Welcome (Back) to Macintosh
Snell converts the software score to an average letter grade of B to B–. Is Apple satisfied with shipping a consistently B product?
I confess the grade I have given has been lower than this average. My experience with Apple’s software for the past several years has been markedly less than fine. Given that my scores have deviated from those given by many others, I started to question my own fairness — which, given that I am merely A Guy giving my opinion about a multi-trillion-dollar corporation, is a little silly. Then again, software is made — mostly — by people, and the intent I have in participating in the Six Colors survey is that a person working at Apple might possibly read my feedback.
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The most important factor is whether the features I use perform as expected. If it does so with unique design and flair, that is a welcome bonus, but it must be built on a solid foundation.
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I am somewhat impressed by the breadth of Apple’s current offerings as I consider all the ways they are failing me, and I cannot help but wonder if it is that breadth that is contributing to the unreliability of this software. Or perhaps it is the company’s annual treadmill. There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; software-as-a-service means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable.
I very much enjoy using older Mac OS versions, but not being able to browse the Web properly and securely, not being able to correctly sign in to check a Gmail account, not being able to fetch some RSS feeds because you can’t authenticate securely or establish a secure connection is very frustrating. Not having Dropbox work on my 2009 MacBook Pro running OS X 10.11 El Capitan is a minor annoyance and means I just won’t have access to certain personal files and that I’ll have to sync manually whatever I do on this other machine.
But if I put these two factors aside, there’s nothing about those older Macs, nothing about the older Mac OS versions they run that makes them less reliable. The crystallisation of the operating system they use and the software environment I find on them is exactly what makes them more reliable than the newer stuff. Just because an application has been discontinued by Apple — like Aperture — doesn’t mean it has stopped working or has stopped being reliable.
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What’s really sad in all this is that many of those “problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps” aren’t structural; that is, they’re not derived from historical faults or shortcomings in the fundamentals of the operating system. They often are the result of more recent bugs breaking something that used to work or a solution that had already been found, and said bugs have been allowed to fester thanks to an unsustainable yearly release cycle that forces engineers to work on new features instead of fixing what broke down in previous iterations.
The cycle of having a major new version ready to preview by June and shipping in September means the amount of time Apple spends focusing on the current version must necessarily shrink. How many teams at the company do you suppose are, right now, working on MacOS 26 when WWDC is a little over three months away? Engineering efforts are undoubtably beginning to prioritize MacOS 27. There are new features to prepare, after all.
Is what we’re seeing overall is really just Apple losing the battle with complexity?
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Today, Apple seems successful on paper, so the pressure needs to come from inside, from someone high up enough to recognize that what Apple is doing vis-a-vis software quality is not sustainable and hasn’t been for some time now. That the bill already came due on all of the decisions where systems thinking and deep testing and focus and preventative maintenance and paying off design debt have been deprioritized in favour of another shiny launch event that stretches the teams and platforms even thinner.
With the possible exception of individual dodgy Time Machine protocol implementations from third parties, all of the issues are directly traceable to components fully in Apple’s control. None of these issues are impossible for Apple to fix. All of them are incumbent on them to do so. Nearly all of them have persisted for at least two major OS releases and multiple Macs.
In the middle of all this, what Apple chooses to focus on is to implement a redesign that no one asked for, that butchers both the most conceivably fundamental usability and the visual pleasantness its user base has self-selected its platforms for; which only saving grace is that it is half-assed enough to not actually really change some things too badly, compared to what it could have been like. Although, had I upgraded to macOS Tahoe, chances are on top of the visual change, I would have been treated to basic Apple Event infrastructure falling apart and stopping working causing hangs, instability and unpredictability.
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The hardware is great and no doubt M5 and M6 variants will run circles around M1, but if I have to sink down further into this bog, that price is too high to pay - a common enough sentiment that it is a matter of public interest to document downgradability or attempting to block dark pattern upgrades.
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My hope is that Macintosh is not just one of these empires that was at the height of its power and then disintegrated because of warring factions, satiated and uncurious rulers, and droughts for which no one was prepared, ruining crops no one realized were essential for survival.
I don’t want to quote the best parts — just go read it if you haven’t yet.
I genuinely hope Jesper is correct here and my pessimism proves wrong in the long run—that the current version of Apple has been so damaged by a decade of simplification and profit obsession, losing so many valuable people who could effect meaningful change along the way.
How did the post end? Sorry, Liquid Glass wouldn’t let me get to the bottom of the page
As of today, all mentions of Liquid Glass have disappeared from developer.apple.com (the main home page). This may or may not mean anything… but I’ve been watching for it.
Previously:
- Apple Watch Fitness Regressions
- Avoiding Tahoe
- How to Replace Time Capsule
- 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card
- Searching for Apps With Spotlight
- iOS 27 “Rave” Update to Clean Up Code
- The Fallen Apple
- The Struggle of Resizing Windows on Tahoe
10 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
We all know Apple moves engineers from one OS to another as necessary, but it's time to stop the breakneck annual updates.
Apple simply does not have the engineering resources to revise macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, TVOS, and VisionOS each year. What they SHOULD be doing: every third or fourth year, they focus on fixing bugs, with only a few new added features. And they should announce this publicly. Of course, Apple is nearly incapable of admitting a mistake publicly, so that's pretty unlikely.
Coming out with six new OS versions each year has resulted in tons of unaddressed bugs in multiple OSes. It's past time for this to stop.
SpamSieve has never let me down, and EagleFiler is great. Thank for the terrific software!
A B- is wildly over generous to Apple’s software quality. I’ve been dealing with bugs that make me think a D is too generous
Personally I would give it a C. I always understood a C to mean that you did the work but you clearly didn't understand most of it, but just barely enough to not call it a complete failure. That sounds like Tahoe and iOS 27 to me.
I switched from Windows years ago because I was tired of constantly being screwed with by the OS maker. Little did I know. At this point Apple is actually making Windows look stable and predictable.
MacOS reliably opens both VS
Code and chrome so I'm not sure what everyone's complaining about.
A+ for me
I would be surprised if anything improves short to medium term. iPhone and services revenue is still trending up, so the bean counters at Apple believe that they are headed in the right direction. Moreover, the enshitiffication of the App Store and soon maps is going to grow services even more; the MacBook Neo will probably be a smash hit; and once Apple gets some modicum of AI/Siri success, they'll start pushing AI subscriptions.
Apple is still benefitting from the view of Apple products as luxury products, that make people envy them. Also most of the mainstream alternatives (Windows, Android phones with crapware pre-installed) are even shittier. So, I fear that it will take a while before Apple will start to feel the results of making both platforms worse, in terms of revenue.
That is an F from me.
On the OS front, things have been going downhill since that clown with a lot of hair took over and since the adoption of the insane yearly major releases. GO TO 5 YEARS CYCLES. FIx bugs. Focus on real, productivity-focused new featurs. Go back the strict UI guidelines and consistency over everything. No enshittification and dumbing down.
And don’t get me started on other Apple software. No professional user can trust anything Apple these days.
Who cares about bugs? Just rewrite perfectly rock solid code in Swift for the thrill of it and break a bunch of stuff
Somehow they thought pushing windowing system, keyboard shortcuts, visual clues, dialogue boxes, menus and quality assurance - optimized for the average Joe who plays games and occasionally does homework - for iPad down the throat of professionals busy with complex workflows on their Mac Pros and Studios was a great idea. Amazing. Microsoft’s dream “achieved” at Apple. One has to wonder.
@WuMing The reason Apple has managed to get Microsoft's dream so, so wrong, is they never fully committed to the consequences, or rather they wanted to maintain the thing that was most important to Apple - that you had to buy multiple devices.
A Surface Pro is a One Device computer experience - it's a *tablet* tablet when you want it to be a tablet, or it's a proper laptop when you want to do "real" work, but plug it into a dock at home, with multiple displays, external GPU etc, and it's a normal desktop PC. All your data there, no cloud sync nonsense, just keep working as you were.
Apple would never do that, because they want you to buy an iPad, AND a Mac, and then dick around with this awkward shifting your user session states between devices through iCloud and maybe your files come with you but not for important stuff because that's all too large and structured to move via cloud syncing...
The iPad would have been a better device if it iPadOS had never existed, and you just had the option to install iOS, or macOS on it. It's been the exact same hardware as the Mac since the M1 was released, so there's no good reason for iPadOS to exist.
At least Microsoft acknowledges the problem:
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-commitment-to-windows-quality/
