As a daily Mac user who started to use macOS (OS X) about 7-8 years ago, I find the insurmountable number of bugs of macOS Catalina alarming. Don’t get me wrong, the situation is still much, much compared to Windows or Linux[0], buy it is alarming to see the general quality of macOS software to decrease.
I personally think it’s due to Apple engineers trying to do so much; I remember being impressed by the number of new features and changes introduced this year while watching the WWDC, but it looks like Apple couldn’t keep up its own enthusiasm.
Project Catalyst was poorly executed; I was disappointed that Catalyst doesn’t default to ‘HIG-respecting’ AppKit controls that correspond well with the UIKit equivalents (so that modal form sheets in UIKit are translated into floating windows, e.g.), and the inability to mix in AppKit controls and UIKit ones into the same view hierarchy (NSColorWell or NSPopUpButton doesn’t have UIKit equivalents), e.g.
SwiftUI is great in theory, but the tooling is immature, it’s not available to write any decently complex apps with them.
The iCloud changes were reverted right before Catalina’s release; looks like the iCloud team didn’t have enough manpower to fix all the bugs until the release.
It’s concerning, as one of the premise of macOS was that it works as expected, though that now the newly introduced parts doesn’t.
I’m expecting a stabilizing release for macOS 10.16 akin to the stone-stable 10.14 Mojave, but I don’t remember 10.13 High Sierra to be unstable like this one.
[0]: For Linux users who don’t agree with this: I’ve never set up a Linux desktop system with all the hardware working without doing any ‘geek’ stuff like running some shell commands.
And no, the fact that Apple only allows to use macOS only on its own computers isn’t an excuse. And no, even on well supported laptops like the ThinkPad, there are a furious amount of bugs that need ‘configuring’
The company and its engineering teams are absolutely subjected to delivering too much.
I think the prior perceived quality of Apple software was propped up by a lot of people internally grinding very hard on a far smaller set of products than the company ships today. That might work when you are at 10k people, not 120k.
It’s really time for Apple to make a good faith effort to improve its software development process. Honestly it seems more like an executive leadership issue, incessant and hasty product changes come at the cost of stability.
I am strongly of the opinion that the fixed yearly release cycle is almost unequivocally bad for macOS (and most years it ain't so great for iOS either -- 13 is still a mess).
My Mac is, and has been for many years, a 100% work machine. 'Leisure' computing for me is done on my phone or iPad, and I think the same likely applies for a lot of Mac users.
The yearly cycle mostly makes sense for iOS because they want flashy new features to go with their flashy new hardware, but the Mac has basically no schedule for hardware updates. Even when they happen, they're usually spec bumps and not the sort of update that requires new user-facing OS features.
Of course I want the Mac and macOS to continue to steadily improve. I love the platform. I am utterly apathetic towards Windows, and using Linux for 8 hours a day at my day job has confirmed that I could not possibly stand to run it full-time on my personal machine. I don't want the Mac to die off. But for the love of god I wish they'd just wait until the software is ready before releasing it.
I personally think it’s due to Apple engineers trying to do so much; I remember being impressed by the number of new features and changes introduced this year while watching the WWDC, but it looks like Apple couldn’t keep up its own enthusiasm.
Project Catalyst was poorly executed; I was disappointed that Catalyst doesn’t default to ‘HIG-respecting’ AppKit controls that correspond well with the UIKit equivalents (so that modal form sheets in UIKit are translated into floating windows, e.g.), and the inability to mix in AppKit controls and UIKit ones into the same view hierarchy (NSColorWell or NSPopUpButton doesn’t have UIKit equivalents), e.g.
SwiftUI is great in theory, but the tooling is immature, it’s not available to write any decently complex apps with them.
The iCloud changes were reverted right before Catalina’s release; looks like the iCloud team didn’t have enough manpower to fix all the bugs until the release.
It’s concerning, as one of the premise of macOS was that it works as expected, though that now the newly introduced parts doesn’t. I’m expecting a stabilizing release for macOS 10.16 akin to the stone-stable 10.14 Mojave, but I don’t remember 10.13 High Sierra to be unstable like this one.
[0]: For Linux users who don’t agree with this: I’ve never set up a Linux desktop system with all the hardware working without doing any ‘geek’ stuff like running some shell commands. And no, the fact that Apple only allows to use macOS only on its own computers isn’t an excuse. And no, even on well supported laptops like the ThinkPad, there are a furious amount of bugs that need ‘configuring’