Why did software become worse lately?

I know a few people who never struck me as the technical type or particularly interested in solving engineering problems who did a boot camp to crash course a new career in software and end up with cushy 6 figure work from home gigs.

I know one got laid off recently though, so maybe things are changing.

Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of Mac OS that was "for the user". After that, macOS was a means to Apple's end. e.g. discontinuation of Front Row with no replacement.

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This is all opinion, but for me, it’s not that modern macOS has severely regressed from Snow Leopard, though I don’t like notarization and I also don’t like the flat design and iOS influences that have made its way to macOS in the past decade. However, it seems to me that macOS hasn’t improved substantially since Snow Leopard, at least from my point of view. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; even with the iOS UI elements that have made its way to macOS, somebody from 2009 using Snow Leopard would easily navigate a 2024 Mac running Sonoma; the macOS interface hasn’t changed substantially since 2001. Other than integration with the rest of Apple’s ecosystem, most of the macOS features I use were present all the way back in Tiger, such as Spotlight.

Another issue I have with modern Apple software is the removal of features (I still miss iPhoto; Photos.app is inferior) and the loss of the perfectionism that once defined Apple; I feel Apple’s software has gotten buggier. Of course the Mac today is much more stable than it was in the classic era (no memory protection and cooperative multitasking made for an unstable environment that meant needing to reboot in the middle of getting work done), but it seems like a regression from the 2000s when Steve Jobs had tight control.

There’s also the context of when Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard were released. I believe these releases of macOS were far better than contemporary Windows releases (XP, Vista, 7) and compared to KDE and GNOME of the time. In fact, if somebody made a Linux desktop environment today that was a clone of Tiger and if enough software was written that conforms to Apple’s human interface guidelines of the era, this would be heads and shoulders better than current versions of GNOME and KDE, but this is my opinion and everyone has different tastes.

My personal opinion is that we bull-shitted ourselves into believing the slap-dash tech stack we created for internet facing applications is the greatest thing since sliced-bread. In the past, we developed software that was meant to be used by one person who used one pc which connected to one server and there was maybe three software vendors involved: the client OS, the software tool itself, and the server OS.

With internet facing applications, it is not uncommon to deal with open sourced software (with no vendor responsible for maintaining it), several APIs (each API may or may not have a vendor who can provide support), and security by duct-tape (we slap this security module on it and hope it stops most attacks). That is the complexity of modern applications has increased exponentially. To deal with this complexity, instead of a mechanism to pay/fund engineers to improve our tech stack. We magically hand wave these concerns away. My opinion is that those who can afford it and demand security will go full "zero trust" by using flashed EPROMS. Software will no longer be soft. Instead software will be flashed onto EPROM chips and only after they go through thorough testing against hacks, will they be deployed into production. When your company buys cyberinsurance, instead of a checklist of security best practices, your company will attest their software stack consists of EPROM chips that have been certified by CISA and the like.