I wish they’d just stop with the yearly major releases.
Unlike the iPhone, there’s no magic date in September when all the year’s new Macs drop and require support for all the new hardware capabilities. Sure, there are changes to system apps on iOS like Notes that want feature parity on the Mac, but you could do those in a point release. Or even better, decouple those apps from the OS and update them individually via the App Store.
They clearly don’t have enough resources allocated to macOS anymore to have a big yearly release without spending the next n months fixings problems. Just release the damn thing when it’s actually ready. They didn’t do yearly releases when the Mac was still their major focus, I don’t see why they need to today.
Unfortunately Apple is a services company now and they have to release all platforms with iCloud (ie all platforms) roughly in lockstep as they add new functionality in iOS that then needs to also be supported on desktop.
Naturally you need to be able to view your stereoscopic 3d videos on your Macbook, or something.
I see more and more complaints about bugs, anyway. I use it all day every day without issues, though. Not sure what to make of that. It’s not that I don’t believe those who are affected. I’m just not sure one can conclude that it’s getting more buggy with each release. Maybe the number of unusual use cases increases with popularity?
For me personally it’s not bugs as such. Bugs usually do get fixed fairly quickly (though something like this making it into a release candidate is concerning).
It’s half-baked features that don’t get revisited for years. We all know the new System Settings sucks; Sonoma hasn’t meaningfully improved it. The Notification Centre redesign introduced 3 (?) years ago is so much worse than the old design, but it hasn’t been touched since. Disk Utility is a shadow of its former self.
macOS is an established operating system, I would prefer them leave perfectly good features alone unless they can actually make them better.
> Yet, macOS seems to get buggier and buggier between releases. Something about the way it's being developed right now is going very wrong
This is a common trend in the SW development in the last decade. Aparently bug fixing is hard and expensive, that's why they concentrate on new features or, in extreme cases, complete rewrites (GTK).
> Yet, macOS seems to get buggier and buggier between releases.
i wonder how much of that is a side effect of constant rewrites of already existing features... i'm reminded of when they tried to replace mdnsresponder amd all the chaos that ensued, or even just swiftui and all its regressions... the dock being rewritten in swift or system preferences etc...
What gives you the idea that macOS doesn’t have big changes between releases? Every single release has a huge amount of change in it, even if you don’t happen to notice.
They're releasing macOS a whole month earlier than usual, with fewer beta releases than usual. I believe this is the first time they will have released macOS and iOS on the same date.
Yet, macOS seems to get buggier and buggier between releases. Something about the way it's being developed right now is going very wrong.