I've never had a problem upgrading macOS... I've never had a noteworthy problem with Macs in general.

Same. It's easy to say I don't like the software when that's the ecosystem you're living in. Go do windows for a month, hell, even my ubuntu certified laptop has issues with Ubuntu. There is no perfect experience but I would argue the alternatives are vastly worse.

I don't entirely think it's just 3rd party software, I think Apple's decision to bundle major app and OS updates together gives people the illusion that every major release is causing problems.

If they were to separate their first party app updates and OS updates (release wise, they can still market them together), more people would be able to pinpoint "ok it's not the entire update since I was on it just fine for a month, but actually just the notes app updated yesterday eating battery randomly". At least for cautious users.

OS X user since 10.3, and while I share the opinion that their software quality has gone downhill, they've always done bundled app and OS upgrades: they co-develop major updates to the OS and its SDKs with applications that make use of them. That isn't a major delta from prior releases which held themselves to higher standards.

While holding back app updates to stabilize the early upgrade experience might work, it's also somewhat contradictory to the idea that they upgraded the apps and their features and upgraded the OS as necessary to support the apps and features.

The last version that was 100% forward progress for me was Snow Leopard, which was essentially the performance/bug fix revision of Leopard. The Windows 7 from Vista equivalent.

Every update since then has felt slow, or introduced bugs. Perhaps it was because Snow Leopard came on a physical disk, so they couldn't "just ship it".

I think it’s time for them to do an OS upgrade like SL again. Just bug fixes. But this time they need to do it across all their devices too.

Not just one — two release cycles focused solely on bugs & performance are really in order. The sheer amount of change, necessary and otherwise, that has been dropped on the macOS in recent years has left things a right mess under the hood. Shoot, one release cycle alone should be focused on fixing/reversing the attempts to iOSify the Mac. The controls are wrong, the spacing is wrong, the appearance is wrong. Things are not consistent, and they do not work as the rest of the OS gives reason to expect.

People have said this for every single OS X release…

I remember feeling like how GP (with M1 Pro) feels when I upgraded my 2007 Intel MBP with Snow Leopard and and SSD. Everything was snappy and instantaneous until the wave of Electron apps and Lion and forced convergence with iOS design...

Before they switched to image-based updates over APFS, the issue was partially with the upgrade process.

My personal record stood at a bit over one week spent observing a dark screen with unmoving progress bar in the hopes that this time it will actually finish the upgrade.

An update (Xcode tools) broke git in September. It's not just 3rd party software.

Just look at the Ventura settings window dude. How are they so sloppy that it cannot even scale properly, not commenting here about how ugly the experience is. At least make it scale a bit. Oh, and I did not say that it even has a lag when it loads, on a fresh login with no apps.

IMHO Ventura's rethink is a huge improvement — search is now actually useful, 3rd-party extensibility is much better, etc. (It does scale vertically, BTW. The old one did not.)

Snappy it is not. I think they’ve used the latest UX pattern called ‘click & wait’

They could provide a package manager, rather than expecting the Homebrew community to fix it for them. My issues are almost always related to command line tools

> but 3rd party software that lags

Microsoft does distribute beta versions of Windows for third-parties to test against.

Does apple do the same? If Apple doesn't, then it's Apple's we have to blame it onto.

Two beta streams - dev, where a dev account is required ($99 per year) and the public beat which is basically a few weeks behind dev, minus early betas. The availability is always announced at WWDC, normally the dev availability is on the day of the keynote.

Much like Windows devs, Apple devs need to pay attention to this. If your livelihood is dependent on a platform, not paying attention is on you.

I’m sure there’s always been those who were affected. There’s always been those who weren’t. And I think the former tend to exaggerate.