Recently, Michael Tsai has compiled quite the list of issues he’s having with Ventura. While reading it, and while reading all the comments where other people chime in with additional problems, I wasn’t really surprised by the amount of issues taken as a whole — I and others have sadly observed the downward trajectory Mac OS has been following since Catalina (I’m being generous here: another popular opinion is that Mac OS has been getting worse since Mac OS X 10.7 Lion); thus, I kind of expected this bugfest from Ventura.

I’m more surprised by the nature of many of these issues, by how ridiculous they are compared with the sheer age and supposed maturity of a 20+ year-old operating system. I mean, take for example the Finder issues:

• Revealing files in Finder (either from the title bar menu or a command in another app) sometimes doesn’t work, revealing an ancestor folder instead of the actual file, or sometimes doing nothing at all.
• Finder sometimes loses all of its sidebar items.
• Finder sometimes forgets which sidebar sections are expanded.
• Sometimes mounted drives disappear from the Computer view, even though they are still mounted and in use.
• Finder windows sometimes don’t get focus when I click on them, even though Finder does become the frontmost app.

This stuff shouldn’t be happening in an operating system that’s been around since 2000. These issues — well, all the issues Tsai reported — are regressions. One of my production Macs is still running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra, and I didn’t experience any of the issues Tsai mentions that I could try and reproduce on my Mac.

The most common reaction I get when I say I’m still on High Sierra is something along the lines of, Are you crazy? What about security? High Sierra hasn’t received a security update since Big Sur came out in 2020. But see, I’d rather deal with the aftermath of a security vulnerability than having to deal with this long list of Ventura bugs and annoyances. Why? Because the likelihood of suffering a catastrophic security event on my Macs running High Sierra is realistically very low. The issues Tsai mentions are way more frequent and would be a constant interruption or disruption of any of my workflows.

To those who maybe are wondering whether Tsai’s issues with Ventura could be specific to his system, keep in mind that, given Apple’s notorious aversion to expandability, Macs are increasingly becoming closed machines hardware-wise. There was a time when one of the first things to investigate while troubleshooting Mac issues was the specific configuration of a machine. Maybe this issue in Mac OS X was happening because there was something wrong with the RAM upgrade installed by the user; or maybe there was an odd conflict with that PCI card added to that Mac Pro; or maybe one of the drives was failing, etc. But in this era of everything-soldered-in and systems-on-a-chip, Macs are getting less diverse inside, troubleshooting is getting less nuanced and, in a sense, much simpler. We’re still at a stage where certain Mac OS issues could happen on an Intel Mac but not on an Apple Silicon Mac, or vice-versa, but soon most of the issues will be general and not really specific to this or that Mac.

By the way, ever since Ventura was in beta, many readers of this blog have reached out and asked why I wasn’t writing about it. I probably mentioned this a few times on social media, but the simple answer is that, apart from my 2017 iMac, none of my current main machines is supported by Ventura. And that iMac is my High Sierra machine, which I’m not going to update to run experiments or to study Ventura’s UI. What I’ve seen on other people’s Macs or borrowed Macs has been enough to make me say, No thanks.

What a strange period of time this is. I’m still drawn to Apple’s products; I have no problem recognising the performance advancements of Apple Silicon Macs, and I still plan to eventually get one. With the sore exception of the notch in the MacBook Pros and M2 MacBook Air, I think this is a great time for Mac hardware. But as I’ve been saying ad nauseam by now, Mac OS and Apple’s first-party applications are a constant letdown. And as I wrote in My next Mac may be the last, “With this (and more) in mind, you can see how difficult and painful upgrading to a new Mac becomes for me. On the one hand, the hardware is great and so is the performance. On the other, getting a new Mac today means it comes with Ventura or Monterey preinstalled, which is unfortunate, and of course there is no downgrade path.”

I’ve also grown tired of something Apple apologists have been constantly repeating like a mantra: that whatever issue the current version of Mac OS may have, things will get better in future updates. That’s bullshit. The truth is that for the past few years, every Mac OS release has felt like a beta release on a loop. Just when the most annoying bugs seem to get fixed in the later stages of one Mac OS release, the beta versions of the next one start coming out. Then the next Mac OS release is officially introduced, and with it newer and quirkier bugs appear. And the cycle repeats. For the past few years, Mac OS has never felt really stable or finished.

I’m dreading the moment when some of the tools I’m still using under High Sierra or Mojave will stop working (Dropbox likely being among the first) and I’ll be forced to use more recent versions of Mac OS for my work. Speaking more generally, I just hate where Mac OS is going. Every release since Catalina seems to make a half step forward and three steps back, where even simple Finder operations become glitchy, good UI and usability practices are forgotten or randomly disrupted, and all this because now Mac OS apparently has to work and behave more and more like its dumber sibling iOS/iPadOS.

→ Mac OS Ventura issues was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 30 December 2022.