At least with Macs you are free to choose and downgrade to any OS version that you like, so long as that version supports your hardware. macOS 15.7.1 will run just fine on any M4 Mac, and Apple will likely continue to release 15.x updates for a year or so yet, and security updates even beyond that.

It's not like iOS where, once updated, you're generally blocked from ever downgrading back to a previous OS version.

Apart from the usual suspect of "modern" UI designers needlessly changing stuff to justify their job, it is my personal opinion that the SwiftUI framework is one of the root causes of Apple's piss-poor software UX and performance. For anything apart from very simple bog-standard views, that framework becomes bewildering with a high cognitive burden and simply does not scale well when any kind of customization is needed.

Also compiler performance - People get fed up of "The compiler could not type check the expression in reasonable time" and just say fsck-it and ship broken stuff.

It is one of the reasons that now >40% of apps on iOS/MacOS now use other frameworks - and that percentage is steadily climbing. (I think that number has already crossed 50% recently).

Apple needs to re-invent their UI framework from scratch. Plain old-school MVC worked better.

The M4 MBP, even if it comes pre-installed with Tahoe, can still be downgraded to Sequoia via DFU restore. The real cut-off will be the M5 Macs, which only Tahoe and above will have hardware support for.

I decided to postpone an iPhone upgrade for another year rather than be forced to use iOS 26 without a downgrade option. This is the only way to send a signal.

IMO at Apple the feedback loops seem to have gotten longer. They took a lot of time to discontinue the butterfly keyboards, bring magsafe back, etc. So it's likely that they'll double down on this OS/ UX than correct their path soon. I am not saying that they don't care. But I haven't seen statements like 'we made a mistake', or even 'you are holding it wrong', etc. This- not caring to be answerable to the end user, along with other perceptions in this thread (like siloed teams, bugs in their own apps) makes me think that Apple has become a somewhat dysfunctional enterprise. If they are going down that path, maybe they should hire SAFe Agile consultants. :-)

Disclaimer: Don't follow Apple or HN a lot. And these opinions are maybe more of my perceptions than facts. Open to corrections.

I know it's shit. But for all of you, regardless of whether it's Mac OS or iOS, go to accessibility options and enable high contrast. It removes transparency/liquid glass.

If you are a pro user its generally not a good idea to install the latest upgrade immediately.

I just bought a M4 MBA, my first since a 2014 MBP. I absolutely hated the 26 update on my phone and iPad but honestly don’t even notice it on my MacBook.