I want my Apple back

People have very short memories.

Apple has almost always shipped with a ton of bugs. The original iPhone is quite possibly the buggiest product I've ever used. I honestly can't remember another device that crashed as much. Was it an incredible product? Yes! Was it extremely buggy? Yes!

For a long time every rev of OSX seemed to break half of my apps. I haven't used Yosemite, so I can't comment on that specific release, but otherwise OSX quality now seems better than its ever been.

And no one was more obsessed with competition than Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was hyper aware of competition and goaded them as well.

This is still Apple -- good and bad.

When I bought my macbook 2 years ago I was wowed with non-buggyness of everything compared to my linux (ubuntu) workstation. I like my workstation and still use it, but the macbook was an experience in which almost everything made sense e.g. no suprises with standby and wifi oddities which plagued me on ubuntu. In those 2 years I went from wowed to disappointed and the thought of "this works pretty well on linux by now". E.g. I was plagued by a wifi error (no auto reconnect) since mavericks when bluetooth was on, which tens of people could reproduce - it took Apple 9!! months to fix this. Multiple non-deterministic freezes when clamshell/external monitors was enabled or disabled, again since mavericks, which seems to have stopped in the latest update 10.9.x though I cannot correlate this to any changelog. And then the whole shitty experience with the forced transition from gcc to Clang as a developer. Ergo, I can concur with the author

Agree. I've got same feeling lately after I run in few issues, which required me to call Apple on each of it, because there was no solution anywhere on internet.

I felt, that Apple does not think anymore about use cases. For example, year ago I gave my old iPad to my daughter, so I had to create her apple id. She is under 13, so there was no way to create this id with her real birthday. Apple support told me to use mine- so I did. This year, they came up with kids apple id for Family sharing, but they didn't came up with the way to convert any existing ids to child ids. Nor they willing to find a solution.

Talking about family sharing - it just didn't work. How would you know, that enabling and then disabling allow user to approve purchases option will resolve my issue?

There are many issues. I hope, Apple will slow down and will come up with "Snow Leopard" for iOS. Snow Leopard was great release: no new features, but a lot of bug fixing. I want that in iOS. Please, Apple!

The only thing this shows is that people like the OP drank the kool-aid and still believe that Apple (as a company) would care, in spite of irrefutable evidence to the contrary and a history of broken things.

The only department I give my kudos to is Apple's marketing and their external communication because they manage to convey this image with such persistence and over such a long time.

NB: I'm an Apple user myself

From my experience Apple still ships products with lesser bugs in comparison to the competition. However, it is true that overall finish and polish of OS X is not consistent with previous releases. I remember my old iBook G4 that ran Panther and then Tiger. That thing was a solid, stable beast. It's the product that allowed Apple to earn my respect.