Not to beat on my own drum but as a mac convert from the days of Tiger I saw the writing on the wall from miles away.
Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
It's worrisome but all is not lost, I'll start sweating for real if next year's releases don't improve things substantially.
> Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
I've tried and returned the iPhone 17 Pro. Love the hardware (especially the camera), but iOS 26 is inefficient (for lack of a better term), and the new camera UI hides too many things.
Maybe you didn’t catch this yet, but Apple pulled their latest iOS 18.7.3 update and they seem to only promote iOS 26 now. They really want everyone off iOS 18 :/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/01/07/hundreds-...
You can sign up for Apple beta and keep doing iOS 18 updates.
Same I'm on iOS 26 and it's reasonably bad but I figured I might as well pull of the band-aid and have app compatibility.
I can't see a single reason to upgrade to Tahoe. We'll see what 2026 brings.
One huge benefit of Tahoe for me is that you can now hide any menubar icon, even if they don't explicitly support hiding. It's a small thing but that alone makes the upgrade worth it for me
The Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked.
There was also a great boutique apps ecosystem.
Right now, it seems that macOS is going through its enshittification phase, sadly.
I still remember Snow Leopard - I think that's when I started using Mac.
Most of the upgrades since then I have resisted and not enjoyed, though I seem to recall liking Mavericks.
A lot of the big features each time seem to be about tieing further into the Apple ecosystem, which doesn't interest me at all, since I have no other devices and don't use iCloud.
I think also that Snow Leopard era (unibody) MacBook Pro design was peak Mac. It was really full-featured while also having clean intentional design.
Tiger on a G4 tibook was peak apple.
> Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked
Was it also great for developers? (Genuine question.)
Yeah, OS X was definitely the nicest native development experience at the time. Apple's documentation was considerably better and more searchable back then than it is now (especially as it is now for desktop). And even though they've introduced lots of niceties (including Swift), as Apple's piled additional features and APIs into Cocoa/Xcode I find the overall experience quite a bit less coherent or intuitive or ergonomic than it used to be.
I'm not mac dev but wasn't apple all in on objc back then and these days it's more swift? that is pretty big shift, I'd assume for the better for most parts.
I prefer Swift as a language, but Apple's developer documentation back then was clear, detailed, and overall excellent. Occasionally I felt like I was reading a classic CS text rather than a manual. I could always find the guide on the particular facet I was looking for within a few clicks.
xcode has been getting better bit-by-bit. No major regression.