The Apple Silicon transition is arguably something they have handled extremely well, with the only unknown being what the pro-level chip will be like. Hopefully it can all be over sooner rather than later and they can get back to work on general software quality.

macOS quality has been declining for years. It can't all be due to the M1 transition.

You would think that with each release being so much worse than previous versions that eventually OSX would quit booting up and become nothing more than a proof of concept.

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.

Does Big Sur let you loopback audio out yet, or are third-party extensions still required? Do Soundflower & BlackHole even work on M1?

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.

>Does Big Sur let you loopback audio out yet, or are third-party extensions still required? Do Soundflower & BlackHole even work on M1?

How is that relevant to a discussion about worsening software quality? OS X never had native loopback.

Agreed, this isnt a datapoint. And I have an app called Loopback by Rogue Amoeba that does this job very well. There are plenty of reasons that you could assume OSX doesnt include this natively. The biggest I can think of is if you can capture streaming audio at no quality loss then you kinda blow up some business models.

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.

Software quality is a moving target. iOS 2.0 was exceptional quality in 2008, if a competitor released something akin to iOS 2.0 now they'd be laughed at.

Additionally, the comment was in response to a comment about audio interfaces, so it's relevant on multiple accounts.

Counterpoint: I don’t know or care what that feature is and I’ve never encountered anyone complaining about it.

It's basically sending your system audio to an audio channel (e.g. to an app). You could e.g. route a Skype call audio to record it.

Handy when you need it, not exactly a metric for OS quality to offer one.

This is a popular trope but I’d really want to see some supporting data. It’s notoriously hard to correct for only hearing from people who found something they don’t like, people assuming their experience is universally shared, and for people to tend to forget old problems.

Anecdotally, I think Big Sur is better than either Mojave or Catalina: in my experience, it solves a lot of the bugs I was trying to avoid by sticking with High Sierra.

Any real data, except of anecdotal "had this or that problem"?

It seems to me macOS quality has been fine for years.

And I've used it since 10.2.

Catalina was a significant downgrade in quality and as far as I know the M1 wasn't a thing yet.

Big Sur made it worse. For probably the greater part of the last 6-7 years I've felt Windows performs better on equivalent hardware (even after Mac OS fresh installs). By Big Sur it's so bad the latest Intel MacBooks chug on it.

That said, the M1 changes things, IME. It's just sad it takes that much.

I assumed dropping 32-bit support was part of the wind-up for the M1 transition but maybe not.