There is a lot of bad writing around on that site and many others. I think the author, in a roundabout way, is trying to make the point that the quality of macOS has not deteriorated over the years, which I think is right. I've used Snow Leopard for its entire run and can't say that Monterey or Ventura are less reliable.
Confirmation bias of one.
You ought to spend some time on
here.
That notwithstanding, folks on here have addressed, repeatedly, the ever-expanding problem of guff and bloat rushed into each major version iteration of macOS, post-Snow Leopard. That pattern and trend continues.
But the worst of the lot — and for me, just plain unforgivable — is in how each major version of macOS is a mess of under-the-bonnet telemetry and ugly reminders that the customer is no longer a customer, but a product. I didn’t sign up for this paradigmatic shift when I bought my last Mac from the Apple Store, and I don’t sign up for it now.
Never mind how I don’t want a computer tied
umbilically to the company which made it
a prerequisite for running the OS out-of-the-box. I get reminded of this anytime Little Snitch notes the OS is trying to phone home to Apple.
I mean,
come on.
(I mean, good lordt. And this is only in
High Sierra!)
Back during Snow Leopard, this was typically confined to one of two areas: Software Updates and features adjacent to either the App Store or the iTunes Music Store. Aside from from that, there were also prompts when sending a crash report to Apple.
But with each major version since Snow Leopard, that stopped being so,
up and to the point where even opting out permanently, with help from a third-party utility like Little Snitch
was no longer enough. The article, notwithstanding the alarmist tone (though understandable for anyone who isn’t a U.S. citizen and isn’t living in the U.S.) painstakingly describes how that umbilical cord has only gotten stronger without much of a clear explanation behind why. The above infosec blogger
later found Ventura quietly scanning the contents of .dmgs on one’s local Mac and sending info about those contents back to Apple.
“General security improvements” or however Apple describe it doesn’t describe anything. As recently as the PowerPC OS X days, Apple were thorough with an itemized list of changes and updates to the system when one rolled out. That hasn’t been so for a long time.
And as I’ve written in the recent past elsewhere on here, let me pay for a major build of macOS if that means eliding much of the above telemetry, bloat and, well, inexplicable inclusions of guff like the
Bitcoin manifesto inside macOS Mojave and later.
Incidentally, eliminate the bloat and the guff and the telemetry, finish the work (instead of sending out a frequently half-baked beta on a strict, arbitrary annual calendar), and suddenly Apple might have an OS which “just works” for all customers, as they need it. But nope. We’re no longer customers. We are their product.
Total
dechets.
Either way, Snow Leopard is now ancient history unsupported for more than a decade and cannot be run on any 2012 or later hardware. There is no hardware that is designed to run both Snow Leopard and Ventura. (Yes, I know of OpenCore, hence I bolded "designed".)
All due respect, but have you a point?
One ritual in podcasts shortly before WWDC is to wish for a "no new features" release like Snow Leopard (even though it had new features) and then after WWDC to whine how there aren't enough.
Sorry, that isn’t my camp. I’m in camp “let me get my work done without disruptions, hoop-jumping, instability, and all that blasted phoning home garbage”.
Your remark reminds me of how the hype around any WWDC, post-Snow Leopard (when it became the kick-off for the annual-cycle major version OS, irrespective of how
finished that OS was) is mostly a pep rally event to cheer the make-work for update princes and not for focussing on just making a great end product. That’s because, lest I flail a dead horse, the customer is no longer the customer, but the product; whereas today’s customers are an army of shareholders who may or may not use Macs the way longtime power users (“power users” due to the line of work they’re in) have long used them.
And that’s why I keep around very particular Macs with noteworthy and exceptional backward/forward compatibility latitude.
