Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence

Perceived Decline in macOS Reliability

• Many long‑time Mac users say confidence has eroded: more glitches, UI corruption, random freezes, HomePod weirdness, Photos/Notes/TV/Contacts bugs, and system services (e.g. storage management) spinning CPUs and disks with no clear cause.
• Silent failures and unhelpful error codes are a major theme: operations fail without notice, errors are buried in logs, and messages like “file can’t be opened” or numeric codes give users no path to diagnosis or fix.

Release Cadence, Incentives, and QA

• Several comments blame the fixed annual release train aligned with iOS: features must ship on schedule; bugs get pushed to “next release” unless they’re show‑stoppers.
• People argue QA at Apple finds most bugs, but culture and promotion incentives reward shipping new features, not stability.
• Broader industry critique: “everyone owns quality” → nobody owns it; dedicated QA teams used to be institutional memory for edge cases. Others note cost‑cutting and role consolidation (dev as QA, PM, DevOps, etc.) as systemic drivers.

UX, Design, and Platform Direction

• Heavy criticism of recent UI changes: “Liquid Glass” aesthetics, oversized rounded corners, transparency harming legibility, and the iOS‑style Settings app seen as a regression from older, more logical panels.
• Some dislike the global menu bar concept itself; others defend it as enforcing a consistent, searchable command surface.
• Many feel macOS is being bent toward iOS/visionOS priorities and casual users, at the expense of “trucks” for power users.

Security, Permissions, and Opacity

• Network and privacy permissions are described as confusing, inconsistently enforced, and poorly surfaced (e.g. “Local Network” prompts, 30‑day re‑asks, invisible denied entries, scary wording, and workarounds via Apple’s own tools).
• Gatekeeper messages that label unsigned apps as “damaged” are seen by some as user‑hostile or deceptive; others defend them as necessary protection for non‑technical users.

Comparisons with Windows and Linux

• Several say macOS is still the “least bad” of the big three; others argue Windows wins on backward compatibility, or Linux wins on transparency, control, and documentation (e.g. Arch Wiki).
• There are multiple reports of people dual‑booting or fully migrating to Linux (often KDE/Plasma or tiling WMs, Asahi on Apple silicon), emphasizing configurability and fixability over polish.

AI and “Hallucinations” Side Discussion

• A subthread debates calling LLM mistakes “hallucinations” versus just “errors.”
• One side stresses user expectations: if it’s marketed as an assistant, wrong answers are bugs. The other side argues the models only generate statistically plausible text and can’t “lie,” so the real problem is mis‑selling their capabilities.