The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating. We are in the thousand papercut stage where lots of small things just don’t work properly.

One of my Macs has developed the most insane habit of losing audio output capability, and then tries to route it to another one - a feature I didn’t even know existed.

I've been playing around with RealityKit (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit) lately, it's their SceneKit replacement (they deprecated it this year).

On tvOS if a frame takes too long it just starts skipping frames and runs at 20 FPS. It won't recover after it happens. ThermalState is .nominal, so it's not that. There's also no way to just say "render as fast as possible" so you can measure performance, instead every device does throttling/pacing and it's completely opaque.

Anyway, I've had a developer account for 10+ years, and run into stuff like this constantly where you just can't get things to work properly. The framework isn't used much, so it's probably just broken.

I ported the game to SDL3/Zig and wouldn't you know it I can run continuously at 60 fps.. It's disappointing because I'm on board with targeting a single platform if I can utilize the hardware more effectively and make something special with it. But instead it's constantly an uphill battle of dealing with the opaqueness/brokenness of the platform. If I open a feedback request I'll probably just get told it's a bug, and maybe they fix it next WWDC.

The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating.

The iPhone 18 Pro has been out exactly a month now and they still haven't pushed a fix for the popping/crackling speaker issue:

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/iphone-18-pro-speaker-c...

I still get crackling or popping many times a day.

Also, the annoying render stutters during scrolling across many apps haven't been fixed since iOS 26 was introduced (they were probably there before, but Liquid Glass made it worse). Even the iPhone 18 Pro suffers from it (also checked on iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air).

Meanwhile, my underpowered P10P with GrapheneOS renders scrolling super smoothly.

My Iphone has had some bugs in the last year that are so sloppy yet impactful its almost funny. About half the time im looking at my lock screen notifications, the screen will lock less than a second after touching the screen. I have had other issues as well, but for a company with so much money I expect a little more craftsmanship.

I have had other issues as well but something that actively locks my phone while I am obviously using it is an extremely frustrating start to my day.

My personal favorite is the alarm clock on iOS, after the first time you dismiss the alert with the phone unlocked, it reappears as a transparent dialog 10% of the size of a normal one (i.e. so small not even a stylus could click the buttons). The mashed ball of widgets can only be swiped off the screen.

Actually it feels a lot like Apple before NeXT's acquisition.

> The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating.

This is not the first time OpenGL got broken and fixed later. This is why software testing exists.

I have my own share of criticisms for Apple, but if we treat every hiccup with doomerism, we will only miss the forest for a single, small bush.

Audio problems aren't new. I remember that the last 10.9 build I was still using in 2016 had this bug where sound would just stop working every now and then. `sudo pkill coreaudiod` fixed it every time.

Yup I have the same problem with audio. And I found more problems last two years than in previous 10. I wonder if that due to some internal cuts in quality assurance or moving to AI and vibe coding more code than devs can review. But it may be subjective feeling.

The latest macOS, after a lot of praise, has proven to be really buggy to me. At least liquid glass only had poor readability, but now windows go missing/turn invisible almost daily and it’s getting seriously annoying.

The Font Book on macOS 27 seems broken - user fonts never show up.

We’re also apparently in a “Settings doesn’t search” build for the Mac once again.

I would agree with you if this wasn't a release candidate. I would wait and see at this point.

Meanwhile, most of us don't have any issues. I think overall the Apple ecosystem is really good in terms of software quality. However, there are of course issues like with any system and if Apple is not able to reproduce something, the harder it gets to get it fixed.

And the whole premise of your comment doesn't make sense as it's based on a bug in a macOS version that hasn't even been released yet. Of course stuff will break when you're busy developing.

Mine has been doing that for a fair few months actually. Sometimes flipping the output to something different then back again sorts it, other times a reboot is required.

Yes. The top menu access for apps full screened in Tahoe stop working. WTF.

you really have to wonder how they managed to mess up this bad, and why they're doing nothing about it.

local search is both broken on my mac as well as iPhone. I search for an app, and its app store entry OR settings pop up, not the app.

how does this persist? do they not use their own products anymore? have they simply given up?

This is a personal anecdote - I'm a games developer, working predominantly on Windows. Since last year I have to use a Mac to work with our iOS builds and I honestly don't understand people saying Mac is for developers - the number of actual outright bugs I run into every week makes windows look like something that came out of NASA. I eagerly awaited the release of MacOS 27 to maybe finally address some of them, and of course it just traded one set of problems for another. It's just shockingly bad - and unlike a true Linux system you have very little ability to fix some of those issues yourself too.

The general quality decline in software seems to be accelerating. I suspect it’s mainly due to AI slop. Engineers creating tons of code due to management pressure and lesser people available to test.

On mine, audio starts to crackle when memory pressure is too high. lol

but you can fold the iphone now ... o.O

My Mac has developed the issue of slowing down over time if not rebooted. Heavy GPU use accelerates the decay. It feels just like swapping to disk except it's not - swap usage always 0. I didn't have this issue before Tahoe.