Two RCs just means they still haven't fixed the bugs.
Normally I don't have too many problems, but Sonoma's been the biggest pile since Yosemite.
While I'm not sure about the whole “two RCs” thing, I do agree, Sonoma's been a complete flustercuck for me. Ventura was already bad enough, with that entire breaking externally-stored user accounts mid-cycle thing (they still work, if created in a really convoluted fashion, but then iCloud breaks to a certain extent), but Sonoma's CloudStorage implementation and its interaction with Microsoft OneDrive borking my Time Machine setup was… interesting, to say the least. As is Safari's text field bug, which is manifesting itself AS I WRITE THIS COMMENT, quite a few updates in… 🤦♂️
Oh, and what about the fact that if I need to share files from my Mac Studio after some time (sleep-wake cycles, I believe?), I must ALWAYS turn sharing off, reboot the machine and turn it on again, otherwise my other machines won't connect to it? This has been going on since Ventura, and
still hasn't been fixed (yes, I've seen networking bugs on Mac OS X/OS X/macOS before, but they'd never lingered on for this long), and I'll be sure to use my brand-spanking-new external hard drive setup with the latest Public Beta (which doesn't even automatically update, alas; I must always manually download the latest full installer to my internal drive with OCLP, and then manually mount the drive and run it from the Terminal in Recovery Mode, because USB-connected SATA SSDs are just too cheap for Apple Silicon Macs, despite macOS Betas then booting and running just fine from them 🙄) to send them direct feedback if I manage to reproduce that behaviour (and I'll likely be able to, as I'm also daily-driving my Studio off of an external Thunderbolt drive, so the beta config isn't that different).
As for Apple deciding to nerf Music.app's “Recently Added” view to a useless “last 60 albums added” deal instead of a Photos.app-like endless chronological view, that's just the icing on the cake. I had to partake in a campaign across three different places (Apple's own Discussions, Reddit and this very website), just so we could all send them a barrage of direct feedback and strong-arm them into fixing a dumbfounding, conscious UX regression, STAT. Yes, I had AppleCare representatives tell me, on the phone and on record, that they did that on purpose, leaving us no choice other than naming and shaming them both in public and in private. The gall of these people, to purposely nerf a product on their most professional and expensive platform and affect their most valuable customers. 🤬
Oh, okay, they're going back to a functional Music.app, but only after months of waiting and public outcry, which are the markers of a positively abusive developer/provider-user/client relationship, if you ask me… It's not the first time we've all been through this (can you say… butterfly keyboards? Stupid, non-standard Safari tabs? 🙄 It's almost as if they're not properly attracting the right beta testers or hiring the proper focus groups to
warn them of these things in advance). Also, during my exploration of workarounds for Apple's disastrous decision, I ran into a myriad little but ridiculous bugs in Music.app that I had never noticed before, and it really made my perception of their software team that much worse than it had ever been. It all just looked… extra sloppy, and we're talking about a dog of an app that has been a Carbon-based mess for decades, on account of its Mac OS 9/Classic heritage (heck, that thing still hasn't gotten a proper, unified title/toolbar in Fullscreen Mode, which is a Mavericks feature from TEN years ago!), so… with such low expectations from the get-go, that is already saying
a lot.
And before you start going all condescending on me, and telling me that my setups are non-standard or some other BS, please look at my profile page. I've been a Mac user for more than twenty years (I bought my first iMac on Dec. 1st, 2003, so that makes it twenty years and one week), and started out on Jaguar, which came preinstalled with that machine, and quickly moved on to Panther, which had been released shortly after its manufacture and came bundled with it. Yes, I've seen a fair share of really nasty bugs, such as the one that caused data loss on external FireWire drives during OS upgrades (which ranks among the worst kind of bug). But the number and frequency of such bugs, and especially those affecting me (silently borking Time Machine backups, of all things, ranks right behind active data loss), even in machines that shouldn't be affected because they get such a light usage, is getting alarmingly high by comparison, and reminds me of my PC user days. No joke. And yes, I also run the latest version of macOS in pretty non-standard machines (such as the venerable and upgraded up the wazoo Mid 2012 13'' MacBook Pro) with OCLP but, funnily enough, it's more stable in some regards than even on my very much recent and cutting edge Mac Studio… Go figure!
I should also remind you all that this yearly release schedule has taken Apple off of their long tradition of tick-tock-like releases, wherein you'd get a feature-rich version (such as, say, Leopard or Lion), shortly followed by a mainly bug fix one (such as the corresponding Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, both widely regarded as being much more solid than their predecessors, and with good reason). macOS is a completely mature product at this point, and iOS and iPadOS are quickly heading in that direction, so there's absolutely no reason why Apple couldn't go back to that scheme even with a yearly release, and add only the bare essentials to support
new hardware drivers and features (or maybe some Apple services, sure, but if they had to put something minor on hold because they were on a bug fix cycle, so be it). In fact, there have been some reports that iOS/iPadOS 17 and macOS 15 may, indeed, fit into that kind of release, something which I would very much welcome. Please, PLEASE hit pause and fix this mess for a change, I
beg them.
As for the nonchalant attitude from Apple engineers and AppleCare representatives alike, that's just adding further salt on the wound. Apple, as a corporate entity and as a whole, is every bit as arrogant as their greenwashing, smug-looking execs. To say that I've never been as close to switching back to the “evil” empire (because, sadly, FOSS offerings aren't really an option in my field of work) as I am right now, twenty years in and with a huge investment in the platform, is a bit of an understatement. If I have to deal with the same s****y bugs as I did back during my PC user days anyway, I might as well go back to them and at least get myself a bit more freedom, serviceability and upgradeability, the works.
I'm already off of the iMac bandwagon, with my Mac Studio, so it wouldn't be that big of a deal. Heck, seeing how all my displays have both USB-C and HDMI inputs, I might even get myself a gaming PC and a smart KVM switch/app solution, and start exploring that option on the side right now… You see, the whole Mac Studio (and, to a certain extent, the higher-end Mac Mini range) thing goes both ways, and may end up biting Apple in the rear; it can work as a trojan horse for people to switch back to the PC. VMs already do a lot in that regard, and I've been noticing lately that while I feel that Windows veered off in a really bad direction UX-wise lately (it looks like macOS, but it's even less “Windows-like”, if you will, and looks kind of alien to someone who stopped using it as a daily driver back in the W98SE days and as a secondary OS in the Vista days, which is kind of sad if you consider that I still feel right at home with OSes as old as System 7.5.5 when playing with emulators), I could still very much work with it on a daily basis even in its current state.
I don't know why but it's so funny to me that they still didn't release the music widget for Sonoma. They even showed it in the keynote back in June(!) it was never in any of the betas. Widgets in general are messy on Mac OS, especially the ones from the iPhone.
Heh, see above. Music.app is a complete mess, and the fact of the matter is that that team has had their hands full lately, all with the new Classical app, this “Recently Added” debacle, these new features, etc. But it's still weird; if it was shown on the keynote, shouldn't it have been ready by now, as you aptly put? Unless, of course, the widget is tied in to some feature that's still coming, but it doesn't really make much sense, really (they could always launch a version that worked with whatever features we have now, and then update it accordingly).
