Mac hardware is great, but macOS 26 is a disaster, say pundits

Jason Snell’s annual Apple report card is out, rating the company’s performance according to 56 influential commenters, including 9to5Mac’s editor-in-chief Chance Miller.

The results show a dramatic difference in perception of Apple’s hardware and software across the board, but most notably with regard to the Mac …

Snell describes the Six Colors report card as a broad view of the sentiment toward Apple.

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year.

Participants are asked to rate Apple on a number of metrics, giving a score of one to five (where five is best). The difference between perceptions of hardware and software quality is stark.

• Hardware reliability: 4.5
• Apple OS quality: 2.7

Respondents are also asked to explain the reason for each of their scores, and this hardware/software split is particularly notable when it comes to the Mac.

On the hardware side, the consensus view could effectively be summarized as the machines being so good they are boring! As Shahid Kamal Ahmad’s put it:

The biggest compliment I can pay my M4 Pro MacBook Pro is that, apart from the unwieldy name, it’s boring. It’s boring that, unlike my high-powered PC laptop, I don’t need to worry about having a charger on hand. It’s boring that I almost never hear obtrusive fan noise. It’s boring that the screen is beautiful, a perfect size, perfect clarity, perfect contrast, perfect colours, perfect brightness and perfect smoothness.

These views were not echoed when it comes to macOS 26. John Siracusa, who has written exhaustive reviews of each macOS release for Arstechnica, didn’t hold back.

Tahoe is the worst user interface update in the history of the Mac. Every change is either wrongheaded, poorly executed, or both. The Mac remains usable only because of Tahoe’s lack of ambition: it mostly alters the appearance and metrics of interface elements rather than making fundamental changes to the structure of the Mac UI. Thank goodness for that. The bad ideas embodied in Tahoe reveal an Apple design team that has abandoned the most basic principles of human-computer interaction.

Mashable’s Christina Warren was more succinct but no more impressed.

I am forced to use macOS Tahoe for work, otherwise there is no universe in which I would have it running on even one of my machines.

As always, the full report card is worth reading.

9to5Mac’s Take

I completely agree with the assessment of Mac hardware. Performance and power efficiency are both amazing and continue to improve at a reliably impressive rate each year. While it will be fun to see the upcoming major redesign of the MacBook Pro, anyone using any of the Apple Silicon generation Macs likely has few complaints.

I also agree that the quality of Apple software falls massively short of the hardware. This includes some schoolboy errors like the window resizing issue, which was fixed and then somehow reverted. There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of failing.

I do, though, have a more positive overall impression of macOS 26 than the apparent consensus view. Yes, the glitches are embarrassing and annoying, but I do actually like the overall look and feel. My colleague Chance highlighted Live Activities and significant improvements to Spotlight and Shortcuts, while even Siracusa acknowledges that the fundamentals are still as good as they ever were.

What’s your view? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo by Yavor Kaludov on Unsplash