Yes, it is better than Windows 11 in many ways. I'm still seeing Windows NT panels when I bring up certain managers.
Yeah, just the whole OS lacks cohesiveness, when it comes to design language.
I worked in software development for over 20 years. There are many bugs in every version of macOS, as well as, design flaws, and points where you can tell that someone just didn't care. It's obvious that Apple has gone from making sure the software is correct to worrying about features that people might use. It's a software development style that has been present at Adobe for 20 years: don't fix bugs, add features.
To be honest, I would say that, most of the time, the new “features” are quite minor – there’s rarely anything that drastically improves or changes the overall user experience.
Having said that, I think that in the past years the quality has been improving. For example, I didn’t have more issues with the first iOS 17 / macOS Sonoma betas, nor I see anything major broken with the current ones. This is quite a change from few years back, where even small on the surface updates, were having ton of serious problems throughout the beta cycle.
This is not to say that there are zero issues. There have been issues with Safari, UI-related bugs here and there, problems with widgets and notifications on iOS all the time, etc.
Generally, what looks to me, is Apple is adding small new features here and there, as small wins, which, unfortunately, have been targeting primarily the teenagers, I suppose.
I would like to see actual enhancements to things that actually matter to most users. For example, despite the improvements in WebKit in the past couple of years, the overall experience is still sluggish – and I think needs more loving. Apps like Music has not really introduced new features in the past 5 years, apart from lyrics and Dolby atmos support.
So yeah… stability-wise things are somewhat better, but I feel the pace of innovation / introduction of actually what matters is lacking.
