> You're seriously taking a 4 post thread on apple support forums ...

Err... that thread seems to have 21+ pages (at the time of writing this comment), including many "Me too" style of comments. Doesn't seem like an isolated problem. :/

The parent is confused by the same thing I was, which is on first load the page only shows 3 "helpful" comments, and you have to click a link to see all 21 pages.

YMMV certainly. As it does for all of us.

What I can say however is that the overall perceived stability and performance of my Mac has declined since the good old days of Moutain Lion. My 2017 MBP often freezes upon resume, there is a palpable lag with the overall UI experience, and the OS experience is bloated with the App Store/iCloud/iTune Store shenanigans.

For the last part, I know things have been adding up for a while, but I feel we are now reaching a tipping point. Enough of a tipping point that I now find myself relying more and more on my 2015 OpenBSD Thinkpad for work, music and movies although it has half the computing power of my Mac.

The downside is the missing ecosystem, the lack of seamless synchronization with my other iThings, which keeps me one foot in. For the moment that is, because I am slowly exploring self-hosted alternatives. And once I am confident my self-hosted system can match Apple's for most of the required features, I'll say goodbye to a 15-year relationship for good.

small edit

It's a two-way street: my expectations are probably higher that what they used to be.

Of course it’s ridiculous. Has the number of reported problems with Macs increased over the last 10 years? Sure. Their market share has also increased like crazy.

Today’s Mac doesn’t seem anymore unpolished than yesterdays. They just support a lot more software and devices than they ever used to.

Get a Mac and use it the way you might have 10-15 years ago when they only supported a few dozen peripherals and 3rd party software titles and you probably won’t ever have a problem either.

And don’t act like Macs never froze. The pinwheel/beachball of death has been a joke since OS X was first released. The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine.

People have this ridiculous hindsight bias. Were some cars in the 1950s more reliable or better? Well, yeah. They had no electronics, no features other than a radio and you didn’t drive as much because there were fewer places to go. And they even seemed safer because there was less reporting on accidents when in reality you were like 7 times more likely to die in a car accident in the best car in the 50s than the cheap east piece of crap made today.

Where did you get this from?

> The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine.

Because screen usage, in all forms, was a lot less 10-15 years ago than it was today.

Some time in the early 2000s a friend of mine who was on the core team of an immensely popular open source project wrote what I consider to be the most important PPT slide ever in software development. It simply read:

  "Nobody cares if it works for you".

While your experience feels very important to you, as you willingly demonstrate by extrapolating your subjective experience to near universal truth, it isn't significant or important. What portion, or proportion, of users, and the experience they have, is important is not even that easy to figure out. You have certain problems and certain users that carry more weight, and it isn't always obvious why and how.

I'd be careful to use the number of posts on Apple's support forums as any indicator of how big an issue is. Apple's support forums are, after all, fairly pointless in that there is a close to zero chance that they will be helpful. It is the wailing wall of Apple products – people come there to moan, to be joined by others who moan, to a deity that never shows itself nor provides meaningful response.

However, there appears to be a consensus that Apple isn't delivering the software quality one would expect from a company with their resources. There also appears to be some consensus that things are getting worse, if you read forums and discussion threads. It would be wise to at least investigate the mounting discontent with Apple from the ranks of professionals.

Nobody but you cares if your 2013 MBP has had zero freezes.