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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
tou 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?
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.
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.
The window manager bugs have been present since the first macOS 27 beta, and have made it unchanged to the current stable release.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
[delayed]
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
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.
Brings back memories of when macOS broke samba, coincidentally the moment I decided to switch off the brand.
WTH. 15.8.1 is current, 15.8.2 ought to be security fixes only.
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
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
[dead]
There is already a better OS.
Yeah, just not on the aspects that matter to some of us.
But there is no Windows Phone anymore unfortunately.
I miss my Lumia 720 more than I miss some family members.
Linux? If someone can fix the ecosystem, I'm there.
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.
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.
ANGLE already does that: https://chromium.googlesource.com/angle/angle
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.
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.
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