I'm not talking about controversial new design directions like the iOS photos app redesign, I mean broken behavior. I can't recall everything off the top of my head, but just a few examples that come to mind:
- The new macOS has a system info pop-up every time any application is using your screen. It tells you how many times the application has accessed your audio or video over the last month, and tells you that you can manage this in settings. You cannot turn this notification off, and it is repeatedly triggered every few seconds by applications such as Zoom. This popup sometimes (but not always) steals application focus, which means if I am screensharing a code editor, keystrokes will inexplicably stop being sent to it.
- In a recent version of iOS, I could no longer tap on the calendar event time-selection wheel while creating an event to manually type the time instead of spinning to select it. As soon as I started typing numbers, the UI would disappear and only a partial time would be entered. In the most recent version of iOS this has been fixed, but for a while the entire workflow of how I create calendar events was broken.
- I used to be able to ask Siri to create an alarm for X minutes from now, but an update or two back Siri started creating timers instead.
- For a few prior iOS versions, I would reduce volume or brightness in the iOS control center, only to have the sliders pop back up from time to time on their own.
The general feeling of using iOS and macOS lately is that I can no longer rely on things continuing to behave the way they used to. Although macOS is a far better operating system experience than Windows, and far more polished than Linux on the desktop, it just feels like the reliable usability of Apple operating systems is slowly ebbing away.
Maybe this is a sign that I'm turning into a curmudgeonly old graybeard in my middle age.