Saying Apple Software is 'terrible' is a blatant hyperbole. Has it degraded meaningfully over the last decade in terms of stability? Yes. Has it's capability increased though? Yes. Has it become more secure by design? Yes. Is the UX better than anything else in market? By a country mile.
The UX used to be better by a country mile. The liquid glass update was a genuinely serious regression. Is Windows or Android now better? At least those operating systems don't have constant contrast issues and flickering. At this point they probably have more consistency.
MacOS reliability has slowly gotten worse and worse, but the UX drop with liquid glass was profound.
I don't agree with the whining about liquid glass. Sure, it isn't the design you like. But usability really isn't that different.
No, it's objectively bad in terms of usability. There is also the matter of taste, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about UX, not style. UX is about functionality and usability.
Contrast is an objective measure. There are well studied and known levels where you can have trouble reading, or an easy time reading. Similarly, things like drag regions not even aligning with visual elements are literally indefensible. This stuff is so basic you'd fail a UX 101 course with it.
Things like spotlight defaulting to the newest item so that when you hit enter and it changes your selected item the millisecond before you hit enter. I'm not even sure how you'd try to defend UI elements literally flickering as either style or not affecting usability.
It's objectively bad by a great many widely agreed upon and studied standards.
Contrast was bad in the first couple bets, but now it’s very similar to iOS 18.
I agree. MacOS became completely unusable with Liquid Glass, it totally feels like one of those amateur custom themes for Linux.
I hope the new leadership will bring back better software. As of now, macOS 26 is disgusting.