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

Jason Snell’s annual report card for Apple is out, rating the company’s performance according to 56 influential analysts, including 9 on 5 Mac editor-in-chief Chance Miller.

The results show a big difference in the perception of Apple hardware and software across the board, but especially in relation to the Mac…

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

It’s time for our annual look back at Apple’s performance over 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 feeling—the “vibe in the room”—about the past year.

Participants are asked to rate Apple on several metrics, assigning a score from one to five (with five being the best). The difference between the concepts of hardware and software quality is obvious.

• Hardware reliability: 4.5
• Quality of Apple OS: 2.7

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

On the hardware side, the consensus view can be summed up effectively as the machines are pretty cool and boring! As Shahid Kamal Ahmad puts it:

The biggest compliment I can pay my M4 Pro MacBook Pro is that, without a bad name, it’s boring. It’s annoying that, unlike my high-powered PC laptop, I don’t have to worry about having a charger on hand. It’s annoying that I almost never hear any unusual fan noise. It’s boring that the screen is great, perfect size, perfect clarity, perfect contrast, perfect colors, perfect brightness and perfect smoothness.

These views were not echoed when it came to macOS 26. John Siracusa, who has written comprehensive reviews of each macOS release Arstechnicahe didn’t hold back.

Tahoe is the worst user update in Mac history. Every change is wrongheaded, poorly executed, or both. The Mac remains usable only because of Tahoe’s lack of ambition: it mostly changes the look and metrics of the interface elements rather than making significant changes to the Mac UI structure. Thank you grace for that. The bad ideas contained in the Tahoe reveal an Apple design team that has abandoned the basic principles of interacting with human computers.

Mashable’s Christina Warren was clear but not impressed.

I am forced to use macOS Tahoe for work, otherwise there is no way I can get it to work on even one of my devices.

As always, the full report card is worth reading.

9to5Mac’s Take

I totally agree with the Mac hardware test. Performance and energy efficiency are both impressive and continue to improve at an impressive rate each year. While it will be interesting to see the next major redesign of the MacBook Pro, anyone who uses any of Apple’s Silicon generation Macs probably has a few complaints.

I also agree that the quality of Apple’s software falls far short of the hardware. This includes some schoolboy bugs like the window resizing problem, which was fixed and reverted somehow. There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of failure.

However, I have a much better opinion of macOS 26 than the consensus opinion. Yes, glitches are embarrassing and annoying, but I actually like the overall look and feel. Partner Chance highlighted Live Actions and significant improvements to Spotlight and Shortcuts, while Siracusa admitted that the basics are still as good as they’ve ever been.

What is your opinion? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo by Yavor Kaludov on Unsplash