Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia

The same year Apple launched the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known as Leopard, sporting “300 New Features.” Two years later, it did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took away. Apple needs to make it snow again.

Snow Leopard did what it was made to do. It was one of the most solid software releases Apple ever put out. I’d say one of the best modern operating system releases, period.

After Apple’s frenetic run of overhauling and quickly iterating on the entire Mac platform in the early 2000s, becoming a major technology player again with the iPod, moving the Mac to a new processor architecture (for the second of three times) and releasing the iPhone, it was time for detail work. 2009’s Snow Leopard was understated, but improved the underlying system while shrinking it in size by removing outdated accretions.

In an era when people still paid money for operating system upgrades every few years (anyone else remember standing in line for Windows 95?), releasing an OS upgrade without huge new features was unusual. But, it was the right idea and cemented one of the best eras of the Mac.

Nowadays, Apple includes the system upgrades in the upfront cost of its computers, so the incentive to constantly roll out ten or twenty or three hundred “new features” should be lower. Inexplicably, since the company adopted that no extra charge, yearly release cadence, it has seemingly been more reticent to do a disciplined “Snow” release, no matter how necessary.

The latest releases — MacOS Sequoia and iOS/iPadOS 18 — are screaming for such a reset. Yes, they work and are still smoother and less glitchy than Windows 11, but they feel like software developed by people who don’t actually use that software. In the 22 years since I became a “switcher”, this is the worst state I can remember Apple’s platforms being in.

Some bugs are inevitable with major releases, sure. The troubling aspect is that many are easily reproducible across devices and show up in high-traffic areas, not just forgotten nooks. How do Apple’s engineers not notice these problems?

Take Messages. Apple’s iMessage and SMS tool is an essential app for communication for me and, I suspect, the vast majority of Apple users. Since the release of Sequoia last fall, one can no longer reliably cut or copy text from the Mac app. Attempting to copy a message bubble is a game of roulette: the message may copy or it may not. Who knows until you try to paste! Select text in a message and attempt to copy a specific part and it will copy… the whole message, not the selected portion. This is basic, nailed-down-in-the-1980s functionality even my first PC could get right every time.

Surface-level problems like this are joined by deeper structural issues, such as how slow and bloated Messages is. Compared to other end-to-end encrypted messaging tools, Messages takes forever to synchronize if the computer has been off or without Internet for even a day. Nor does it give any indication of an incomplete sync while it takes an hour or more to catch up. Meanwhile, I regularly catch it consuming 20-40% of a processor core when idling.

This is not good.

On my laptop, Mail, and any other tool that depends on MacOS’s secure networking libraries, will at times refuse to connect to the necessary servers. Because the problem is with some aspect of the underlying system, nothing less than a full restart of my Mac will allow connections to flow again. Separately, Safari regularly has internal components jam up and silently prevent a tab or the whole browser from loading pages.

Neither are the glitches confined to the Mac. UI bugs are strewn across Apple’s mobile platforms, too. Messages on iPad, for example, will regularly lose its top navigation bar, requiring a force quit of the app to get things working again. The emoji picker on both the iPad and Mac regularly comes up blank or fails to pass through a selection.

Then there are design decisions that aren’t bugs, they’re just bad. System Settings is a perfect case. For most of MacOS’s existence, you could rearrange a second display’s location in relation to the primary display simply by going into the System Preferences, clicking on Displays and dragging the pictured displays around. Now, counterintuitively, the picture of the displays on this main screen are immovable, with rearrangement functionality hidden behind a button that leads to another window.

That’d be an annoying step backward in the olden days, but it is worse in an era when an iPad can share the Mac’s mouse pointer and even double as a secondary display. Am I the only one who sometimes has his iPad on the left of the Mac and sometimes the right? Why make it harder to rearrange displays now?

I could walk item by item through System Settings and point out many equally inexplicable decisions. Did anyone at Apple really believe a Mac user’s life would be better if common features were buried deep in menus? Or that those menus would be better if designed with odd, glitchy interface arrangements more akin to web pages than a proper Mac app?

Then there’s the abomination that is the iOS and iPadOS Photos app. The previous release was not perfect, but it was good. The new release buried quick access to functions such as favorites. The first release also defaulted to showing all photos and videos with huge margins around them rather than using the full screen. When is the last time you heard someone say, “I sure hate when photos fill my whole screen, I wish they’d put a big border around them instead”? Meanwhile, navigation items are non-standard and riddled with inconsistencies — sometimes there’s a back navigation button, sometimes an “X,” sometimes in one place, sometimes in another — more akin to an Android app than a core part of iOS.

A year focused on cleaning up these and a thousand similar issues big and small is the single step Apple could take that would most enhance its products.

This is not to say Apple’s platforms are without the need for updates. Apple is clearly behind on the AI arms race and the recent announcement that Apple Intelligence’s most exciting features are indefinitely delayed instills little confidence the company will soon catch up. John Gruber is right that Apple now seems to be producing concept videos of vaporware.

The company’s struggle to release its most important new features in years may be more than tangentially related to everything I’ve bemoaned in this column. Reports suggest Siri is actually divided into two different systems — the old, core, limited Siri and a newer one for the latest features — because they haven’t been able to pull off integrating them.

You can put beautiful new windows on your house when the wood is solid; when it is rotten, you need to replace the rotted-out structure first. Snow Leopard’s clean-up paved the way for years of solid, reliable upgrades to MacOS, including many of the flashy features we now take for granted.

I am not suggesting Apple has fallen behind Windows or Android. Changing a setting on Windows 11 can often involve a journey through three or four different interface designs, artifacts of half-implemented changes dating back to the last century. Whenever I find myself stuck outside of Appleland, I am eager to return “home,” flaws and all.

Yet, Apple’s products gained loyal supporters like me because their products were polished and “just worked.” They are middle of the road to premium offerings; it is no compliment when they are the “least bad” instead of the “best.” They should be better than the experience on a $200 PC.

Apple is a company with enormous resources. Apple has not wisely directed some, significant portion of those resources in recent years. An ill-advised focus on the far-fetched Vision Pro occupied Apple when it should have seen AI racing into the mainstream. I lamented that nearly two years ago. Having squandered its lead going the wrong direction, Apple’s temptation could now be to ignore the infrastructure rot and simply keep trying to bolt on catchup features without fixing what’s already broken.

With the company’s size and resources, though, this needn’t be a call to fall even further behind on AI. Apple could easily have its core operating system team focused on clean up releases of its operating systems even while its AI team tried to find its footing.

AI or no-AI, spring cleaning would make the Mac, iPhone and iPad really shine. If Apple Intelligence can get caught up, so much the better: the software around it won’t get in the way.

Full Disclosure: Tim does own some Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) stock.