OP, if you want to convince anyone who doesn’t already share your view, you need to tell us specific ways that Mac has become a worse UX, not vague unhelpful descriptions like “has become tortuous to use”, and not issues specific to you like needing to reboot multiple times a day (that’s definitely not the experience of the vast majority of Mac users, so I hope and believe you can probably get that resolved). The only somewhat specific complaint I could find in your post that could apply to many Mac users was about the lack of coherence of the Settings app. And that really doesn’t seem like a huge problem, so if that’s a “prime example” of how Apple has gone off course, I‘d say they’re doing very well. But if you have more specific issues, please share.
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An Open Letter to the Mac Community: The Decline of macOS
- Thread starter silverdollar
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I remember waiting for Apple to release a new OS (pre-macOS). It was delayed and delayed, and then the first iPhone came out, and I knew what the delay was. Apple was no longer a computer company.
As someone who got my first Mac 2 years ago, I still feel that Windows is easier to use and has "it just works" functionality that requires tweaks or 3rd party apps in Mac (and still doesn't work as well).
Examples:
- Systemwide clipboard manager with clipboard history. Part of Windows, need to use a 3rd party app on Mac.
- Ability to set system font size independent of resolution, so you don't have to choose between tiny unreadable text or loss of real estate. Mac did improved this a little bit since I bought my MBA back in 2022, but only a tiny bit.
- High readability, crisp text and icons on any decent external monitor. Apparently used to be a thing on Mac but got dropped a while back.
- Window tiling. Finally addressed with Sequoia, although Windows still does it a little better (snaps). But, at least it's finally part of OS.
- A simple resizable file preview in Finder. While it has lots of different ways to present files, none of them is as good as Windows Explorer's file list on the left, preview on the right. The Column view could be great except the size of preview is fixed and can't be resized to make documents more readable. At least none that I found after some extensive search (you can zoom inside the preview window on a portion of document, but that's not the same). The Gallery view is the opposite - too large of a file preview, not enough information in the file list. Overall, while Finder has some neat functionality that I like, I find Windows Explorer to be better at its core functionality of file management. Although there are even greater 3rd party file managers on Windows such as FreeCommander.
- Maximizing windows. Everywhere else, it's just another window size. In Mac, it's another window state and you have to exit it first before you do something else.
- Mouse acceleration. The way Mac does it just feels unnatural. Again, every other OS I used has it the same way as Windows. Can't be just me.
- Using one key combo to switch between windows of different apps, but another to switch between windows of the same app. Again, every other OS that I used just uses one key combo to switch between all windows. To me, each window is a specific task, and I don't care if that task is in the same app as some other task.
macOS is only worse than it has ever been if you discount all previous versions of macOS.
As a user since System 6, while it has always been unique and lovable, the Macintosh operating system was, for many decades, a steaming pile of **** in many ways. Having to save my work every 5 minutes, just in case something crashed, taking the entire OS with it - I don’t miss that.
As a user since System 6, while it has always been unique and lovable, the Macintosh operating system was, for many decades, a steaming pile of **** in many ways. Having to save my work every 5 minutes, just in case something crashed, taking the entire OS with it - I don’t miss that.
The System Settings redesign came in for a lot of (justified, I feel) criticism. But it has a very useful search function, top left of the window. I hope you try that rather than just going from one category to the next to find what you want.
As for the rest, I'm sorry that whatever your setup is (hardware, software, third-party hardware and apps, etc.), it's so frustrating for you. As you've probably seen from the replies here, that's not an experience that most of us share.
I find many of your characterizations of the OS to be way off base, but that doesn't help you. My Macs are very stable and usable for the work I do. They get out of my way, unlike Windows, and allow me to simply do what I want to do pretty seamlessly. Hopefully you can figure out what is causing your setup to need restarts so much. And if the OS itself isn't working for you, try Windows or a Linux build. Maybe one of those will work for you. Apple isn't going to make a sudden top to bottom rebuild of their desktop OS when there's no need to, and if you're not comfortable with it, you have other options to try.
Best of luck either way.
my macOS days only go back to 8.6 but I think that's long enough to have a decent perspective.....
not a popular opinion but system settings actually starts to make sense as they improve it
you may have liked the old preferences pane but it was actually a random mish mash that relied on the user memorizing non sensical icons and where they were located.
now categories are laid out in a side bar in a manner that does make some sense and the whole interface can be navigated sort of like a finder window
Logic Pro keeps getting better and better. mail and safari work fine for me
and quite frankly sequoia has brought increased snappiness to both my high end hackintosh and my old 2012 Mac mini
I guess my response to you is that entire your premise is largely flawed
I have my grievances with apple, and macOS is certainly not perfect, but it is still the best operating system available for virtually any use case and it works at least as well as it always has, and has steadily improved for me over the last 3-4 years
I push my MBP M1 pretty hard and it behaves flawlessly. I did finally come across a bug in Notes that I think lot of people have faced but I don’t think it’s there anymore in Sequoia. Honestly between Rogue Amoeba and Claris FileMaker , and now AI apps such as ML Studio, and all of Apple’s own software, I personally think this is a golden age of stability and performance. Photos is finally very fast and reliable too. I don’t like Mail at all but all the competitor app are worse. Music isn’t a patch on iTunes in its heyday, but Apple has no respect for music generally so I can’t care. Between Loopback and my CD player I’m set
My last favorite mac os was snow leopard. Fast and stable with no extra crap and the UI didnt look like ipados. Seems like the mac was a mac and not a hybrid mac/ios device.
Curiously, I have none of the problems highlighted by the OP, while I remember very well the daily crashes in OS 7, not to mention when I got the first Dual Processor machine.
I basically live in heaven now compared to the 90s/early 2000s
I basically live in heaven now compared to the 90s/early 2000s
Since you think the original poster is basing his opinion on his current setup, allow me to weigh in.
I switched to Macs when they started their Intel era in 2006. My MBPs all came with 16GB RAM at those times. With the earlier macOSs, I had few problems.
But in later years...
For an entire year, I could not run Mojave at all. It contained a macOS daemon which bricked my computer all because I had the audacity to use custom icons on some of my files. When I reverted back to High Sierra, all was well. Apple fixed the bug only in their next full major OS release, i.e. a year later.
Then came a different OS daemon bug which decided to allocate 64GB RAM on my 16GB machine. The only way to recover was to KILL the daemon. Apple eventually fixed this bug too after I told them about it.
Next, my computer became mostly unresponsive for 5-10 minutes whenever Time Machine backed up to a network drive located on my NAS. TM took this long because the kernel would hang while it waited for a UNIX umount shell command to finish (i.e., timeout) while it tried to unmount the TM network drive. A KILL on the umount command would fix the problem. I informed Apple and even gave them the umount shell command for them to look at. My own workaround was to schedule my TM backups to two per day. Apple took several months to address this.
I had issues transferring my eBook to my iPad from my Mac. I created an epub file using Scrivener. Next, I started Apple's Books app so I could drag and drop the epub file into my book library for transfer to my iPad. This would work a couple times then break. The file would sit there forever on my Mac until I KILLed Apple's icloud daemon. (Note: It took me a while to troubleshoot this problem) Then the epub file would transfer instantly over to my iPad and I could read it using the iPad Books app.
Now for the present. I run a number of third-party apps. One of them is called, iStat Menus. As a power user, I like to monitor my computer in realtime. I am forced to reboot my 64GB MBP every 4-5 days. After a reboot, I use about 20% RAM with no one app/daemon using more than 175MB at MOST. Most apps that I run use a small amount of memory, at first.
To be brief, there is a memory leak in one or more of Apple's shared libraries. App memory usage grows hourly. My current UPTIME is 3 days 22 hours and my machine is using 60% RAM. Apple's WindowServer (GUI) is using 2.1GB, Little Snitch Extension is using 1.3GB, Apple Music (iTunes) is using 848MB, Path Finder is using 681MB, Apple Mail is using 613MB, Spotlight is using 385MB. Way more than any one should be using.
I have told Apple about this problem--which existed in the previous macOS--over and over and over, but they seem unable/unwilling to fix it. My point in this dissertation is simple. The original poster is right. Each subsequent major release of the macOS will contain shiny new bells and whistles, but that doesn't make it better or more stable than previous releases. The above-mentioned bugs are serious and all of them are owned by Apple. They exist in Apple's own software and should never have been released. This has nothing to do what third-party software I run (or the configuration of the original poster's system). There is nothing weird or exotic about apps like iStat or Bartender. Thousands run these apps.
Every year, I submit at least a half-dozen bug reports. I never ever hear back from Apple on any of them. Some get fixed. Sometimes the fix doesn't fix anything. It seems purely random as to what changes. In certain cases, I have complained till I am literally blue in the face, but my complaints fall on cemented ears. (Shame on you Apple!)
Each year, Apple puts out what they call a new and better OS. But that's not true anymore, and it has not been true for some time. They are sacrificing stability and reliability for the sake of new features. They need to step back and clean up their mess--which goes by the name of "macOS."
One additional thing I want to add: When I reboot, I get the login screen, and I enter my password. The boot process gets through about 20% (based on the horizontal line indicator) before the OS crashes. I am put back at the login screen where I have to re-enter my password. When my system finally restarts, I am greeted with a popup dialog which states the system did not shutdown properly and do I want to start my previously open applications. Yes ... very stable macOS.
Phones are computers that can make calls. It yes, there was a shift.
I’ve owned 5 Macs in my life. When I was younger, I used to always build my own PCs. I just finished building a gaming PC. My MACs have all been relatively stable and without issues. There has been a decline in the OSes over time but all have been stable for the most part.
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This is what you get when macOS is becoming infinitely closer to iOS and iOS becomes infinitely closer to macOS, aka “unified experience“, without breaking that thin artificial barrier. I’ve been wondering why Apple hasn’t yet to pull the plug on terminals, *nix support, and much of those “legacy” features old macOS users loved and cherished all the way to High Sierra, but then I realise they don’t want to completely turn macOS into iOS since they have repeatedly says they don’t want to turn iOS into macOS. (iPadOS is just iOS with extra features).
Arguably, the whole “decline” marks an ever growing shift from “traditional computer Operating system” to a hybrid between mobile and desktop os. You can think of it as “what if iOS is running natively on a screen that doesn’t support touch“. I dunno who Apple is appealing to, but I can see one day they unify the codebase so that maintenance cost is lower (without passing the saving to customers of course) While they try super hard to not “break the line” between a desktop and a phone/tablet. It’s a paradigm shift, and it has been happening since Apple Silicon transition. Future generations will be greeted with a unified look of all 3 primary devices Apple has today, with a unified system to navigate them all.
Another point I want to make is Apple‘s view in user’s intelligence: It doesn’t exist. Back in the very old days, Apple II and most of its derivatives, allowed all sorts of expansions, from earlier versions using expansion cards, to later one using one card for multiple functions. It was very configurable and expandable. Apple more or less entrusted users to do what they want and know what they are doing. Nowadays? Not so much, and I don’t even think soldering everything onto the board is necessarily the sign. It’s two fold. One is users are less and less willing to tinker with their advanced tools that is the computer, the other is Apple doesn’t want to give user much choice in terms of how the hardware and software is being used in the first Place, as they believe their modern users are just not intelligent enough to understand the computer and how to use it properly.
Does this also contribute To the “decline” of Mac? Maybe, but when more and more people just want to get the job done, you can bet macOS will be more and more limited, to a point where users can’t do much outside of what Apple explicitly allows user (and developers) to do. Think of it as a white list. The entire Apple community is approaching such a balance year on year, and we shall see how all this will play out.
Arguably, the whole “decline” marks an ever growing shift from “traditional computer Operating system” to a hybrid between mobile and desktop os. You can think of it as “what if iOS is running natively on a screen that doesn’t support touch“. I dunno who Apple is appealing to, but I can see one day they unify the codebase so that maintenance cost is lower (without passing the saving to customers of course) While they try super hard to not “break the line” between a desktop and a phone/tablet. It’s a paradigm shift, and it has been happening since Apple Silicon transition. Future generations will be greeted with a unified look of all 3 primary devices Apple has today, with a unified system to navigate them all.
Another point I want to make is Apple‘s view in user’s intelligence: It doesn’t exist. Back in the very old days, Apple II and most of its derivatives, allowed all sorts of expansions, from earlier versions using expansion cards, to later one using one card for multiple functions. It was very configurable and expandable. Apple more or less entrusted users to do what they want and know what they are doing. Nowadays? Not so much, and I don’t even think soldering everything onto the board is necessarily the sign. It’s two fold. One is users are less and less willing to tinker with their advanced tools that is the computer, the other is Apple doesn’t want to give user much choice in terms of how the hardware and software is being used in the first Place, as they believe their modern users are just not intelligent enough to understand the computer and how to use it properly.
Does this also contribute To the “decline” of Mac? Maybe, but when more and more people just want to get the job done, you can bet macOS will be more and more limited, to a point where users can’t do much outside of what Apple explicitly allows user (and developers) to do. Think of it as a white list. The entire Apple community is approaching such a balance year on year, and we shall see how all this will play out.
Serious question: Why are you still using a Mac instead of Windows given this litany of MacOS shortcomings that presumably don’t exist on Windows?
I am utterly convinced you have the opinion of the majority of users, and the people who complain about it are a very vocal minority. I was never able to figure out where anything was in preferences the first time I had a Mac around 2010, and was never able to find anything when I came back in 2020. The old system preferences was useless without the search bar. At least now theres a fighting chance the category names coherently relate to their contents… Even if I hated system preferences, I don’t need to open it more than a handful of times per week. (and I deeply question what anyone is doing to require much more than me) It’s such a non issue.
This post is complete hogwash.
Just about everything in it is an opinion of dubious value, and with zero relevance to the OP post which questioned first and foremost the OS stability.
If you miss so much the olden days, just get yourself an upgradeable Mac that can run Snow Leopard and be happy.
(Or a Windows XP PC, because all the criticisms you raise are also applicable to recent Win releases.)
But you won’t do that. You won’t do that because Sequoia (or Win 11) are infinitely more accomplished and stable OS releases and your workflow relies on that.
I cannot even begin to comprehend how anybody could attempt to argue that recent OS versions, coupled with recent hardware releases, are not improvements on anything that came before (with rare exceptions).
Finally, for future reference, a reply is infinitely more useful than one of these 😡
1987? I was using the Apple IIgs and MS-DOS word perfect in those days. How did you get a Mac???
macOS is not perfect; but the issues you’re describing are exceptional (perhaps related to your setup) and do not support sweeping generalizations about the declining state of macOS in my opinion.
Is the OS changing? Yes. Does everyone like all the changes? No. Is sequoia performing worse than Sonoma? Not for me — I installed Sequoia on release day and my M1 Max MacBook Pro is running great and the only issues I’m encountering are window-focus issues when switching between Microsoft Office apps using Stage Manager and Mission Control.
Are these issues annoying? Yes. Are they typical issues seen with every OS upgrade? Yes. Are they indicators of a decline of macOS? No.