They surely fixed a lot of bugs, but not enough, and they added so many new stupid ones. Mission Control wasn't perfect before, but at least it wasn't buggy. Now there is a bug every two clicks.

Even double-clicking in Finder is broken, many times double-clicks are just ignored.

Golden gate has been ok-ish for me. I am more annoyed by the constant render stutters in iOS. It got worse with iOS 26 (tested on iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air) and it is still pretty bad with iOS 27 (tested on iPhone Air and iPhone 18 Pro).

Some apps like the App Store or Mastodon are a complete stutter fest, even when you let them preload all assets. But it even happens in very basic apps like the Settings app.

Meanwhile my woefully underpowered Pixel 10 Pro (on par with a flagship from a few years ago) with GrapheneOS is butter smooth in nearly every app.

They didn't fix one pretty big audio bug (or possibly introduced it?) which bit me the other day: I attempted to use an aggregate audio device consisting of the headphone jack and a USB audio interface. Randomly every few minutes, the outputs would get rearranged and my audio would get routed to the wrong places. It was definitely the aggregate device, since it hasn't happened again since I switched to just the USB interface.

they may have fixed audio bugs but it broke ableton was my main complaint.

The centering bugs are important. They show attention to detail. Humans are wired to see such sloppiness as indicative of deeper problems. If they can’t get the easy stuff right, it saps your trust that they got the harder stuff right.

> Firefox bugs are bugs in Firefox. (I also keep experiencing the stuck menu bug, but again, Firefox bug.)

Glitches in context menus could theoretically be just Firefox bugs. Glitches in the global menu bar can't be just Firefox bugs. Those pixels don't belong to Firefox. It shouldn't be possible for an application to cause the OS to lose track of which menu the user has open in the global menu bar. Even if Firefox is buggy here (quite likely), there's clearly a deficiency in the OS itself, too.

Firefox UI bugs are crazy. For example, on Tahoe 26.5, you can select disabled control menu items: https://imgur.com/a/7VUHzLK

Anywhere else on macOS, you can't do that. Even better, you can activate them with Enter.

> "I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn't that then open?" Yes, and it does.

Look at their gif carefully. Enable Dock magnification, click one folder, then click on any part of another folder's icon for which the click/cursor would no longer be on that folder's hitbox after the magnification effect moves to center that folder.

What does the NS prefix mean?

Was it a poorly-authored PDF without fields? You’d be SOL entirely on Windows in that situation. I find Preview’s PDF editing pretty intuitive generally.

I also like that Preview gets page numbers right in complex documents like textbooks. If a problem set is on page 89 (which might be the 115th actual page), I can just go to it. I’ve yet to see any other free or built in PDF reader do that.

Papercuts, that's a neat way of describing them. Thanks for that!

Pretty sure Apple must dedicate a product manager to coming up with new ways to break spaces in each OS release.

They rewrote it this year and it doesn’t seem like they polished it enough :(

I also genuinely cannot believe how broken Mission Control is. I use it constantly and the flickering, black spaces, and other small issues lead to an overall frustrating experience I did not have in 26. I'm very surprised that these issues didn't come up on HN from all the beta users, many reporting that they're very happy with 27. Is Mission Control a feature that those likely to download the beta are disproportionately unlikely to use?

Spaces really needs some attention. It makes me much more productive overall, but it really feels like it's been forgotten. Beyond just making it less buggy, some simple things would make a huge difference, like being able to rename spaces, and not only showing the name of the space when you hover over it.

Edit: Thanks for the tip about killing the dock to get the keyboard shortcuts working. That was driving me mad. Do you have to do that every restart, or will those just work now?

I use Spaces very heavily and it is amazing how much they borked it up. Even 27.0.1 is not helping it.

To me it basically feels the same as 26. All the "they're fixing Liquid Glass guys" hype turned out to be over a slider to control the transparency of the glass, when you could already set it to opaque (tinted) in 26. I guess it's an improvement for however many people were dying to have specifically 70% opaque Liquid Glass. If anything Golden Gate looks a little worse than Tahoe. They added a faux-3D effect to the Liquid Glass, which clashes with the flat design used on whatever part of the UI isn't Liquid Glass. It's as if you were using Windows 10, then got halfway through installing a Windows 7 theme before cancelling it, so random stuff is Aero vs. flat.

The biggest problem introduced in Tahoe was the massive padding areas around everything, which remain unchanged in Golden Gate. I've seen rumors that Apple is planning on a touchscreen Macbook, so maybe the padding is to make it so people will be able to use their fingers more easily. I guess they've decided to repeat the mistake Microsoft has made in Windows 8 and newer, where they destroy the UI for everyone in order to cater to whatever percentage of users prefer 2-in-1 convertible laptops.

Saying 27 is an improvement over 26 is a different statement to the one you’re making about the general trend of macOS.

Nor does it mean that people shouldn’t welcome improvements even if those improvements don’t bring the overall quality back to that of what it used to be.

But I do also agree with you that we shouldn’t be ignoring the fact that Apple have generally been on a downward spiral in terms of software quality for a number of years.

I'm still on Sequoia and waiting for things to get better. Thankfully I don't do dev work for Apple platforms anymore.

Yes, it is. How can’t you follow this logic? It is an upwards trajectory. Genuinely, what are you missing about this? Two things can be true at the same time. Nobody said that there had been a historical downward trajectory. Well, at least, in your description of what “gets you”. But I’ve never really seen many people arguing that macOS hasn’t degraded over the past ~10-15 years. The fact that’s “getting you” s still worth noting and not every online comment has to be a complete, comprehensive accounting of someone’s entire position. Some things are just left unsaid because there’s a shared understanding. At this point I think that “macOS had generally gotten worse” is easily one of those.