The Death of macOS: Why Apple’s Once-Perfect OS Is Now a Mess

Photo by James McKinven on Unsplash

I’ve been a Mac user for the past 15+ years, and it’s been harder and harder to admit the simple truth — it’s difficult to understand where macOS is heading and whether Apple still cares about the kind of users who built its loyal following in the first place.

I started using Mac OS around the Tiger/Snow Leopard era. Things weren’t perfect, but at least it felt like an operating system that I owned, rather than one that owned me.

Back then, it was lean, stable, and clearly designed for people who wanted to understand and control their machines. Today, macOS feels less like a standalone, user-respecting operating system and more like an extension of Apple’s ecosystem control strategy — or, to put it bluntly, an iOS extension with a keyboard.

Let’s see what features were either removed or modified to the point where we could call them useless — or worse, user-hostile.

Single User Mode

Up until around macOS Mojave (10.14), you could boot into Single User Mode by holding Command + S at startup.

It dropped you into a root shell before the OS loaded — perfect for repairing disks, resetting passwords, or fixing broken system files. It was a true backdoor for those who actually knew what they were doing.