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
3 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.
