The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating. We are in the thousand papercut stage where lots of small things just don’t work properly.
One of my Macs has developed the most insane habit of losing audio output capability, and then tries to route it to another one - a feature I didn’t even know existed.
On tvOS if a frame takes too long it just starts skipping frames and runs at 20 FPS. It won't recover after it happens. ThermalState is .nominal, so it's not that. There's also no way to just say "render as fast as possible" so you can measure performance, instead every device does throttling/pacing and it's completely opaque.
Anyway, I've had a developer account for 10+ years, and run into stuff like this constantly where you just can't get things to work properly. The framework isn't used much, so it's probably just broken.
I ported the game to SDL3/Zig and wouldn't you know it I can run continuously at 60 fps.. It's disappointing because I'm on board with targeting a single platform if I can utilize the hardware more effectively and make something special with it. But instead it's constantly an uphill battle of dealing with the opaqueness/brokenness of the platform. If I open a feedback request I'll probably just get told it's a bug, and maybe they fix it next WWDC.
You can most certainly render “as fast possible”. You are probably using a CAMetal layer render target with a delegate that is vsync’d to device refresh. You have to roll your own delegate or render target instead. Apple has a sample project in the Metal framework on how to do this.
I still get crackling or popping many times a day.
Also, the annoying render stutters during scrolling across many apps haven't been fixed since iOS 26 was introduced (they were probably there before, but Liquid Glass made it worse). Even the iPhone 18 Pro suffers from it (also checked on iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air).
Meanwhile, my underpowered P10P with GrapheneOS renders scrolling super smoothly.
My Nexus 5's "underwater" mic issue never got addressed. Wouldn't be surprised if the next thing iOS copies from Android is, "Audio bug that just never gets fixed."
(If you have a problem with this comment, please point out which part is untrue or unfair. iOS has copied many Android features in recent release, the Nexus 5 had an audio bug that was never fixed, and we are in a thread talking specifically about an iOS audio bug that seems to not be getting fixed. Please do not treat the downvote button like you're on Reddit.)
My Iphone has had some bugs in the last year that are so sloppy yet impactful its almost funny. About half the time im looking at my lock screen notifications, the screen will lock less than a second after touching the screen. I have had other issues as well, but for a company with so much money I expect a little more craftsmanship.
I have had other issues as well but something that actively locks my phone while I am obviously using it is an extremely frustrating start to my day.
I really appreciate that I'm not the only one. Using Apple software is increasingly an experience in navigating a minefield of bizarre UX mistakes.
The big concern for me is if I ever find myself in an emergency situation and I need to use my phone to contact someone. Apple's iPhone is so inconsistent and unreliable even in the best of conditions.
This is a personal anecdote - I'm a games developer, working predominantly on Windows. Since last year I have to use a Mac to work with our iOS builds and I honestly don't understand people saying Mac is for developers - the number of actual outright bugs I run into every week makes windows look like something that came out of NASA. I eagerly awaited the release of MacOS 27 to maybe finally address some of them, and of course it just traded one set of problems for another. It's just shockingly bad - and unlike a true Linux system you have very little ability to fix some of those issues yourself too.
The latest macOS, after a lot of praise, has proven to be really buggy to me. At least liquid glass only had poor readability, but now windows go missing/turn invisible almost daily and it’s getting seriously annoying.
It's so extremely buggy! I upgraded to Golden Gate early (tho after release) because everyone (including here) said it's so much better than Tahoe, but it has fixed no bugs which annoyed me with Tahoe and introduced so many new ones. Mission Control frequently switches to the wrong window (perfectly reproducible bugs which result in the wrong window coming forward). And in Mission Control, windows now overlap each other, are overlapped by the dock, and end up partially outside the screen, in ways they just never did in any earlier macOS release. The Launchpad replacement part of Spotlight in 26 was always super buggy but has gotten even more buggy in 27. Just yesterday the WiFi menu in the menu bar beach balled.
iOS text input is also super buggy now, with frequent rendering glitches where the new blue words from "AI" suggestions or whatever overlap other text, there are stale blue squiggles which are hold-overs from grammatical issues which have since been fixed, completely nonsensical grammatically nonsense suggestions, etc.
The decrease in quality from 15 to 26 and then 26 to 27 is staggering.
You'd think there is no point in astroturfing the latest macos. They make no money from you or me upgrading their OS software. If anything it is a net negative for apple's brand to have me upgrade and face the B.S. newer OSs saddle upon you. The turfing would do better to keep me on my current OS if the goal is to increase my pleasurable feelings towards the apple brand.
New releases of macOS often drop older hardware, so perhaps pressuring people to be running the latest version incentivizes regular hardware upgrades. Especially considering Apple's push for local AI; new versions of macOS can gate AI features behind newer hardware.
They make no money from you either way this quarter, but people talking about bad experiences are sure to deter new customers. I guess Apple is just counting on their walled garden to keep existing customers from leaving.
What is the profit angle? So what? That is just them paying for devs to write that up for total waste of money unless they sell me a subscription to make money off of me. How are they making more money? Will they sell me a siri subscription? That is one way, but that isn't what this is doing. This is literally negative brand fuel turfing this update on this forum in particular. They should want to hide it under the rug and not scare more people off to linux instead of macos for their home compute. Macos is hanging on a thread already. normies don't buy macs anymore, they buy ipads. The division is on a thread and spending on turfing makes no sense here. Just alienates the remaining crop of users and buys no newer ones.
> I upgraded to Golden Gate early (tho after release)
One would think that after this many macOS releases, all the techies would have learned to wait till the .1/.2 update drops with the critical bugfixes...
> Exactly 0 of the new or old bugs I experience have been touched since then
I mean, that's at least in part because the first update (confusingly numbered .2) isn't out yet. Which is pretty normal for Apple releases. Wait a few months for a stable experience.
> I need to know whether that software works on the new OS, and fix
Yeah, I get the pain. To some extent this is just the price for being a developer (and I have had similar early-adopter issues on Windows for the same reason)
Audio problems aren't new. I remember that the last 10.9 build I was still using in 2016 had this bug where sound would just stop working every now and then. `sudo pkill coreaudiod` fixed it every time.
Although so far I'm mostly happy with Apple products. Happier than with any Windows laptops.
(But damn if I encounter a bug or an issue. Just reporting those have made hordes of Apple fans attack me, in response to a standard technical bug report.)
Youngsters have to understand that Apple's quality was so bad, not only did they fail to deliver in a few products with industry partners, the teams weren't even capable of writing a new operating system.
Windows is also equally away from "3x Developers!" cry days.
It is an unusual spelling and there is some trivia about it, it turns out — it's an anglicisation of "Kaplan", either by his father or by an official at Ellis Island:
And If you google just "Copland", you instead get references to the Stallone/De Niro/Liotta/Sciorra/Keitel/Patrick/Rapaport/Berg/Garofalo/essentially everyone good in cinema movie Cop Land.
(Which I rarely miss an opportunity to recommend, and I guess this is one)
Not the best for any of the actors or the director.. it was that good? Maybe I watched it with the wrong prior info. It /was/ during a cop-movie excess period.
It’s an outstanding movie, IMO. (But then I think it’s better to try magnificently and fail than to turn out most of the shit that passes for current movies.)
It really exists as an antidote to New York cop antihero movies, or maybe sort of a contentious, jaded superposition of them all. It’s an ensemble piece, full of great acting, complex dynamics, undercurrent of tragedy, abasement etc.; Stallone is brilliant.
The way the tables suddenly turn for Superboy (Rapaport) is a great turning point for the movie.
My personal favorite is the alarm clock on iOS, after the first time you dismiss the alert with the phone unlocked, it reappears as a transparent dialog 10% of the size of a normal one (i.e. so small not even a stylus could click the buttons). The mashed ball of widgets can only be swiped off the screen.
On the latest production release for Intel Macs, I can no longer connect to two external displays at the same time. I have to plug them in one at a time (sometimes multiple times before they register), and reconnect them after sleep. A very annoying regression.
The hidden "Detect Displays" button in Display settings does nothing.
This bug is one of many papercuts in Apple software.
Here’s another: Hide My Email’s “Forward To” feature is broken. You can’t change which email address messages get forwarded to. I have nearly 500 Hide My Email addresses and want to change the forwarding address, but can’t because the feature is broken.
I migrated family email hosting from Google Workspace to Apple iCloud+ Custom Email Domains a few years ago and it's been smooth sailing. Few people realize that Apple has been a high-volume email host since long before Google Mail. This is the guide I used: https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...
I also used Hide My Email to de-Google. I changed the email on basically every online service I use from my Gmail to a unique Hide My Email address for each service.
At one point, when I had fewer Hide My Email addresses, I was able to change my Forward To address. But now when I try to change it, it simply doesn't work.
I see the same screen as in your screenshot, but selecting a different Forward To address and submitting does nothing. There's no error message; the Forward To address just doesn't change.
I've been trying to update my Forward To address for months on multiple versions of macOS and iOS, and it doesn't work. I think the bug is related to how many Hide My Email addresses I have, since I was able to update it when I had fewer.
Another annoying thing, even if updating the Forward To address did work, is that you can only have one Forward To address for all your Hide My Email addresses. You can't choose separate Forward To addresses for different Hide My Email addresses.
I for one stopped holding my breath after witnessing a pretty major issue introduced in a macOS beta carry into the stable release for the dozenth time.
Yup I have the same problem with audio. And I found more problems last two years than in previous 10. I wonder if that due to some internal cuts in quality assurance or moving to AI and vibe coding more code than devs can review. But it may be subjective feeling.
Finder search has been broken for me for years I think, and that smart folder "Recents" never worked properly. It's puzzling how they can let this happen.
My iPhone 15 has a weird one. I beta tested the glass updates. Part way through the beta it broke, and my phone will only show glass visuals during movement. Once it stops it turns opaque. This happens across the entire phone. Resetting the phone from a backup doesn’t fix the issue. My only fix is to wipe my data and start over. Hardly a solution. I’m no longer on the beta, even a few major versions updated now. Issue remains.
My macOS 27 m4 MacBook 128GB ram has in the last 3 days: completely locked up and went black screen (after reboot it had a stacktrace that windowserver crashed and didn’t come back) ; had a full on kernel panic, which later an AI agent analyzing the panic dump said it’s because the iOS simulator was somehow leaking resources and watchdog triggered a the kernel panic.
I genuinely have more issue with my audio peripherals (USB microphone, bluetooth earbuds) on the M4 Macbook that my work gave me than on my Arch Linux desktop. Around once a month the Macbook will inexplicably not be able to receive input from mic or output to my earbuds (or both!) despite the OS settings still showing the current input/output as selected correctly. Rebooting somehow fixes it, but I'm at a loss to understand how the computer/OS that costs thousands of dollars and is supposed to "just work" because of being completely designed by a single entity manages to struggle with this when the completely arbitrarily selected set of hardware and software components that I threw together for my desktop seem to never have any problem like this nowadays.
Mine has been doing that for a fair few months actually. Sometimes flipping the output to something different then back again sorts it, other times a reboot is required.
My Mac has developed the issue of slowing down over time if not rebooted. Heavy GPU use accelerates the decay. It feels just like swapping to disk except it's not - swap usage always 0. I didn't have this issue before Tahoe.
We may not be far off from finding LLM prompts embedded directly in software. Instead of savefile(data_thing), we might start seeing
agentcall( claude, data_thing, "please save this file to the user's home directory" )
and the author of that code will pat him/herself on the back then form a habit of telling his/her friends "I am an engineer, I have built over 100 software programs spanning multiple continents".
I already see this behavior out of the tech support class that likes to participate in bureaucratic processes among gen z. The standards and expectations for what is colloquially "engineer", outside of bonafide engineering circles, has really fallen over the last two decades.
The attitude that replacing functions with calls to AI agents is like totally okay in software engineering will eventually seep in too.
I once worked in L1 support, and because we had to take calls @07:00 sharp (we were the only number a company of 40k people could call) and Windows updates were still a multi-hour endeavor, I stuck to rebooting daily (or shutdown+startup) all devices I use heavily, including MacOS.
Over the past 8 years that has basically solved every bug all my colleagues ran into with MacOS. At some point my boss wasn't getting calendar notifications anymore for a couple weeks, "did you try and reboot?" fixed it in 5m. He later mentioned he hadn't rebooted in 7 weeks.
I don't understand why people treat Apple devices like unbreakable analog AM radios, they're very complex computers like any Windows or Linux machines, with a huge state machine beneath it that is easier to reset daily/weekly than to keep working properly for months.
This isn't happening for me, if by "over time" you mean "several weeks" of heavy GPU use without a reboot. Consider the possibility that the root cause is not macOS.
By "over time" I mean that if I run local LLMs or play graphics-intensive games (like No Man's Sky's native Mac port) I can start seeing up to half-second (or longer) delays in switching apps, starting videos and much more with less than 5 days of uptime. Heavy enough usage will reproduce it within a few hours.
If I avoid doing those things, it can last much longer.
I have the 128GB/8TB M4 Max and I'm not even coming close to using up all or even most of the unified memory. I suspect it may be related to some form of fragmentation, though I have no way to know how.
I believe you, just suggesting that the issue may not be quite as general. I have a 64GB Studio M1 Max, so the years of hardware/firmware differences between us may be relevant as well. Hope you find a solution!
It didn't happen to me before the update, so I suspect it must be something about the update or how it interacts with the software on my system. Still, it's one of those issues I have no hope of seeing solved, because at this rate nobody doing development at Apple is actually going to leave a Mac running for days on end...
Huh, that file seems to have existed since I first set up the machine! Do you have any more information on this? For me it just contains the bytes `0x0:0x0`. How'd you know to try that and do you know how it worked at all?
Edit: The modification date is actually earlier than the added date -- it looks like the file was transferred by Migration Assistant from my previous machine! Not sure if that's important.
I think I figured it out when I experienced a repeating crash in the drop down control in the network settings, and then looked at the crash report, there was something about localization in the backtrace, so I removed the file in an attempt to fix that and after a logout/ login the weird lag went away too. In my case the file had the value for UTF-8 and something in Tahoe’s text system goes into a loop when that file is present. I’ve had the same file for ages because it fixed a problem with pbcopy/emacs interaction. I wound up working around that issue with an env var once I realized that the file was causing issues.
There's a bug causing NSStatusItems in MenuBar<->WindowServer to enter a continuous redraw loop after a number of hours of uptime which pins CPU at like at least 10-20%. I filed it as FB24528844
1. WindowServer sends the app a stream of remote-context notifications (CGSDatagramReadStream::dispatchMainQueueDatagrams -> remote_context_notify).
2. AppKit responds by rebuilding the status-bar window's tracking areas and structural regions (_NSTrackingAreaAKManager _updateStructuralRegionCreateIfNeeded / displayCycleUpdateStructuralRegions, including NSButtonCell _hasRolloverAppearance for the menu bar rollover effect).
3. That dirties the window, so UpdateCycle/stepTransactionFlush commits a CA::Transaction to the WindowServer.
4. Another notification arrives and the loop repeats at display refresh rate.
Just so you know, a process pinning the CPU at 10-20% on Apple Silicon doesn't even cause any perceptible impact to multitasking. I've pinned the CPU far higher and not noticed anything like this, so it's definitely not that issue. I sometimes forget workloads are even running because the rest of the system feels so perfectly fine even when the fans are running full tilt.
This causes big pauses and stutters system-wide, which is not consistent with any level of CPU utilization alone.
The general quality decline in software seems to be accelerating. I suspect it’s mainly due to AI slop. Engineers creating tons of code due to management pressure and lesser people available to test.
Honestly it aligns with ideas like the move to Swift. (And the monstrosity of Xcode replacing project builder).
Back when it was obj-c with cocoa the quality was night and day higher than it is today. Not too long ago I booted my G4 and was stunned by how responsive it is, which was extra surprising considering at the time it didn’t feel that way!
You can tell that generations of greybeards at infinite loop have been retiring. They got the hardware culture right only to see the nextstep legacy in software go to waste.
That doesn't really make sense to me, since Objective-C is a terrible language and Swift is a pretty good one. The good parts (mostly the libraries) are still there in Swift.
Swift was the beginning of the end of macOS. It signaled the exit of a ton of NEXT people, and a completely new regime -totally disconnected from what came before- being allowed to run the show.
The quality drop around the time it was introduced was staggering. One example: In the Objective-C days we had extensive, reliable and up-to-date documentation including entire developer guides (book-length PDFs) for all aspects of the OS. These days, besides half-broken frameworks and missing docs, you're lucky if you find out how things work from a WWDC video.
How can one argue against the disaster that is Tahoe? What kind of engineering culture not only produces something this broken but pretends it's OK? Jobs would have fired half the OS division for something half as bad.
I get about a second of audio interruptions when theme auto-switches from light to dark at night. Usually no big deal but I need to remember to turn it off if I were to perform with it.
Did they actually catch it in their own tests? Or is this an external developer catching it for them? I guess if it works, it works, but this certainly seems like something they could be testing for up front.
Meanwhile, most of us don't have any issues. I think overall the Apple ecosystem is really good in terms of software quality. However, there are of course issues like with any system and if Apple is not able to reproduce something, the harder it gets to get it fixed.
And the whole premise of your comment doesn't make sense as it's based on a bug in a macOS version that hasn't even been released yet. Of course stuff will break when you're busy developing.
Regularly bugs reported during a beta do not get fixed until the next major release. If they do not, they will be closes as wontfix because they were fine to exist a whole major version.
My macbook has been kernel panicking during every sleep.
Been using macOS since the OS X days of Panther (2003). Since then, people were kicking and screaming about bugs that Apple presumably didn't fix yet, and that's probably true. But it does get fixed, and if you're just sensible - like not upgrading immediately, you'll hardly notice issues. On average, I'm about 6-12 months behind on major versions. I'm in 26.6.2 (Tahoe) right now
I "upgraded" from Tahoe pretty quickly because Tahoe, even a year on, was such a buggy mess that I hoped Golden Gate would be better, especially after it was glazed as a bug fix release. But it just introduced new bugs without fixing the old ones. Staying 6-12 moths behind doesn't leave you with a functional system anymore, it's just differently broken.
Do you have data on that? Based on peopel I talk to, it seems like there are plenty of people on both sides, and it's not clear to me which one is the majority.
The only data most of us can refer to are Google Trends. The unprecedented peaks for "How to switch to Android", "iPhone revert update", "iPhone fix battery", "iPhone slow", "new iOS sucks", "iPhone bad now", "How to block iPhone updates" all reached new peaks with the release of Liquid Glass in late 2025.
Of course, this is only Google Trends, and even if we interpret this as a 4x to 100x increase in bad experiences with Apple products with the forced introduction of Liquid Glass, it still might be the case that >50% of people aren't consciously experiencing problems from it.
I'm not debating whether there are issues. Any sufficiently complex system will have issues, and those having issues will be very vocal about it. But I'm pretty sure it's not worse, or unacceptable.
By and large macOS is extremely stable and robust. Based on my both experience and hundreds of employees using Macs over a 10+ year period. We'd undoubtedly have had more support issues if we had used Windows, as an example.
No, you're debating whether "most" users have issues, which was your claim. I don't bother complaining to the IT people at my company because of fundamental issues in the OS that they can't do anything about, so I'm not sure your data implies what you think it does.
One of my Macs has developed the most insane habit of losing audio output capability, and then tries to route it to another one - a feature I didn’t even know existed.