I've had a Late 2013 MBPR (basically maxed specs at the time) since 2013 and with every major OS update performance very noticeably gets worse. It's literally a matter of installing the update, rebooting and being more sluggish, it's not gradual, it's poor software.

Do you have a dedicated nVidia chipset? If so, you'll also be encountering a plethora of driver bugs introduced in High Sierra, most noticeable watching videos in a browser or viewing WebGL content.

The USB stack has been a joke since they rewrote it and made it closed source to hide their incompotence.

I would have stopped installing updates long ago if I wasn't regularly forced to update XCode.

Agreed, I remember the day when I looked forward to OS updates as often they made your computer faster.

My brand new (3 month old) MBP 15' "Y" key stopped working for a day, had to clean the keyboard. Sometimes when I power on this mac I hear this scratching sounds coming from the laptop. Trackpad is noisier than the previous gen. USB peripheral hell. Speaker issues. Several kernel panics.

Now my older Mac's were never perfect, but I don't recall having so many hardware issues so soon. And living somewhere, where there is no official Apple store, getting anything fixed is a week+ of no computer.

Apple hardware still seems excellent to me. It's the software that's unreliable.

I've personally had different experiences in a professional workspace. I'm currently sitting at a ~15% replacement rate (e.g.: Apple saying they cannot fix it, and giving us a new one) across ~12 touchbar MBP's. We have 2 of the 13" MBP's sans touchbar and they've been relatively trouble free.

That's similar to Macbook Air's, which I despise in the workplace simply because they seem to randomly die much more than other models.

All of our 2012-2015 MBP's are still going very strong. We have not replaced a single one.

^ This. Apple's hardware is second to none, and iOS is mostly alright but it feels like MacOS lags behind further and further with each release. Though I suppose Apple isn't selling the software so they have no reason to improve it.

I respectfully disagree about iOS being mainly airtight. The biggest problem is probably that new iOS updates frequently destroy battery life. Also there have been bizarre problems with the spell checker. But I do agree that macOS is worse.