Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

I don't think that's quite right. Snow Leopard was a lot of changes to a lot of the OS code base and wasn't great out of the gate, taking multiple dot releases, like all large-scale software updates do, to stabilize and bugfix enough to be "good."

There is no silver bullet, just a lot of lead ones and the answer to Apple's quality problem is to begin baking QA back into the process in a meaningful way after letting it atrophy for the last decade or so.

Hire more humans and rely less on automation. Trust your developers, QA, and user support folks and the feedback they push up the chain of command. Fix bugs as the arise instead of assigning them to "future" or whatever. Don't release features until they're sufficient stable.

This is all basic stuff for a software company, stuff that Apple seems to have forgotten under the leadership of that glorified accountant, Cook.

Why do any of that? What they're doing has made them infinitely rich, and that's all that matters. /s

> In the 22 years since I became a “switcher”, this is the worst state I can remember Apple’s platforms being in.

Indeed, I remember three times when Apple went a bit overboard on the feature front, but dialed it back and made some of the most stable and useful OS versions:

OS 8.5/8.6 pushed a bunch of features and were the last big pushes pre-OSX, but then OS 9 fixed a TON of bugs, and added a few smaller quality of life improvements that made running 'Classic' Mac OS pretty good, for those who were stuck on it for the transitional years.

Mac OS X 10.0 rewrote _everything_, and especially 10.0 was _dog_ slow, with all the new Quartz graphics stuff in an era where GPU accelerated 3D display widgets wasn't quite prevalent. 10.1 patched in a bunch of missing features (like DVD Player—it was still a pretty useful tool back then), and fixed a couple of the most glaring problems... but 10.4 Tiger was the first OS X release that was 'fast' enough OS X was a joy to use in the same way OS 9 was at the time. At least on newer Macs.

And then of course Snow Leopard, which is the subject of the OP.

macOS 13/14/15 have progressively added more little bugs I track in my https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook project; anything from little networking bugs to weird preferences that can't be automated, or don't even work at all when you try toggling them.

That's besides the absolute _disaster_ that is modern System Preferences. Until the 'great iOSification' a few years back, Apple's System Preferences and preference pane were actually a pleasure to use, and I could usually remember where to go visually, with a nice search assistant.

Now... it's hit or miss if I can even find a setting :(

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There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased.

It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and moved on (taoofmac.com, my blog, was started when I wrote a few very popular switcher guides, and even though I kept using the same domain name I see myself as a UNIX guy, not "just" a Mac user).

For me, Spotlight is no longer (anywhere) near as useful to find files (and sometimes forgets app and shortcut names it found perfectly fine 5 minutes ago), and there is no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage).

Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_).