Apple Releases macOS Sonoma 14.1

i might be crazy but im more excited by the premise of bugs fixes in this .1 version than i have been for the new iteration release with all of its features lol

It's simply not true that software quality has been on another level in the earlier SJ days. I could list some many glitches and annoying software bugs from the old Panther, Tiger, Leopard days that were exactly the same quality that we can experience today.
Sure, it always felt less buggy compared to the complexity that all the features in macOS, iOS etc cause today, but after all we've had enough bugs to deal with as well.

I've been using Macs for almost 20 years (i.e. also since Panther; I did use Jaguar for a few days, as it came preinstalled on my first Mac, but it came with pack-in Panther upgrade DVDs which I made use of shortly after), and… I actually disagree.

Yes, I remember suffering from my fair share of bugs, graphical glitches, etc., but they were somehow… more benign. Even the great debacle that was the loss of functionality in iWork or in Final Cut Pro, when Apple rebooted their respective codebases, felt less gratuitous or disrespectful, because there was some sort of a program behind it and it WAS properly communicated to the end-users, even at a time when Apple's PR was a bit of a paranoid mess.

These regressions and silent feature deletions, half-assed implementations (like the CloudStorage framework and the world of hurt it wrought upon us, in my case as recently as… you've guessed it, the 14.0 update, which borked Time Machine in the process because of some really stupid decisions made by Apple engineering) and whatnot do feel a bit more sloppy and egregious than before. Back then Beta builds felt like Beta builds and RCs and GMs felt like RCs and GMs, whereas now everything feels like Beta builds, one after the other, with many old bugs left unfixed and new ones, including regressions, unannounced feature deletions, etc., rearing their ugly head.

For sure, I remember some infamous bugs like the one that caused data loss on external media connected during OS updates (was it some Leopard point update in the later G5 days? Maybe…). Yes, Apple did have some really dark moments in the past, but their current crop of software, especially on the Mac, gives off that “death by a thousand cuts” vibe so familiar in Microsoft products of yore (and current ones, as I've been sadly also realizing, and likely for similar reasons). I remember vividly what using PCs was like, and the kinds of issues I've been getting on the Mac remind me a lot of those. Especially the cryptic, non-human-readable/fixable nature of some of the structures put in place by Apple on top of NeXTSTEP/early OS X's simple elegance.

Apple engineering moving away from the com/org.[app developer].[app name].plist naming scheme and simple Application Support/[app developer]/[app name] hierarchy to whatever the hell they decided to come up with on their Containers and Group Containers folders is ridiculous (yes, I get it, it has to do with sandboxing, but… did they *really* need to add a numerical identifier for developers? Why didn't they use a similar naming convention to that of .plists and add such identifiers after their names, so as to not screw up alphabetic sorting, then? ?‍♂️), and the insanity that is TCC reeks of both Vista's UAC at its worst and, to add insult to injury, the Windows Registry itself. Trying to troubleshoot and fix TCC permission-related problems feels like complete voodoo, with some of those probably calling for an outright erase-and-install (seriously, at some point it may just be easier, and kind of makes me miss editing hex values by hand). Don't believe me? The fact that this page ('https://eclecticlight.co/downloads/') even has to exist (or, better yet, that a regular user might have to resort to it) in the first place is a bit worrying if you ask me.

TL;DR: it's not just the bugs, it's the inelegant way the OS is structured, and that unsettling vibe of technological debt slowly but steadily accruing. Yes, I know Apple has been “replacing parts of the engine while in flight” for a few years, but they've also been tacking a lot of cruft on the side (will you look at all those daemons in Activity Monitor, trashing your SSD and whatnot), and even when it's patently useful or even essential, it isn't nearly as elegant or well thought-out as early OS X components and structures were. It's hard to put a finger on it, but modern macOS, at least behind the curtain, kind of feels like a weird blend between the worst of Windows, Classic Mac OS and even OS X (namely its lack of transparency whenever something goes wrong, which has indeed been a longstanding problem), with but a veneer of user-friendliness on top.

Crappy update. They didn't fix their stupid Recently Added regression introduced in Music.app v. 1.4.0.118 ('https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/music-apps-recently-added-view-completely-borked-by-apple-in-sonoma.2406996/'). Together with it, this new update, v. 1.4.1.29, will forever live in infamy. They all will, until Apple engineers get their collective asses together and fix this mess.

Also, text rendering in Safari is STILL messed up beyond all recognition… Check out this post I just wrote a few minutes ago:

FFS APPLE!! Text rendering! Of ALL things, they can't get something as basic as this right?

Super excited about the new warranty status section!

The release is build 23B74, so one later than the RC.

doesn't fix the menu bar being stuck in light colour when in dark mode

I'm pretty sure the color of the menu bar is determined by the color of the wallpaper underneath it. It's not affected by dark mode or light mode.