Stability isn't the sole attribute of quality (e.g. consistency, usability, utility, interoperability, to name a few). Where the software and experience are losing their edge is, metaphorically, at the edges.
For whatever reason, I became self aware to—in my opinion—a lacking of attention to these attributes throughout my Apple experience four years ago or so. And quite honestly, the list of examples I encountered unwittingly started to become so big that to sit down and document them all would be a waste of time. I've thought about starting that list 100 times, every time I re-encountered an old inconsistency that I had been experiencing for who knows how long. And for what? As a single user, raising a concern about edge cases will have little impact.
But in service of your prompt for discussion, here are just a couple from a mental list that has gotten a new entry every week or two for the last four years:
- Opening your list of Hide My Email addresses in iCloud settings is painfully sluggish on any Apple device.
- Finder's side-scrolling Columns view does not persist "autofit" of column widths for each level in folder hierarchy.
- Clicking any OS-native menu bar provides a link to its respective settings pane, but not for Clock.
- Safari not supporting multi-select of open tabs for drag/drop management until 10+ years after Google Chrome.
- The intuitiveness of iOS home screen app icon arrangement: still wonky in the "widget" era.
- Example: How auto-arrange will work for other app icons in light of you trying to position a specific icon is completely unexplainable. Dragging into or out of a folder, or to subsequent home screen pages sucks.
- MacOS window position persistence when transitioning between single and multiple-display environments.
- Siri. Full stop.
There's seven I could remember after thinking on this for 30 minutes. Consider for a moment that it took recognition of a pattern on my part, at the beginning of those four years, to even conceive of the possibility of a decline. There are probably 50 more I can't think of right now that have existed since years prior.
The best and most mainstream example, is one where the company put business before its users: iMessages. Whether or not one fancies the elitism fostered by blue text bubbles and the respective rich interactions supported by iMessages (before RCS), remember who Apple hurt most by refusing interoperability with Android, by slow-tracking SMS fallback improvements, etc.? Apple users.
And this pattern is not just in software.
In fact, I remember the first Macbook I got with a TouchID button. While logged in almost right out of the box, I intuitively depressed it thinking it would lock the screen. Even though it had a physical detent action, it didn't lock the screen. It would be a several years before that got that worked out.
- How about the inability to use your own iPad as a true external display? What does Apple truly gain by introducing latency in the Sidecar implementation, over supporting direct cabled hardware input to an iPad? This would make iPad's attractive to not just Mac users. I wanted to get onboard with Sidecar, but it was never reliable for me.
- There was a time I remember non-creative organizations standardizing on Apple Intel hardware—to run Windows by default—because it was the hands-down most well-engineered and reliable hardware. What does Apple have to lose by preventing alternative OSes being installed on its devices? Easy: unit sales. And the opportunity to have an Apple logo staring into the eyes of a bunch of Linux users from their desktops. Or in the corporate offices at Microsoft HQ. Granted, this verges more on the side of "strategic" quality and consistency in a protectionist scheme, but even business decisions can be seen as low quality "design" decisions or ignorance.
Anyway. While I don't see Apple as a $h¡tsh0w (I still think it has the best experience), the ecosystem of software and hardware has begun to expose its cracks.
Hope this helps.
