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.
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 still get crackling or popping many times a day.
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).
Meanwhile, my underpowered P10P with GrapheneOS renders scrolling super smoothly.
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.
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.
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 maybe they fix it next WWDC.
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.
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.
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.
Although so far I'm mostly happy with Apple products. Happier than with any Windows laptops.
(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.
Windows is also equally away from "3x Developers!" cry days.
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 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.
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.
The decrease in quality from 15 to 26 and then 26 to 27 is staggering.
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.
This bug is one of many papercuts in Apple software.
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.
I migrated family email hosting from Google Workspace to Apple iCloud+ Custom Email Domains a few years ago and it's been smooth sailing. Few people realize that Apple has been a high-volume email host since long before Google Mail. This is the guide I used: https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...
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.
The hidden "Detect Displays" button in Display settings does nothing.
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.
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.
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.
Finder search has been broken for me for years I think, and that smart folder "Recents" never worked properly. It's puzzling how they can let this happen.
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.
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.
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.
If I avoid doing those things, it can last much longer.
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...
We may not be far off from finding LLM prompts embedded directly in software. Instead of savefile(data_thing), we might start seeing
agentcall( claude, data_thing, "please save this file to the user's home directory" )
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".
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.
The attitude that replacing functions with calls to AI agents is like totally okay in software engineering will eventually seep in too.
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.
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.
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.
Sad but not surprising. Apple marked their OpenGL subsystem as deprecated all the way back in 2018 with macOS 10.14 Mojave and iOS 12. By some miracle it has kept working all that time. While I hate it that Apple can just up and declare a widely used cross-platform API 'deprecated,' it's their system, not ours. So, we should not expect them to care or lift a finger if they accidentally break it.
It's more an indictment of everyone else, buy a different computer and you're guaranteed to be buying an objectively weaker computer for the vast majority of work scenarios. And you're paying a comparable price for it too.
It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.
It’s not really “some miracle” as they clearly had some incentive for it to work - it just runs through Metal on the ARM series now. Someone had to spend the time to get that together.
It's more nuanced and the official deprecation status doesn't mean much. sandbox-exec has been deprecated since 2016, but obviously Apple can't afford to break it (Chrome and basically all sandboxing solutions rely on it).
Right I'm still on 15.5. But random app windows flicker! FLICKER! And it's a brand new 2025 M4 MacBook Air. This is the kind of thing I would expect from like Linux in say 1998?
OpenGL is a low(ish) level hardware interface, that is almost certainly implemented in legacy unsafe code, so it will be fertile ground for CVEs. Presumably this is a security fix gone wrong
So they keep breaking previously functioning components even in older OS versions? I thought those were only getting security updates?
Until recently only Windows was the OS where I thought, "how could anyone use that voluntarily?", but Apple has managed to put their OSs right next to that in the same category. After a monotonous decline over more than a decade the final slump only took them three years. They've gotten better at failing faster than before.
> I can't comment on known issues or on whether or when a fix might ship. Your report is the right channel for the issue.
> As new builds become available, please retest and add the results to FB25133383. If you have access to the macOS 26.7.2 RC or the 27.2 beta, results from those builds belong there too.
Waste your donated time and effort testing against each new build, even though we won’t tell you if we even touched that subsystem between them.
If I were this bug reporter and got a response like that (after making a perfect report including a minimal reproducible test case) I would never donate another free bug report again.
The response from apple is insane, “please keep trying to reproduce this for us”. That is your job, apple engineer. As a manager of a large software org, a response like that from one of my engineers would drive me insane. Fix the damn problem or provide a timeline for addressing it. When you think the fix is released, then ask them if their issue was resolved.
I read the comments before the link and thought this was a bit harsh, but reading that response I now feel the same way you do.
The reporter ALREADY provided a minimal example and Apple is like "yup we're going to keep changing things and you need to keep rerunning the code you sent us and reporting here because we won't bother to run your minimal example ourselves".
Giving the Apple engineer (but not Apple) the benefit of the doubt I guess their policy is not to make any promises or announcements in that channel. They have probably said as much as they are allowed.
Forward looking statements can come from anyone and become sticky when considering security laws. Imagine everyone at Apple was sharing their full triage and timeline for every issue; one can then make informed decisions about their stock price, and investors could sue if those statements turned out to be misleading. At a certain point, the risk is too great.
You need to get your head out of your bubble and realize that this bug does not move the needle on anything meaningful.
I work at a superscalar and we have also had about 40% increase in breaking bugs in prod year-to-year due to a lot of slop code. However, the engagement and revenue generated is up from the features. Why bother make a timeline and spend time and resources on things that the average user does not care about? Does the average person care about the OpenGL compatibility? No, so why would you spend effort on this instead of for example user engagement? Answer that.
You can ask an AI to go through my HN account and see that I used to be an unapologetic Apple fanbitch
Now I must soundly say: Screw Apple.
Momentum and their hardware quality are the only things setting them apart from other platforms, while their ecosystem and individual software products are going to shit.
There's no way to have ourselves heard by them. Their "official" forums are just peer support for users to bang heads against each other.
Ironically, our best hope for computing now is that someone eventually uses AI to make a better OS and ecosystem, like they've started doing with the Adobe and Office clones.
What's the qualifier for "so" (in "so emotionally invested")? Did someone measure it and it's beyond the healthy range?
Parent is just passionate about the quality, or decline, of the tools he spend a good chunk of money of, and spends hours each day doing professional work with.
I agree with you but buying in to Apple's ecosystem is more than just being emotionally invested in a company. If all of the hardware you bought is going to shit because of what Apple is doing then I think it's fair.
The hardware absolutely changes after sale, there have been cases of keyboard's failing (e.g. during the butterfly keyboards), backlight failures (happened to some MBP runs), cracked displays (keys pressing into them), anti-reflective coating peeling, hinge issues (in several models), display failures (discoloration, light leaks), issues with (dedicated) GPUs in intel era models, battery expansions, logic board failures (there was a program that had 2-3 rounds or replacements), touch strip failures, and many others. Also ever heard of planned obselense?
And that's just pure hardware. Hardware/battery performance dropping by OS updates has been well known, and there were a few class actions lawsuit Apple lost or settled and fined.
Ever heard of planned obsolescence? The hardware absolutely changes after sale, there have been cases of keyboard's failing (e.g. during the butterfly keyboards), backlight failures (happened to some MBP runs), cracked displays (keys pressing into them), anti-reflective coating peeling, hinge issues (in several models), display failures (discoloration, light leaks), issues with (dedicated) GPUs in intel era models, battery expansions, logic board failures (there was a program that had 2-3 rounds or replacements), touch strip failures, and many others.
And that's just pure hardware. Hardware/battery performance dropping by OS updates has been well known, and there were a few class actions lawsuit Apple lost or settled and fined.
Many of those examples are disingenuous. Planned obsolescence could explain some, but to suggest there's no such thing as price/durability trade offs, regular wear and tear, or just poor construction, and instead it is "hardware changes" is a weird take. Of course physical objects change over time!
Someone bought the hardware. It worked. Then it stopped / was damaged, and not for bad use (e.g. operating it in the sun or dropping it or something).
>but to suggest there's no such thing as price/durability trade offs, regular wear and tear, or just poor construction, and instead it is "hardware changes" is a weird take.
Nobody suggested that, so that's an even weirder take.
The things mentioned are not "regular wear and tear" nor price/durability trade offs.
As for "poor construction", yes, that leads to hardware that changes to worse under you over time. Mind blown?
It sounds like you expect products to have zero defects, under any circumstances. There's a wide margin between shitty products and perfect.
Show me a single product EVER that doesn't have failure modes or that lasts forever.
None of this is to say I excuse poorly made products. But they generally are known before most people buy them, so a buyer can make an informed decision.
Oh yeah let's not be emotionally invested in the things you use everyday to do basically everything.
Try walking with a pebble in your shoe or sitting in a crooked chair or sleeping on a lumpy mattress and see how long before you get pissed, O Awakened Unattached Sage
I installed Asahi Linux on my Macbook Air recently and while it definitely took more effort than your grandparent would be capable of, it wasn't too bad. Getting FDE working was a pain for sure though.
The overall experience is good, aside from a few big areas: sleep mode still drains battery a ton, like 20-30% a day or more. And battery life in general while using it is pretty bad. And Firefox constantly runs out of memory and crashes.
Hopefully it improves soon. Even despite these issues I'm not going back to MacOS or Apple ecosystem again despite being a big fan of it and user for the last 7 years.
Given the comparable performance of OpenGL and Metal on the same hardware I was under the impression that is how Apple had been implementing OpenGL for quite a while.
OpenGL on Apple GPUs is implemented on top of Metal with some private extensions to be closer to OpenGL behaviour. Making things work performantly on top of regular Metal is quite a bit harder.
> Comparing traces, the render pass "OpenGL mode" sets an unknown bit in this kernel-processed block. If we set the same bit in our OpenGL driver, we find the clip space changes to -1/1.
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.
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.
The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating.
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:
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/iphone-18-pro-speaker-c...
I still get crackling or popping many times a day.
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).
Meanwhile, my underpowered P10P with GrapheneOS renders scrolling super smoothly.
I've been playing around with RealityKit (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit) lately, it's their SceneKit replacement (they deprecated it this year).
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.
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.
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 maybe they fix it next WWDC.
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.
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.
I now get stuck in the camera app half the time I try to use it, and other nonsense.
Same here.
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.
It’s funny how that basic of functionality is broken.
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.
Actually it feels a lot like Apple before NeXT's acquisition.
That sounds right.
Although so far I'm mostly happy with Apple products. Happier than with any Windows laptops.
(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.
Windows is also equally away from "3x Developers!" cry days.
Copeland... (That was the actual name of supposed future Apple's OS 30 years ago, sounds kinda different with 2026 perspective.)
I remember that period. System 7,8,8.6 were all so fragile compared to Windows. No progressive crashes... just sudden lockups.
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 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.
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.
The decrease in quality from 15 to 26 and then 26 to 27 is staggering.
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 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.
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.
Wait, this is terrible news. I was planning to migrate off of Gmail using that feature
It does work great generally. Here's what changing your foward-to looks like: https://imgur.com/a/feSBCCN
I migrated family email hosting from Google Workspace to Apple iCloud+ Custom Email Domains a few years ago and it's been smooth sailing. Few people realize that Apple has been a high-volume email host since long before Google Mail. This is the guide I used: https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...
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?
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.
The hidden "Detect Displays" button in Display settings does nothing.
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.
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.
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.
SwiftUI and probably Liquid Glass preceded slop. It's a larger cultural/management issue within Apple.
you really have to wonder how they managed to mess up this bad, and why they're doing nothing about it.
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.
how does this persist? do they not use their own products anymore? have they simply given up?
Finder search has been broken for me for years I think, and that smart folder "Recents" never worked properly. It's puzzling how they can let this happen.
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.
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.
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.
If I avoid doing those things, it can last much longer.
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...
We may not be far off from finding LLM prompts embedded directly in software. Instead of savefile(data_thing), we might start seeing
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".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.
The attitude that replacing functions with calls to AI agents is like totally okay in software engineering will eventually seep in too.
https://github.com/cofob/autogenlib
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.
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.
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.
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!
My M4 Max was probably that stable too until Tahoe, although I rarely left it running for more than a few weeks between updates.
Sad but not surprising. Apple marked their OpenGL subsystem as deprecated all the way back in 2018 with macOS 10.14 Mojave and iOS 12. By some miracle it has kept working all that time. While I hate it that Apple can just up and declare a widely used cross-platform API 'deprecated,' it's their system, not ours. So, we should not expect them to care or lift a finger if they accidentally break it.
When they break stuff, developers should lift their middle finger in response. That they don’t I think reflects some kind of Stockholm syndrome.
It's more an indictment of everyone else, buy a different computer and you're guaranteed to be buying an objectively weaker computer for the vast majority of work scenarios. And you're paying a comparable price for it too.
It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.
As long as people keep buying them, devs have no choice but to adapt
Devs always have a choice, but almost always choose to make more money. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head forcing them to develop for macOS.
It’s not really “some miracle” as they clearly had some incentive for it to work - it just runs through Metal on the ARM series now. Someone had to spend the time to get that together.
It's more nuanced and the official deprecation status doesn't mean much. sandbox-exec has been deprecated since 2016, but obviously Apple can't afford to break it (Chrome and basically all sandboxing solutions rely on it).
Yes, this is the real continuation of that. I still don't agree with the deprecation, and hope the support will be continued.
Right I'm still on 15.5. But random app windows flicker! FLICKER! And it's a brand new 2025 M4 MacBook Air. This is the kind of thing I would expect from like Linux in say 1998?
Was it released for the M4? If so, you might have a hardware problem. Bad display cable, faults on the motherboard, that kind of thing?
No, it's specifically just certain app windows. If it was a hardware failure, we would expect the whole physical display to flicker.
Seems like a good time to mention that LunarG’s Vulkan-on-Metal wrapper reached Vulkan 1.4 conformance recently.
https://www.lunarg.com/the-state-of-vulkan-on-apple-oct-2026...
Now we need Mesa’s OpenGL-on-Vulkan to be production-ready when running on KosmicKrisp
https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/zink.html
XQuartz performance has been broken for a couple of years now and I believe it is primarily due to an OpenGL issue.
what, there are still regression in the age of AI? or OpenGL is never in regression test suite to begin with?
Tell me this is sarcasm because it's genuinely impossible to tell these days.
Fails to reproduce on macOS Version 26.6 (25G70) (but I can't post a reply on the forums because developer.apple.com currently hates me.)
I get the green triangle and `hasDrawable=1 status=0x8cd5 glError=0x0` which is the expected result.
WTH. 15.8.1 is current, 15.8.2 ought to be security fixes only.
Maybe they asked Claude to fix a vulnerability?
Can't have OpenGL security issues without an OpenGL context
Here we're seeing what skill in using LLMs looks like.
OpenGL is a low(ish) level hardware interface, that is almost certainly implemented in legacy unsafe code, so it will be fertile ground for CVEs. Presumably this is a security fix gone wrong
There's a few very annoying audio and Bluetooth bugs on MacOS. I've even installed 3rd party software to hack a fix one of them.
So they keep breaking previously functioning components even in older OS versions? I thought those were only getting security updates?
Until recently only Windows was the OS where I thought, "how could anyone use that voluntarily?", but Apple has managed to put their OSs right next to that in the same category. After a monotonous decline over more than a decade the final slump only took them three years. They've gotten better at failing faster than before.
I wholeheartedly recommend Linux. Seriously.
It's a release candidate. That's what they are for, to catch bugs. Nothing to see here.
...except the interesting tidbits shared like this sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50142208
> I can't comment on known issues or on whether or when a fix might ship. Your report is the right channel for the issue.
> As new builds become available, please retest and add the results to FB25133383. If you have access to the macOS 26.7.2 RC or the 27.2 beta, results from those builds belong there too.
Waste your donated time and effort testing against each new build, even though we won’t tell you if we even touched that subsystem between them.
If I were this bug reporter and got a response like that (after making a perfect report including a minimal reproducible test case) I would never donate another free bug report again.
Brings back memories of when macOS broke samba, coincidentally the moment I decided to switch off the brand.
The response from apple is insane, “please keep trying to reproduce this for us”. That is your job, apple engineer. As a manager of a large software org, a response like that from one of my engineers would drive me insane. Fix the damn problem or provide a timeline for addressing it. When you think the fix is released, then ask them if their issue was resolved.
I read the comments before the link and thought this was a bit harsh, but reading that response I now feel the same way you do.
The reporter ALREADY provided a minimal example and Apple is like "yup we're going to keep changing things and you need to keep rerunning the code you sent us and reporting here because we won't bother to run your minimal example ourselves".
Just wow.
Giving the Apple engineer (but not Apple) the benefit of the doubt I guess their policy is not to make any promises or announcements in that channel. They have probably said as much as they are allowed.
Forward looking statements can come from anyone and become sticky when considering security laws. Imagine everyone at Apple was sharing their full triage and timeline for every issue; one can then make informed decisions about their stock price, and investors could sue if those statements turned out to be misleading. At a certain point, the risk is too great.
Ok, but even if that were true , it costs nothing to say "we'll let you know when we think we have fixed the issue so you can then retest"
"Idk lol, it'll probably be fixed one day, keep testing and find out" is a pretty crappy response.
You need to get your head out of your bubble and realize that this bug does not move the needle on anything meaningful.
I work at a superscalar and we have also had about 40% increase in breaking bugs in prod year-to-year due to a lot of slop code. However, the engagement and revenue generated is up from the features. Why bother make a timeline and spend time and resources on things that the average user does not care about? Does the average person care about the OpenGL compatibility? No, so why would you spend effort on this instead of for example user engagement? Answer that.
Because if you make enough decisions like that in a product that affects consumers and developers, eventually you turn into Adobe. Or worse, this guy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49984862
> please keep trying to reproduce this for us
There's an engineer that's used to solely interacting with agents.
You can ask an AI to go through my HN account and see that I used to be an unapologetic Apple fanbitch
Now I must soundly say: Screw Apple.
Momentum and their hardware quality are the only things setting them apart from other platforms, while their ecosystem and individual software products are going to shit.
There's no way to have ourselves heard by them. Their "official" forums are just peer support for users to bang heads against each other.
Ironically, our best hope for computing now is that someone eventually uses AI to make a better OS and ecosystem, like they've started doing with the Adobe and Office clones.
It might not be super healthy to be so emotionally invested in a company, its products, and its doings.
What's the qualifier for "so" (in "so emotionally invested")? Did someone measure it and it's beyond the healthy range?
Parent is just passionate about the quality, or decline, of the tools he spend a good chunk of money of, and spends hours each day doing professional work with.
> Did someone measure it and it's beyond the healthy range?
The person I responded to self-identified as an "Apple fanbitch". Now they categorically say "Screw Apple."
That seems like a pretty emotional attachment swinging from one extreme to another. Attachment will cause you pain.
Everyone is different and we shouldn't judge them.
Not having any attachment or inability to feel pain ain't good either.
And it's not a swing: it happens over years. Discontent built up by a thousand small cuts.
Things failing when you need them the most, so often that it makes you reflexively afraid the next time you think about trying it.
I agree with you but buying in to Apple's ecosystem is more than just being emotionally invested in a company. If all of the hardware you bought is going to shit because of what Apple is doing then I think it's fair.
The hardware doesn't change after sale.
The hardware absolutely changes after sale, there have been cases of keyboard's failing (e.g. during the butterfly keyboards), backlight failures (happened to some MBP runs), cracked displays (keys pressing into them), anti-reflective coating peeling, hinge issues (in several models), display failures (discoloration, light leaks), issues with (dedicated) GPUs in intel era models, battery expansions, logic board failures (there was a program that had 2-3 rounds or replacements), touch strip failures, and many others. Also ever heard of planned obselense?
And that's just pure hardware. Hardware/battery performance dropping by OS updates has been well known, and there were a few class actions lawsuit Apple lost or settled and fined.
Ever heard of planned obsolescence? The hardware absolutely changes after sale, there have been cases of keyboard's failing (e.g. during the butterfly keyboards), backlight failures (happened to some MBP runs), cracked displays (keys pressing into them), anti-reflective coating peeling, hinge issues (in several models), display failures (discoloration, light leaks), issues with (dedicated) GPUs in intel era models, battery expansions, logic board failures (there was a program that had 2-3 rounds or replacements), touch strip failures, and many others.
And that's just pure hardware. Hardware/battery performance dropping by OS updates has been well known, and there were a few class actions lawsuit Apple lost or settled and fined.
Many of those examples are disingenuous. Planned obsolescence could explain some, but to suggest there's no such thing as price/durability trade offs, regular wear and tear, or just poor construction, and instead it is "hardware changes" is a weird take. Of course physical objects change over time!
What exactly sounds "disingenuous" to you?
Someone bought the hardware. It worked. Then it stopped / was damaged, and not for bad use (e.g. operating it in the sun or dropping it or something).
>but to suggest there's no such thing as price/durability trade offs, regular wear and tear, or just poor construction, and instead it is "hardware changes" is a weird take.
Nobody suggested that, so that's an even weirder take.
The things mentioned are not "regular wear and tear" nor price/durability trade offs.
As for "poor construction", yes, that leads to hardware that changes to worse under you over time. Mind blown?
It sounds like you expect products to have zero defects, under any circumstances. There's a wide margin between shitty products and perfect.
Show me a single product EVER that doesn't have failure modes or that lasts forever.
None of this is to say I excuse poorly made products. But they generally are known before most people buy them, so a buyer can make an informed decision.
Oh yeah let's not be emotionally invested in the things you use everyday to do basically everything.
Try walking with a pebble in your shoe or sitting in a crooked chair or sleeping on a lumpy mattress and see how long before you get pissed, O Awakened Unattached Sage
Stop bending over for mediocrity.
> Stop bending over for mediocrity.
That's a false binary choice. You can also shift your purchases to other providers if you think a company is providing a shitty product.
There is already a better OS.
But there is no Windows Phone anymore unfortunately.
I miss my Lumia 720 more than I miss some family members.
Yeah, just not on the aspects that matter to some of us.
Such as?
Such as the ability to run the commercial software I want to run - for music, video, etc.
Such as the ecosystem being united and not a fragmented mess even worse than Apple's lack of coordination between teams.
Such as first class support, drivers, and control programs, for almost all the hardware I want to own.
Linux? If someone can fix the ecosystem, I'm there.
I installed Asahi Linux on my Macbook Air recently and while it definitely took more effort than your grandparent would be capable of, it wasn't too bad. Getting FDE working was a pain for sure though.
The overall experience is good, aside from a few big areas: sleep mode still drains battery a ton, like 20-30% a day or more. And battery life in general while using it is pretty bad. And Firefox constantly runs out of memory and crashes.
Hopefully it improves soon. Even despite these issues I'm not going back to MacOS or Apple ecosystem again despite being a big fan of it and user for the last 7 years.
I mean, I pretty much agree with everyone else here that Apple software quality has gone to shit recently but the issues you describe are just awful.
I would not use a laptop with those issues no matter the problems MacOS has currently.
These days you could just ask a bot to port your stuff from OpenGL to a newer API.
Backward compatibility is less of an issue when fixing legacy stuff takes $25 in tokens.
Unfortunately there is no universally supported newer API thanks to Apple.
There's some libraries like wgpu that can fill this gap in practice
Minecraft has been moving to Vulkan and using MoltenVK to run the same backend on Mac.
In that case maybe the answer is $200 in tokens to make a metal OpenGL shim and then share it to the community on GitHub.
Given the comparable performance of OpenGL and Metal on the same hardware I was under the impression that is how Apple had been implementing OpenGL for quite a while.
OpenGL on Apple GPUs is implemented on top of Metal with some private extensions to be closer to OpenGL behaviour. Making things work performantly on top of regular Metal is quite a bit harder.
Not sure why this is downvoted, it's true: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-6.html
> Comparing traces, the render pass "OpenGL mode" sets an unknown bit in this kernel-processed block. If we set the same bit in our OpenGL driver, we find the clip space changes to -1/1.
ANGLE already does that: https://chromium.googlesource.com/angle/angle
Isn't https://github.com/google/angle just that?
Edit: I guess no, Angle is OpenGL ES. My bad.
Metal is universally supported among Apple's product lines.
Just as useful as DirectX being universally supported in Microsoft's product lines.
The point of OpenGL was to have an API universally supported everywhere
That's a bad analogy
Why is it a bad analogy? I don't have experience on either of the libraries, so I may be missing something.
Shouldn't Apple be the one spending the $25 to deliver a product that works?
"Why have X when Y costs $N in tokens" is becoming a tired thought-terminating cliche.
It shouldn't be user's responsibility to have to get their binaries to work at all costs.
How about they spend $25 in tokens to fix what they broke?
Why, yes, of course, have all the devs in the world spend $25 and tons of time each, because Apple doesn't care about devs nor users.
/s