[thisislife2]

The poor quality of macOS Tahoe is by design as it is a "transition" release - a transition OS release is often like a beta quality release (of some feature) and often features a "break" (like loss of hardware support or EOL etc.). It is meant to frustrate the user, so that the "next" OS release (which fixes all the bugs of the "beta" features is more "appealing" and hyped (just read all the comments praising the new release here and elsewhere :). Apparently Tahoe is going to be the last macOS that supports Intel macs - that means it will continue to frustrate Intel Mac users and force them to consider buying the Apple ARM models if they want to use the newer macOS. A similar thing happened with Catalina too after it dropped support for 32-bit apps - many people chose to remain in the previous version (Mojave) because it was less "buggy" / appealing than Catalina. Followed by the "hype" of how the next version (Big Sur) was "so much better". Microsoft also does this with Windows OS - e.g. Windows Vista and Windows 8 both can be considered "transition" releases that are infamous due to their "beta" quality features and / or frustrating UI features. (This tactic of boring and / or frustrating the viewers is more common in many popular TV series, where one or more episodes is often deliberately made that way - by focusing on something mundane and meaningless that doesn't really move the story forward, so that it makes the following and often climax episodes more exciting, fulfilling and enjoyable. E.g. Breaking Bad s03e10 - The Fly - the most boring episode of season 3).

[trollbridge]

Intel Macs are ancient and there isn’t a compelling reason to really even need to run Tahoe or Golden Gate on them. I still use a 2020 iMac, which is getting a little sluggish for some tasks, runs Sequoia mostly (main use is a GitLab runner for macOS based pipelines like testing iOS and macOS apps), or occasionally booting into Catalina for some ancient software I need to use a few times a year that doesn’t run on anything newer.

Deprecating really old stuff is fine.

[thisislife2]

I wasn't making any case for supporting Intel Macs - they can still run run other OSes. Just pointing out a pattern I have observed with commercial operating system releases, which is not accidental in my opinion. (Personally, I stopped buying Macs since they started soldering the RAMs and SSDs and removed the ability to run others OSes - I find such practices suffocating for my computing needs).

[9dev]

That seems to be more of an emergent phenomenon than conscious design decision to me to be honest - never assume malice when stupidity will suffice and all that.