I wonder why you think that? I suspect it might be related to the focus on "consumer-centric" (as opposed to geek-centric) features. That is one interesting side-effect of the bazaar model: it's great at building what the majority want. If you are trying to build something that nobody is asking for, you can't beat the cathedral model! ;-)

I will tell you, though, that Snow Leopard missed its ship date by 8 months (of course, you never heard about that because Apple is smarter than to announce an OS ship date before it goes GM). It was also nearly un-usable for about a month, and only marginally usable for two months beyond that, during development. Lion suffered from none of these issues...

I can't speak for the gp, but I certainly would still be on Snow Leopard if development for the current version of iOS was still supported on it. I'm now seriously considering switching back to Linux as a desktop OS as I hardly do any iOS work anymore. (I've rather fallen out of love with that platform too as it's pretty clear that the only objective is selling me a new iPad+iPhone every year as this year's iOS always runs like crap on last year's hardware)

I guess post Snow Leopard era OSX and Apple apps just feel cheap, unpolished and rushed. It actually feels a lot like Windows, where quality of different parts of the system varies wildly.

Examples: Finder and anything file browsing related beachballs much more than before (particularly when dealing with network shares). Visual design seems to have taken a hit - everything seems to just consist of either different murky shades of grey, or jarring skeumorphism. The 10.6-era AHCI kernel panic hasn't happened for a while now, so maybe that was fixed in a newer revision of 10.7 or 10.8, but userspace stability seems much worse. Some of it is crashes, some just weird UI glitches that require a restart or Force Quit. Old problems (like Mail.app reliability or the heap of shit that is iTunes) are ignored completely in favour of sexing up the UI. (the runaway dynamic pager issue FINALLY seems better on 10.8, but again we get loads of other regressions)

Add to that what you say: the "improvements" leave most people I know completely cold or even get in the way, and that's not just power users/developers. Since we're "paying" for the (subjectively) unnecessary bling with regressions, the overall impression is that of a negative change.

Not that any of this is particularly relevant to the development model. You can end up with festering layers of crap with either model if nobody feels responsible for overall quality. I suspect the objective for Lion was "make OSX look kind of like iOS and get rid of all of that GPLv3 software" and that's basically what was achieved. I guess bug-free software isn't good business, Microsoft were printing money for decades.

"I suspect the objective for Lion was "make OSX look kind of like iOS and get rid of all of that GPLv3 software" and that's basically what was achieved. I guess bug-free software isn't good business, Microsoft were printing money for decades."

You can say that again. Frankly, after using Mac for 10 years, this is my last one.

Just out of curiosity, would you use newer Apple hardware if you could run older OS X versions on it?

Hackintosh or something even worse (and I am with you 100% on the horrible state of OS X) -- I wouldn't want to discount the quality of the hardware.

As someone who's been on OSX since Panther, I think you may have a slightly rose-tinted view of the past - lots of stuff in OSX has been improved - I remember pretty horrible kernel panics in 10.4 and userland issues in 10.5 that no longer exist since 10.6/10.7 (or have yet to show themselves). Driver support from vendors is vastly improved, and overall, though I agree that quality has been a bit hit-or-miss, the overall usability is improved, IMHO.

I've been here since 10.2 and IMO the only great releases of OS X were Panther and Snow Leopard, though Panther did begin the whole idiotic metal UI thing. Maybe 10.9 will rock?

I'm actually finding Mountain Lion much more stable than Lion or Snow Leopard. Lion had some really weird memory things and I did get multiple kernel panics in early Snow Leopard.

Ok, so who's telling the truth? Was Snow Leopard good or did it kernel panic? Is Mountain Lion stable or have users just not reported the issues yet?

I think we are both telling the truth as we saw / see it. It might come down to machine, configuration, and type of jobs.

Sounds reasonable to me.

Not to fork this discussion further, but it bears repeating how much things changed after SL.

In fact, it actually reminds me a lot of the change from FreeBSD 4.x to 5.x ... things worked, people were happy ... and then boom.

That was when all of my desktops and laptops stopped running FreeBSD and I "switched" to the mac. I am fairly certain that once running SL stops being practical, I will switch again.

My feelings exactly! I now do virtually all my development in Linux (or ssh'ed into a Linux box from my MacBook Air). I hate what OS X has become. The only thing I now find superior about OS X to Linux is that it runs Logic Pro 9 (which I can't do without); yay for vendor lock-in!

> it's pretty clear that the only objective is selling me a new iPad+iPhone every year as this year's iOS always runs like crap on last year's hardware

Nothing against a good conspiracy theory, but if you truly think this is intentionally planned then this thought is a bit … dumb.

I've not experienced this "bug-free software" you speak of. Where might I find such a thing?

It does feel that Apple's development model is changing to an annual release cycle, wherein larger/systemic bug fixes are deferred to the next major release, rather than in a point release. In fact, most OS X release these days feel like "minor tweaks that make consumers happy + a truckload of bug fixes and plumbing". The fact that they deferred so much 10.0-era plumbing to 10.6 and beyond is indicative of why there's a lot of regressions, IMO.

For me, it's stuff like my quad core iMac becoming unusable under heavy disk activity, or issues like scrolling web pages being impossible when running (quasi) full screen video in a dual monitor setup, or mouse lag under ML.

Minor irritations like reworked Spaces and full screen mode making a second monitor pointless are irritations, but I wouldn't regard them as reflective of the quality of Lion and ML.

I think you're confusing two largely-unrelated issues.

Whether products are developed according to what users want vs what builders want has almost nothing to do with bazaar vs cathedral.

Indeed, many bazaar-style projects (the linux ecosystem in general, gimp, etc) are almost cautionary tales about "builders creating what they want for their own niche purposes and if anyone disagrees they're free to fork off".

The majority wanted to have scrolling inverted?

No, the majority wanted to stop it from continuing to be inverted, as it has been for decades. If you do a significant percentage of your computing on a touchscreen, having the touchpad work the same way is really, really nice. After a few days of Lion, I switched all my other machines to do scrolling the same way. Now that I'm moving to Linux instead of Mountain Lion, I was happy to note that I can swap the up and down scroll with a simple command, and almost everything respects it (oddly, some things don't).

Have any actual data on that (to be clear, data that says that people didn't like / wanted to change the way that computer scrolling has worked for the last 25 years)?

I have no data. The first part of that bit ("... majority wanted ...") was intended to be somewhat hyperbolic, but I would expect that a survey would show that heavy smartphone and tablet users tend to keep the Lion default, rather than switch it back to the traditional scroll behavior. Haven't actually done the survey, though. :)

You are aware that the same “simple command“ is a checkbox in the OS X system preferences, right?

Yes, I am. I was just pointing out something about Linux that was easier than I'd expected, not dissing OS X. If you read the last coupla years of my history, you'll note some bitter rants from me about how 2010's Linux hadn't improved nearly as much as I'd hoped since I moved to OS X in 2003. So, I'm often pleasantly surprised these days. :)

The majority have never known an Apple product that worked any other way.

?

I think he's referring to the OS X users that started out with the iPhone, iPod or the iPad as their first Apple device and then bought a Mac. (Not that I agree with the argument).

I know, but if he's speaking to expectations, the brand of computer isn't relevant.

I don't think this follows.

The software that replaced Spaces in Lion is so painful to use that I just don't use virtual desktops on OSX any more. I basically only moved to Lion because Snow Leopard would not work on my new machine.