Except none of Apple stuff is Electron based, and as far as I am aware of Apple salaries are competitive with top companies - so none of your arguments really hold up.
Apple software is still top tier when you start comparing to Slack, Teams, and all the non-native friends. Apple Music does not take close to 1GB of RAM. There are very few native applications these days because of the cost. And lower cost availability is based on the web stack and lower entry level of skills.
MacOS may have bugs but in general they are well engineered. Starting from secure enclave that none of the competitors have, or just raw performance and battery life that is not just hardware. I haven’t seen a single bug in my Watch for over a year. I guess it depends what you use.
The most bugs that we see these days are originating from the choices behind the tech stacks. Python and pure JavaScript are still too popular. Every post here with Rust name on it gets attention because of its promise of some level stability reduced resource footprint.
Dev at Apple seems immensely political and corporate. From the outside it looks very much as there are points for shipping $new_thing, even if no one out there wants $new_thing.
The whole marketing cycle is based on a endless stream of $new_things that give Tim Cook something to talk about during those slick presentations - presumably so he doesn't spend all his time making prayer gestures and talking slowly.
There doesn't seem to be anyone in charge of overall user experience who can say "Why does Facetime get so confused by different numbers and devices owned by one person? Why does the shared clipboard only work some of the time? Did the Settings app really need a new UI? Why hasn't Finder been updated since forever?"
> Why does the shared clipboard only work some of the time? Did the Settings app really need a new UI? Why hasn't Finder been updated since forever?"
These are like smallest of the small annoyances.
Compare Facetime and Zoom, for example. Issues are on completely new universum.
Zoom has new RCE about almost every month. They just don’t give CVEs for them because they can be mitigated on server update.
Web-based apps definitely lose when you compare RAM use, and probably also when you look at the average app installation size. Spotify.app filling half a CD is absolutely bonkers. But these are also the easiest two metrics to measure, and that makes it tempting to look at a huge trend in software quality and reduce it to "Chromium eats RAM".
It is much harder to quantify how many bugs or delays one encounters in a single day of macOS/iOS compared to earlier versions, or in native apps vs web apps, and so it never happens.
