macOS 26 Tahoe's Dead Canary Utility App Icons

> The problem isn’t that one little bird has died. The problem is that the bird might be dead because the whole mine is filling with deadly carbon monoxide or highly flammable methane gas

This is where I'm at with Apple at the moment.

I know this sounds crazy or stupid, and people on reddit made sure to tell me as much, but the recent iOS, macOS, and watchOS betas have actually caused me to abandon the Apple ecosystem. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't one bird dead, but a whole bunch of birds. I suppose I'm a little more sensitive than Gruber. I find the design language (or lack thereof?) in Apple's recent work to be largely void of life, inspiration, purpose, craft, or anything else I'd come to expect over the last 25 years of using their platform. The quality in terms of performance, efficiency, bugs, intuitive user interfaces, and so on has been dropping for years now. The last OS revision is exemplary of this decline in a deeply concerning way.

I've been so disheartened by things like this, and I'm confident it represents the end of an era so to speak, that I've already come to terms with it and started moving off of Apple's ecosystem.

For me, the move is a matter of pursuing systems which allow me a bit more freedom. Apple has restricted me in ways that I permitted for decades now, but I permitted it because the compromise was worth it. I don't see it being worth it in 5 or 10 years, so I'm starting the transition now. I sold my watch, gave away my iPhone, and started shopping for a ThinkPad.

It's hard to give up macOS and Apple hardware (the value prop has become kind of insane, really), but seeing their recent OS work takes the sting away. I'd love to see them recognize their mistakes and correct course, but... I don't think I'm their target customer anymore, frankly. The people who think I'm an idiot on reddit are their target market, I suppose. That's fine. I'll learn to love Linux and Windows for different reasons and regain some privacy and control over my machines.

My family will certainly stay on Apple's ecosystem.

My dad went to school near Cupertino and got a student prerelease of the first Mac in '84. I've been in this ecosystem as long as I've been alive.

As many others have said elsewhere in these comments, Apple has been stagnating in quality for a long time. Even the Jobs-era iPhones were buggier than anyone inside the Reality Distortion Field (and most of the tech press at the time) would admit. I'd have to really squint to think of anything good that came from bringing iPhone tech to the Mac.

All that said, the sorts of things I need a computer for have been a mostly-solved problem, by Apple, for most of this millennium. There were year-on-year improvements in the early years of X, but I can't tell you the last Mac feature that made me go "OMG I want that."

Unfortunately, the "by Apple" part of that sentence is load-bearing. So far as I can tell, desktop Linux is still largely the work of hobbyists on GitHub. I don't expect there to be a unified design philosophy, and I do expect it to need constant tweaking to get each package to work how I'd like and to keep them working with one another.

Even if Apple's desktops have been stagnating for at least as long as they've been naming them after landmarks, I don't know of an alternative that's worth the effort of switching.