Roughly 2002-2010 that attention to detail was on display and the OS struck an impressive balance between features, ease of use, and power user access.

Since then it’s been straight downhill. First they stopped investing in desktop in favor of mobile. Then they underwent some rewrites to OS and bundled apps that dumbed things down and exploded the defect rate. Then they started setting the stage for a touch experience on desktop at the expense of UI density. Around the same time they started to prioritize short term profit over UX — spamming with notifications to try to get you to sign in, upgrade, etc. And then there’s the travesty that is Tahoe.

I don't get asked about access for Chrome at every update.

I have bigger issues with the way a lot of MacOS apps are just poorly designed.

Like screen capture - I want to be able to save to my choice of destination folder after clicking. But instead you get a selection of preset choices, and the option to select a destination before you capture the file, which is unnaturally distracting.

Finder hasn't changed for decades. It should be possible to have source and destination trees visible in the same window, but it isn't.

Mac Mail has threaded conversations, which means some emails don't appear in searches.

App Store search was designed by cynics, idiots, or both. If you know the exact name of an app, search will probably show it but it probably won't be anywhere near the first hit.

Xcode - I can't even...

Meanwhile a lot of clever and useful features remain hidden or ignored. Automator and AppleScript would have been gamechangers if Apple had promoted them, but they were just left on a shelf to moulder.

I can't imagine ever swapping back to Windows, but these annoyances are an insult to the quality of the hardware, which is on another level.

> I keep complaining about the fact Mac OS asks me whether I want to allow chrome to access the local network with every update. I tried to dig deeper and discovered a privacy settings UI with dozens of entries written "Google Chrome" with the permission disabled. One for each time I said "No".

IMO the party that should be blamed here is Google. Why do they keep asking you for local network access when you've already denied it? Why do they just prompt for access without first showing a page telling you why they want access along with a button to go through with the prompt? Ironically, this is what Google and the other browser vendors force websites to do when they want to ask users to grant certain permissions.

I went through this around 15 years ago, even migrating my parents from Windows to MacOS on the promise of simplicity and better UI. No, it’s not simpler or more intuitive, instead it has its own world of quirks, issues, and annoyances. And both Apple and Microsoft have become worse since.

I use and have used Windows and macOS for decades. I think Windows is better, but both are doing their best to drive users to Linux. Their relentless focus on extracting subscription and "service" revenue from others is fundamentally undermining the user experience in countless ways. Ads. Dark patterns. Nags windows. Auto-bundled games and software. Telemetry. Every year they make their operating systems just a little bit worse.

Apple's days of simplicity out of the box are over. The simplicity is still in there somewhere. Through a combination of turning off a lot of features in settings and using a few defaults shell command it can be made simple.

Apple got complex due to dynamic workspaces that result in windows unexpectedly flying off screen or popping up as one mouses's around and the new security model which no longer trusts defaults to local applications trusting each other.

This security model is why each application needs to be granted local access. I believe Apple encourages all apps to stick to their own sandbox to the extent possible.

I'm currently trying to figure out how to give Image Events access to my local hard disk. My old applescripts using Image Events have broken due to the loss of access.

With Apple, the stuff I want to do just works. I actually like the granularity in permissions, because I only give them out sparingly.

Having said that, the OS felt better a few years ago. I feel like they have less attention to detail and don’t care for Liquid Glass.

Still blazingly fast machines compared to my intel windows corporate workstation though.

I have been using macOS for I think fewer than ten years and I think the attention of detail may always have been just about the hardware... macOs and iOS have presented me with some of the clunkiest edge cases and mishandled situations and a lot of them are damn near undebuggable. I think Windows is very tasteless OS making macOS seem good in comparison but in isolation there is a lot that could a should be improved

I've been using macbooks since 2015 and I feel like every single update has made it worse somehow

Here are some things that existed for a long time but still blow my mind (note: this is not "modern macOS", I migrated to Linux long time ago, so forgive me ignoring modern flaws).

- The preview app - document editing at its best

- Apple Mail Search - you can filter by nearly every aspect, even between dates

- the mighty Alt key (alt+click unlocks an extra feature all the time, alt + shift + volume makes smaller steps, etc)

- apple headphone remotes also work on macbooks

- you can turn off the display by setting 0 brightness

- Printing just works - everywhere

- the trackpad integration

- brew is just awesome

I bought an original 128K Mac, and then used them professionally for decades --- Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, which I view as the most perfect Mac OS ever, was the last version I really liked, or found comfortable.

I need to replace a MacBook Pro w/ Touchbar, and am _not_ excited about the options, and I find the OS version numbering/naming baffling (why they couldn't've counted versions, started at the next letter of the alphabet, and then cycled through the alphabet in the California Gazetteer when they switched place names from there on out mystifies me) --- probably I'll end up w/ a hand-me-down iMac, but I'd be a bit more interested if there was a portable Mac tablet w/ a stylus and touch, having preferred that form-factor for portable usage since Go Corp.'s PenPoint on an NCR-3125 (which I paired w/ a NeXT Cube and represents the highwatermark of my GUI experience).

I wish that there was an option to limit the OS to only Cocoa/SwiftUI/equivalent "native" apps, and I really wish that Preferences.app would arrive at a simplified and stable state which makes sense.

I can tell you that Apple grows closer and closer to Microsoft-level annoying every year. The update situation is just stupid at this point. 10:30am and "hey, we'd like to take your computer offline for 45 minutes? Want to defer until this evening? Yeah? put your password in anyway.

iOS has gotten gross as well. You see that email notification on your lock screen? Wanna see what it says? Tap it. HAHA, that just expands the stack. Tap it again... that reveals a bit.... TAP IT AGAIN - ah, now we're unlocking and revealing it in the app....

> the progress bar actually made progress and stayed stuck at 80%.

> the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish.

Oh so that’s what it is. Thought it was a desync between UI state and software logic.

I think they could remove most of what they have added to the OS in the past 6-7 years and I wouldn’t even notice or miss it.

Don't get me started on the whole iCloud thing, and apple account sign in (although to be fair to them they've improved this it was way too onerous in the past).

Both of your examples are software from Meta and Google. Those companies ship what cannot be called anything else than malware. But it is possible to stop Chrome from updating and messing with your system in the background. I forgot which guide I followed, but search and you shall find.

I doubt you will get many long term Mac users disagreeing that the attention to detail has got consistently worse every year since Lion.

Trying to push poorly done, rushed UI frameworks to match iOS in the wrong form factor has trashed the OS.

Wait until you have to exit the video call because you haven't yet granted screenshare permissions to the current app, and it needs a restart.