Tiger through Lion had a 2-year release cycle. Ever since Mountain Lion, it's been a 1-year cycle. Further complicating this is that these have included unintuitively "ambitious" (or at least "labor intensive") changes. Big Sur was a UI redesign that touched the entire system. But let's not forget that Mojave was also a huge undertaking to get everything working with Dark Mode (both for Apple developers and third party developers). Meanwhile entire suites of apps get thrown out and the rewrites are used to dogfood Catalyst. It's just infinite churn. The core of the technology has taken on the properties of fashion. And that is just not a great recipe for stability.
I've personally chosen to try to approximate the missing "tock" cycle by upgrading to every other macOS. Clearly this is nowhere near the same benefit of Apple actually dedicating a full year and a half to a release, but at least I don't have to go through the (largely arbitrary) UI changes every year or so, and I have the "bugs I know" to deal with vs. the ones I don't yet know about.
At this point all I do with my Mac is work. I would much rather it be rock solid and reliable than be crammed with new features and change for the sake of change every year. Most of the features that get added for iOS parity/compatibility could probably be delivered in point updates anyway.
So much hyperbole in this thread. A solid subset of users declares that the sky is falling and this is the end for Apple. Rinse and repeat with each iteration. I am not saying there haven’t been missteps, but it ain’t all bad. My personal experience with Big Sur has largely been a non event and I have tons of boutique usb synthesizers audio interfaces and software. I use windows Mac and dabble in a few Linux distros. None are perfect but they’re all pretty good.
The fact there hasn't been native loopback for so long is mind-boggling. I'm a Mac user and use BlackHole.
I've lost count of the number of times I've been on a call and someone with a Mac has gone to share screen and been confused as to why their audio isn't being shared. COVID/WFH has made this a regular occurrence.
How is that relevant to a discussion about worsening software quality? OS X never had native loopback.
I dont hear any detailed descriptions of how the software quality has declined. What I generally see is bugs being reported which is then called evidence that apple software is bad. I think the UMN story has shown that all OS software is large, complex and bug ridden.
I personally dont love how OSX is becoming more of a walled garden, but I also think that given the fact that bad people exist to make sure we cant have anything nice its a reasonable reaction to try and make the OS more secure. The days of the OS is your playground are ending. I wish that werent true but there are crappy folks out there that want to steal your data, identity, scam you, commit computer crimes against you.
I will reiterate that I think Big Sur was probably the smoothest big release of MacOS Ive been through(since Tiger). Others may have different experiences, but I can only speak to mine.
Additionally, the comment was in response to a comment about audio interfaces, so it's relevant on multiple accounts.
Handy when you need it, not exactly a metric for OS quality to offer one.
It seems to me macOS quality has been fine for years.
And I've used it since 10.2.
That said, the M1 changes things, IME. It's just sad it takes that much.
I think people tend to forget things like that, and only remember the later releases of an OS since that is the version they are likely switching off of it to the newer one.
I personally have found big sir no more buggy than most releases. Better than some[1], worse than others. About middling. Not bad for it including new hardware (m1)!
[1]: ye gods, remember how bad 10.10 was with discoveryd before they rolled back to mdnsresponder! yikes!