Remember when Snow Leopard came out? No new user features. It just ran faster. Greatest OS release in history. Why can't Apple just do that again with one of their OS's?
I don't understand this narrative anymore. The yearly macOS changes are objectively minimal. It's a mature platform. This year, a new design and a few power user features (Spotlight, Shortcuts, tidbits like Call Screening/Hold) and framework overhauls (Metal 4), that's it. Heck, new design excepted, I doubt Snow Leopard added fewer features than Tahoe.
Snow Leopard was mainly framework overhauls, but they're still doing those, year after year, only piecewise. People praise Snow Leopard as a golden release, but early on it was very buggy and, for many, slow (I still remember). It only became great after refinement. Now Tahoe seems stable enough (not counting minor UI glitches) that even Ableton/Pro Tools/SPSS/AdobeCC and other frequent troublemakers work fine on release day, an unusual feat. The "downhill" narrative seems to be nothing but baseless nostalgia.
Everybody also forgets that Apple always did yearly macOS releases except for a short gap around the iPhone and iPad introductions. That's not new either.
It's no surprise that it had lots of bugs because it rewrote lots of components. But the power of storytelling (and remembering via most-upvoted Reddit comment) has turned it into the perfect release.
