[xkemp]

How can there still be people writing these yearly "I'm so disappointed" articles. It's the same for every single MacOS release. I bet if I look through the archives here, the last halfway usable OS release from Apple was Mac OS 8.

You'd figure the people writing these articles wold leave for other platforms, and those that remain should be less likely to do hot-take duty next year, considering they didn't feel the need to this year?

Unless there's constant renewal in the pool of people-with-something-to-say. I guess today's worst-MacOS-ever is their future good-old-days-of-quality.

[thawaway1837]

This is absolutely not true.

I haven’t been in the Mac ecosystem for some time now, but I can say for sure that no one was writing these articles until Snow Leopard at least.

I thin what has led to the prevalence of these articles is Apples shift to an annual release cycle for their Mac OSes. It used to be well known that you didn’t upgrade to an OS until the .1 version at the earliest, and it was only until .3 or .4 that a new OS X would be absolutely stable. Unfortunately with the annual release cycle the OS isn’t stable for even a few months before it is replaced. And I’m convinced that the fixes aren’t as good anyways because as soon as one OS is out, many devs are likely working on the next one.

Catalina itself appears to have become a bigger disaster due to what may be considered good decisions, such as better security and killing 32 bit, but done in a way that reminds people of Vista. With nag screens and a poor transition path. That’s why the noise against Catalina has been even louder.

[tambourine_man]

Memory is a curious thing. Snow Leopard had a very problematic release but got better during the dot updates. Its “no new features” slogan was commendable and resonated well, but it meant under the hood changes that broke things.

Perhaps they should reconsider the yearly release schedule. Either go back to a more conservative one, letting things settle after many point updates and enjoying the achieved stability for longer, or adopt a continuous evergreen model, like Chrome and Firefox.

[thawaway1837]

Well, no one moved to a new OSX release on their main machines until .1 at least. That applied to Snow Leopard as well. And so SL wasn’t penalized for that.

The difference was that the non annual release cycle meant that the .0 version was a significantly smaller proportion of Snow Leopards life cycle, than is the case for recent annual releases of OSX.

Let’s assume Apple takes 3 months to stabilize an OS right after release. If you’re always up to date, an annual release cycle means that for 25% of your time, you’re using an unstable version of the OS. A 2 year cycle would mean that you’re using an unstable version for only 12.5% of your time. That’s a very significant change.

And in practice I think it’s worse because with the non annual release cycles, most OSX devs would use the time right after release to stabilize the OS. Whereas with the annual release cycle, it’s apparent that most devs’ priorities shift to next years OS instead.

[tambourine_man]

> The difference was that the non annual release cycle meant that the .0 version was a significantly smaller proportion of Snow Leopards life cycle, than is the case for recent annual releases of OSX.

Exactly. That’s what I meant.

[arh68]

Snow Leopard was the first "cheap" version of OS X, $29 (IIRC). People who went Tiger -> Leopard had to pay for the privilege, and after Snow Leopard it was all free (EDIT: no, I was wrong, it was later.. but it was cheaper).

Maybe that had something to do with it?

[kstenerud]

Leopard was an utter crap release with tons of complaints. I remember the many issues just trying to get Finder to work without crashing, or syncing a phone.

Snow Leopard was "better" in that it wasn't so terribly broken, and they eventually got it working decently.

From then on, the only complaints were about how locked down each new version was, what was no longer supported, and how many new annoying dialogs they'd introduced... UNTIL Catalina.

Now we're back to the Leopard problem again. Plus more annoying dialogs.

[chungus_khan]

Leopard also got rid of Classic, which meant I just couldn't use it if I had wanted to at the time. At that point there had been a long-time legacy of backwards compatibility for the Macintosh, and I was in a position where I frequently needed to retrieve data in oddball formats from older Mac software. Tiger for Intel already didn't have it, and from that point forward Apple's attitude to backwards compatibility has seemed to be to operate at the minimum acceptable level.

[thatfrenchguy]

I mean, Tiger for Intel had a PPC emulator, that’s not “minimum acceptable level”.

[chungus_khan]

It absolutely was. Pretty much nobody would have been able to use Intel Macs at launch without Rosetta, because there was no software.

What I mean is that Apple used to actively support a very long legacy of backwards compatibility, and since the switch to Intel seems to only care about maintaining as much backwards compatibility as is strictly necessary for ordinary users to accept.

[newscracker]

Every single Mac OS X/OS X/macOS release has had glaring issues, but the difference is that some of the releases have been relatively better and some of them worse. Catalina, combined with the user experience of someone who upgrades to Catalina, probably comes close to the original release of 10.0 or worse. Apple isn’t paying attention to software engineering on the Mac, and the constant push to “iOSify” the Mac is a big drag. It seems like the “Wild West” and “cowboy coding” and what other metaphors you can use to describe why Catalina and its apps are so bad.