This saves the individual files of the site in standard format, html, js, css, etc., much like Chrome does with Webpage, Complete.

I totally agree with most of the article, but the hallucinations bit puzzles me. If it’s genuinely an unchangeable limitation of the product (as hallucinations are with LLMs) it’s good to set the right expectation rather than making promises you can’t deliver on.

If the error message happens to include a numeric code, OSStatus.com is sometimes helpful if the issue if they didn't bother with a localizable string for it.

I have an on-again-off-again relationship with macOS - the deep integration with Apple hardware is stellar and IMO the new MacBook Airs are tremendous value for money, but otherwise the OS seems to be suffering from some deep technical debt and MBA-brained decision-making.

I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me.

I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..

This guy nailed exactly what’s wrong with macOS IMHO.