A poisoned Apple and no prince in sight

I still remember very well the day in November 2008 when I opened the package with my just delivered first MacBook Pro full of anticipation. Today you would make an "unboxing event" out of it, back then it was simply called "unpacking". For me, that meant not only enjoying new hardware, but also making the move from Windows to Apple, and it felt good.

Even my then five-year-old daughter could hardly contain her excitement when I opened the silver device for the first time, the distinctive Apple startup tone sounded and the operating system started for the first time. And while my daughter was thus making her first computer experiences on devices with the bitten apple, I already had more than two decades of MS-DOS and Windows behind me.

For many years following the switch I felt like Alice in Wonderland: Gone were the blue screens, the often complicated operation of certain software, the dealing with the Windows Registry, grueling installation processes and even more horrible uninstall sessions, you name it. I had arrived in "intuition land" where everything appeared to be smoothly integrated, providing clever functions as well as easy and straightforward install and spotless uninstall, to just name a few benefits. I never thought I would regret this change, or at least question it one day.

Well, that day has now arrived as over the past few years things have deteriorated dramatically. Apple seems to be poisoned leaving me feeling like Snow White with no prince to the rescue in sight. Even the strategy of delaying macOS updates from one major version to the next for a couple of months in order to circumvent the teething problems no longer seems to work.

On an Apple MacBook Pro 13" 2020 that I bought in October 2020 and that shipped with Catalina macOS 10.15.4 I am now experiencing occasional kernel panics (the Apple equivalent to Windows blue screens). This started after I had installed the macOS 10.15.7 upgrade. I had similar issues on my iMac from 2017 with a previous Catalina version for which Apple Support made me run several hardware tests, then erase my hard disk, reinstall the system from scratch and migrate all my previous data and settings from backup - not really a fun kind of activity. Eventually, the problem was only fixed by the macOS 10.15.6 upgrade - and then re-introduced by the next version after that (see above).

While I can somehow tolerate this happening on a hardware that is four years old and that has been running with a system that has been upgraded a lot over the years, I have no understanding for these kind of kernel panics happening on a relatively new machine. A quick Google search reveals that I am not alone with this problem, however, Apple appears to be incapable of fixing it. Now when I turn to the Apple Support for help, I am proposed to make the move to Big Sur macOS 11.0 - thank you very much.

Unfortunately, this kernel panic issue is not the only problem. Nowadays, early adopters of any new Apple software (macOS, iOS) have to suffer through sometimes fatal problems, far more severe than the acceptable careless mistake. Quality control - apparently missing! And even worse, more than once I notice that things are made worse or obvious errors are not corrected for years. To just name one example: I often encounter calendar sync problems between devices, i.e. certain entries are correctly showing on my iPhone, but are missing on my MacBook Pro. One would think (hope) that Apple has this kind of iCloud based operation under control by now.