Dear Apple: Stop the Enshittification of macOS

Author: erics, Posted May 6th, 2025 at 11:52:15am

For decades, Apple earned the loyalty of professional users by building systems that were fast, stable, and empowering. macOS once represented the ideal blend of power and polish—a UNIX foundation dressed in a minimalist, intuitive interface. Systems like Snow Leopard were lauded not for how much they did, but for how well they did it.

That Apple is gone.

Today, macOS has become a tangled mix of locked-down behaviors, inconsistent UI metaphors, broken legacy support, and background services no one asked for. What used to be a sleek, responsive operating system is now bloated with half-baked features and hidden restrictions. And the worst part? Apple pretends this is progress.

Here’s what’s been quietly sacrificed in the name of “security” and “ecosystem synergy”:

• Stability and Trustworthiness
  With each major release, users have come to expect new bugs, broken workflows, and discontinued features. Disk Utility was gutted. Mail rules silently fail. Mission Control has been mangled. Stability—the one thing professionals need—has been pushed aside for cosmetic changes.
• User Control
  Remember when you could simply turn off system features? Now you fight SIP, TCC, notarization, and sealed system volumes just to maintain basic control. Gatekeeper treats its users like idiots. Settings are scattered, buried, or removed altogether.
• Coherent, Consistent UI
  System Settings is a joke. It looks like it was ported from an iPad in a weekend and never tested. Its layout is illogical, search barely works, and it breaks decades of user muscle memory. This isn’t design. It’s neglect.
• Professional Respect
  Apple used to build tools for professionals. Now it builds products for passive consumption. Ports? Gone. Terminal users? Ignored. Developers? Annoyed. Creatives? Herded into cloud subscriptions. It’s clear that Apple now optimizes for services revenue, not empowering creators.

And yet, the bones of something great still remain. Beneath the clutter, macOS is still UNIX. Still scriptable. Still automatable. But the trend is undeniable: Apple is slowly turning the Mac into a sealed appliance. A beautiful box that tells you what you can do, not asks you what you want to do.

We’re not asking for a return to 2009. We’re asking for a return to values that made Apple great:

• Performance and reliability over feature churn
• Clarity and control over needless abstraction
• Respect for power users, not infantilization
• Design that works, not design that sells

If Apple continues down this road, it will lose the very people who made the Mac worth buying. And when the power users leave, the rest will follow—because an ecosystem without its builders, troubleshooters, and evangelists eventually collapses under its own weight.

So here’s the feedback Apple doesn’t want to hear but needs to:

Stop the enshittification. Bring back the discipline, the coherence, and the user-first mindset that defined your golden era. Because right now, the most “pro” thing about a Mac is the marketing budget.

We’re still here. Still waiting. Still willing to believe.

Just give us a reason.

Categories: Rants, Technology Tags: apple, MacOS, rant