You do know that it’s pointless to argue against the yearly hardware paired with multiple OS advancemints cycle that starts at WWDC. Trying to stall this in two year spurts would only give the competition the benefit of a Osborn effect to software changes for Apple OS advancement. Aside from the current Sonoma depending on you model you can make use of any older supported OS of you choice using DFU restore to pair OS and system FW correctly.
What Osborne effect? What competition? Microsoft, with their… what, triennial release schedule? Linux-on-the-desktop?
Face it, Apple could hit pause at any moment and nothing – other than maybe them getting back to the top of the performance and stability heap – would happen. Doing what they're doing, however… may degrade the experience in ways they might be oblivious to. Considering how spotty their development of professional machines is, and even of professional software (to the point that they can't even dogfood it, as their latest Keynote video having been edited in
Adobe Premiere Pro attests), I suspect Apple does indeed have some serious blind spots when it comes to QA.
As for DFU restoring and old firmware pairing, surely you're not suggesting that I downgrade to potentially insecure, unsupported or otherwise outdated OSes just to get basic functionality back, are you? We're talking
networking here, the pride and joy of UNIX. I've had AppleTalk and SMB shares here at home, working fine, for TWO DECADES now, and my most recent and expensive computer, a Mac Studio, can't properly serve those. It's a joke.
And to further drive the point home: I used to be the Mac Room monitor (more like admin) at my old Faculty, and I oversaw a network with around 36 desktop Macs, to which dozens and dozens of students also connected with their PowerBooks and MacBooks to send files to our print servers. None of them ever had any issues, and they ran everything from Panther to Snow Leopard. Heck, here at home I can actually connect from the Studio to an old iMac G5 running Leopard via SMB, and that one can, in turn, connect to an UTM VM on my Studio running Mac OS 9 via AppleTalk, so I know for a fact that this isn't a hardware issue. I own 20 different Macs at home, and those that are actually functional can connect to the network just fine. Conversely, I believe my old iMac 5K and Mid-2012 13'' MacBook Pro also had networking issues recently, due to… you've guessed it, s****y macOS versions (was it Catalina? Monterey? I can't recall, but I know it was fairly recent).
In my not-so-small sample of over 50 Macs, yeah, I'm pretty sure that networking issues like these are fairly recent and OS-related. I'm not sure how bad Windows' network stack is at the moment, but if I ever figure out it's more stable than macOS's, that would just add to the reasons for switching back, yep. The sheer amount of stupid little bugs (oh, someone mentioned windowing; guess what, I'm not forking over €1800 for a 5K Studio Display, and I'm a bit fed up with macOS screwing up my window sizes whenever it wakes up from sleep) is like death by a thousand cuts.
For someone so well-versed in computing history, to the point that you even know what the Osborne is, surely you can appreciate how OSes and platforms come and go, and sometimes due to sheer hubris. And my personal experience is: the more bugs I find, and the longer they linger, the less “bluff-y” my threats to AppleCare representatives that I may one day switch back are. I haven't exactly looked at pricing, and whether I'd get a pre-built/brand name machine or build my own, but I never really stopped buying components as I've always treated my Macs like PCs. Sure, Apple could do away with all the power users like us, but they shouldn't forget that
we are the ones who got others to switch and stick to the platform in the first place. If I were to switch back, I might very well take ≈50 people with me for the journey in the long run. And considering how my nickname is actually Mac-related, and how I'm a design teacher, that would be news in and of itself and send a bit of a signal across a +300-strong community.
