The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating. We are in the thousand papercut stage where lots of small things just don’t work properly.<p>One of my Macs has developed the most insane habit of losing audio output capability, and then tries to route it to another one - a feature I didn’t even know existed.
I've been playing around with RealityKit (<a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit</a>) lately, it's their SceneKit replacement (they deprecated it this year).<p>On tvOS if a frame takes too long it just starts skipping frames and runs at 20 FPS. It won't recover after it happens. ThermalState is .nominal, so it's not that. There's also no way to just say "render as fast as possible" so you can measure performance, instead every device does throttling/pacing and it's completely opaque.<p>Anyway, I've had a developer account for 10+ years, and run into stuff like this constantly where you just can't get things to work properly. The framework isn't used much, so it's probably just broken.<p>I ported the game to SDL3/Zig and wouldn't you know it I can run continuously at 60 fps.. It's disappointing because I'm on board with targeting a single platform if I can utilize the hardware more effectively and make something special with it. But instead it's constantly an uphill battle of dealing with the opaqueness/brokenness of the platform. If I open a feedback request I'll probably just get told it's a bug, and <i>maybe</i> they fix it next WWDC.
<i>The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating.</i><p>The iPhone 18 Pro has been out exactly a month now and they still haven't pushed a fix for the popping/crackling speaker issue:<p><a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/iphone-18-pro-speaker-crackling/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/iphone-18-pro-speaker-c...</a><p>I still get crackling or popping many times a day.<p>Also, the annoying render stutters during scrolling across many apps haven't been fixed since iOS 26 was introduced (they were probably there before, but Liquid Glass made it worse). Even the iPhone 18 Pro suffers from it (also checked on iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air).<p>Meanwhile, my underpowered P10P with GrapheneOS renders scrolling super smoothly.
My Nexus 5's "underwater" mic issue never got addressed. Wouldn't be surprised if the next thing iOS copies from Android is, "Audio bug that just never gets fixed."<p>(If you have a problem with this comment, please point out which part is untrue or unfair. iOS has copied many Android features in recent release, the Nexus 5 had an audio bug that was never fixed, and we are in a thread talking specifically about an iOS audio bug that seems to not be getting fixed. Please do not treat the downvote button like you're on Reddit.)
My Iphone has had some bugs in the last year that are so sloppy yet impactful its almost funny. About half the time im looking at my lock screen notifications, the screen will lock less than a second after touching the screen. I have had other issues as well, but for a company with so much money I expect a little more craftsmanship.<p>I have had other issues as well but something that actively locks my phone while I am obviously using it is an extremely frustrating start to my day.
Yeah iOS is headed the same way.<p>I now get stuck in the camera app half the time I try to use it, and other nonsense.
Same here.<p>IME on the lock screen I’ll be interacting with the media controls and the screen will just turn off, like I’m not doing any interaction.<p>It’s funny how that basic of functionality is broken.
The latest macOS, after a lot of praise, has proven to be really buggy to me. At least liquid glass only had poor readability, but now windows go missing/turn invisible almost daily and it’s getting seriously annoying.
It's so extremely buggy! I upgraded to Golden Gate early (tho after release) because everyone (including here) said it's so much better than Tahoe, but it has fixed no bugs which annoyed me with Tahoe and introduced so many new ones. Mission Control frequently switches to the wrong window (perfectly reproducible bugs which result in the wrong window coming forward). And in Mission Control, windows now overlap each other, are overlapped by the dock, and end up partially outside the screen, in ways they just never did in any earlier macOS release. The Launchpad replacement part of Spotlight in 26 was always super buggy but has gotten even more buggy in 27. Just yesterday the WiFi menu in the menu bar beach balled.<p>iOS text input is also super buggy now, with frequent rendering glitches where the new blue words from "AI" suggestions or whatever overlap other text, there are stale blue squiggles which are hold-overs from grammatical issues which have since been fixed, completely nonsensical grammatically nonsense suggestions, etc.<p>The decrease in quality from 15 to 26 and then 26 to 27 is staggering.
> I upgraded to Golden Gate early (tho after release)<p>One would think that after this many macOS releases, all the techies would have learned to wait till the .1/.2 update drops with the critical bugfixes...
> because everyone (including here) said it's so much better than Tahoe<p>Is today the day you learn there is Apple astroturfing on this forum?
You'd think there is no point in astroturfing the latest macos. They make no money from you or me upgrading their OS software. If anything it is a net negative for apple's brand to have me upgrade and face the B.S. newer OSs saddle upon you. The turfing would do better to keep me on my current OS if the goal is to increase my pleasurable feelings towards the apple brand.
It might be, people have high expectations of this place.
Actually it feels a lot like Apple before NeXT's acquisition.
That sounds right.<p>Although so far I'm mostly happy with Apple products. Happier than with any Windows laptops.<p>(But damn if I encounter a bug or an issue. Just reporting those have made hordes of Apple fans attack me, in response to a standard technical bug report.)
Youngsters have to understand that Apple's quality was so bad, not only did they fail to deliver in a few products with industry partners, the teams weren't even capable of writing a new operating system.<p>Windows is also equally away from "3x Developers!" cry days.
I remember that period. System 7,8,8.6 were all so fragile compared to Windows. No progressive crashes... just sudden lockups.
Very true. People that manage to be nostalgic about system 8 or 9 mystify me.
My macOS 27 m4 MacBook 128GB ram has in the last 3 days: completely locked up and went black screen (after reboot it had a stacktrace that windowserver crashed and didn’t come back) ; had a full on kernel panic, which later an AI agent analyzing the panic dump said it’s because the iOS simulator was somehow leaking resources and watchdog triggered a the kernel panic.
Audio problems aren't new. I remember that the last 10.9 build I was still using in 2016 had this bug where sound would just stop working every now and then. `sudo pkill coreaudiod` fixed it every time.
I'll need to try that! I have that issue like once a month on the macbook my work gave me, and rebooting was the only thing I figured out that works.
I have an issue like that on my M1.
My personal favorite is the alarm clock on iOS, after the first time you dismiss the alert with the phone unlocked, it reappears as a transparent dialog 10% of the size of a normal one (i.e. so small not even a stylus could click the buttons). The mashed ball of widgets can only be swiped off the screen.
Yup I have the same problem with audio. And I found more problems last two years than in previous 10. I wonder if that due to some internal cuts in quality assurance or moving to AI and vibe coding more code than devs can review. But it may be subjective feeling.
My iPhone 15 has a weird one. I beta tested the glass updates. Part way through the beta it broke, and my phone will only show glass visuals during movement. Once it stops it turns opaque. This happens across the entire phone. Resetting the phone from a backup doesn’t fix the issue. My only fix is to wipe my data and start over. Hardly a solution. I’m no longer on the beta, even a few major versions updated now. Issue remains.
I would agree with you if this wasn't a release candidate. I would wait and see at this point.
This bug is one of many papercuts in Apple software.<p>Here’s another: Hide My Email’s “Forward To” feature is broken. You can’t change which email address messages get forwarded to. I have nearly 500 Hide My Email addresses and want to change the forwarding address, but can’t because the feature is broken.
The window manager bugs have been present since the first macOS 27 beta, and have made it unchanged to the current stable release.
As if this is the only example in support of what the parent said? Or as if these are restricted to release candidates and beta versions?
I for one stopped holding my breath after witnessing a pretty major issue introduced in a macOS beta carry into the stable release for the dozenth time.
On the latest production release for Intel Macs, I can no longer connect to two external displays at the same time. I have to plug them in one at a time (sometimes multiple times before they register), and reconnect them after sleep. A very annoying regression.<p>The hidden "Detect Displays" button in Display settings does nothing.
I genuinely have more issue with my audio peripherals (USB microphone, bluetooth earbuds) on the M4 Macbook that my work gave me than on my Arch Linux desktop. Around once a month the Macbook will inexplicably not be able to receive input from mic or output to my earbuds (or both!) despite the OS settings still showing the current input/output as selected correctly. Rebooting somehow fixes it, but I'm at a loss to understand how the computer/OS that costs thousands of dollars and is supposed to "just work" because of being completely designed by a single entity manages to struggle with this when the completely arbitrarily selected set of hardware and software components that I threw together for my desktop seem to never have any problem like this nowadays.
The Font Book on macOS 27 seems broken - user fonts never show up.<p>We’re also apparently in a “Settings doesn’t search” build for the Mac once again.
> The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating.<p>This is not the first time OpenGL got broken and fixed later. This is why software testing exists.<p>I have my own share of criticisms for Apple, but if we treat every hiccup with doomerism, we will only miss the forest for a single, small bush.
Did they actually catch it in their own tests? Or is this an external developer catching it for them? I guess if it works, it works, but this certainly seems like something they could be testing for up front.
you really have to wonder how they managed to mess up this bad, and why they're doing nothing about it.<p>local search is both broken on my mac as well as iPhone. I search for an app, and its app store entry OR settings pop up, not the app.<p>how does this persist? do they not use their own products anymore? have they simply given up?
Mine has been doing that for a fair few months actually. Sometimes flipping the output to something different then back again sorts it, other times a reboot is required.
This is a personal anecdote - I'm a games developer, working predominantly on Windows. Since last year I have to use a Mac to work with our iOS builds and I honestly don't understand people saying Mac is for developers - the number of actual outright bugs I run into every week makes windows look like something that came out of NASA. I eagerly awaited the release of MacOS 27 to maybe finally address some of them, and of course it just traded one set of problems for another. It's just shockingly bad - and unlike a true Linux system you have very little ability to fix some of those issues yourself too.
Yes. The top menu access for apps full screened in Tahoe stop working. WTF.
The general quality decline in software seems to be accelerating. I suspect it’s mainly due to AI slop. Engineers creating tons of code due to management pressure and lesser people available to test.
On mine, audio starts to crackle when memory pressure is too high. lol
but you can fold the iphone now ... o.O
My Mac has developed the issue of slowing down over time if not rebooted. Heavy GPU use accelerates the decay. It feels just like swapping to disk except it's not - swap usage always 0. I didn't have this issue before Tahoe.
We may not be far off from finding LLM prompts embedded directly in software. Instead of savefile(data_thing), we might start seeing<p><pre><code> agentcall( claude, data_thing, "please save this file to the user's home directory" )
</code></pre>
and the author of that code will pat him/herself on the back then form a habit of telling his/her friends "I am an engineer, I have built over 100 software programs spanning multiple continents".<p>I already see this behavior out of the tech support class that likes to participate in bureaucratic processes among gen z. The standards and expectations for what is colloquially "engineer", outside of bonafide engineering circles, has really fallen over the last two decades.<p>The attitude that replacing functions with calls to AI agents is like totally okay in software engineering will eventually seep in too.
This isn't happening for me, if by "over time" you mean "several weeks" of heavy GPU use without a reboot. Consider the possibility that the root cause is not macOS.
By "over time" I mean that if I run local LLMs or play graphics-intensive games (like No Man's Sky's native Mac port) I can start seeing up to half-second (or longer) delays in switching apps, starting videos and much more with less than 5 days of uptime. Heavy enough usage will reproduce it within a few hours.<p>If I avoid doing those things, it can last much longer.<p>I have the 128GB/8TB M4 Max and I'm not even coming close to using up all or even most of the unified memory. I suspect it may be related to some form of fragmentation, though I have no way to know how.
I believe you, just suggesting that the issue may not be quite as general. I have a 64GB Studio M1 Max, so the years of hardware/firmware differences between us may be relevant as well. Hope you find a solution!
It didn't happen to me before the update, so I suspect it must be something about the update or how it interacts with the software on my system. Still, it's one of those issues I have no hope of seeing solved, because at this rate nobody doing development at Apple is actually going to leave a Mac running for days on end...
I once worked in L1 support, and because we had to take calls @07:00 sharp (we were the only number a company of 40k people could call) and Windows updates were still a multi-hour endeavor, I stuck to rebooting daily (or shutdown+startup) all devices I use heavily, including MacOS.<p>Over the past 8 years that has basically solved every bug all my colleagues ran into with MacOS. At some point my boss wasn't getting calendar notifications anymore for a couple weeks, "did you try and reboot?" fixed it in 5m. He later mentioned he hadn't rebooted in 7 weeks.<p>I don't understand why people treat Apple devices like unbreakable analog AM radios, they're very complex computers like any Windows or Linux machines, with a huge state machine beneath it that is easier to reset daily/weekly than to keep working properly for months.
My Intel Mac didn't need to be rebooted. I would leave it running for months with no issues. Apple devices genuinely used to be that stable.<p>I get that you can't generally expect things to be that stable. But in my experience they used to be and now they're not!<p>My M4 Max was probably that stable too until Tahoe, although I rarely left it running for more than a few weeks between updates.
I was seeing a bug that was very similar to what you describe! I fixed it on my Mac by deleting the .CFUserTextEncoding file in my home directory.
Huh, that file seems to have existed since I first set up the machine! Do you have any more information on this? For me it just contains the bytes `0x0:0x0`. How'd you know to try that and do you know how it worked at all?<p>Edit: The modification date is actually earlier than the added date -- it looks like the file was transferred by Migration Assistant from my previous machine! Not sure if that's important.
Meanwhile, most of us don't have any issues. I think overall the Apple ecosystem is really good in terms of software quality. However, there are of course issues like with any system and if Apple is not able to reproduce something, the harder it gets to get it fixed.<p>And the whole premise of your comment doesn't make sense as it's based on a bug in a macOS version that hasn't even been released yet. Of course stuff will break when you're busy developing.
> Meanwhile, most of us don't have any issues.<p>Do you have data on that? Based on peopel I talk to, it seems like there are plenty of people on both sides, and it's not clear to me which one is the majority.
The only data most of us can refer to are Google Trends. The unprecedented peaks for "How to switch to Android", "iPhone revert update", "iPhone fix battery", "iPhone slow", "new iOS sucks", "iPhone bad now", "How to block iPhone updates" all reached new peaks with the release of Liquid Glass in late 2025.<p>Similar story for Macs. It's hard not to see the graph for "macos broken" ( <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=macos%20broken,osx%20broken,mac%20broken&hl=en-US" rel="nofollow">https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=macos%20...</a> ) or "macos slow" ( <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=macos%20slow,osx%20slow,mac%20slow&hl=en-US" rel="nofollow">https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=macos%20...</a> ) or "how to fix macos" ( <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to%20fix%20macos,how%20to%20fix%20osx&hl=en-US" rel="nofollow">https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to...</a> ) and find any reason for this other than people having a surge in bad experiences with Liquid Glass.<p>Of course, this is only Google Trends, and even if we interpret this as a 4x to 100x increase in bad experiences with Apple products with the forced introduction of Liquid Glass, it still might be the case that >50% of people aren't consciously experiencing problems from it.
Regularly bugs reported during a beta do not get fixed until the next major release. If they do not, they will be closes as wontfix because they were fine to exist a whole major version.<p>My macbook has been kernel panicking during every sleep.
Been using macOS since the OS X days of Panther (2003). Since then, people were kicking and screaming about bugs that Apple presumably didn't fix yet, and that's probably true. But it does get fixed, and if you're just sensible - like not upgrading immediately, you'll hardly notice issues. On average, I'm about 6-12 months behind on major versions. I'm in 26.6.2 (Tahoe) right now
I "upgraded" from Tahoe pretty quickly because Tahoe, even a year on, was such a buggy mess that I hoped Golden Gate would be better, especially after it was glazed as a bug fix release. But it just introduced new bugs without fixing the old ones. Staying 6-12 moths behind doesn't leave you with a functional system anymore, it's just differently broken.