>Does Big Sur let you loopback audio out yet, or are third-party extensions still required? Do Soundflower & BlackHole even work on M1?

How is that relevant to a discussion about worsening software quality? OS X never had native loopback.

Agreed, this isnt a datapoint. And I have an app called Loopback by Rogue Amoeba that does this job very well. There are plenty of reasons that you could assume OSX doesnt include this natively. The biggest I can think of is if you can capture streaming audio at no quality loss then you kinda blow up some business models.

I dont hear any detailed descriptions of how the software quality has declined. What I generally see is bugs being reported which is then called evidence that apple software is bad. I think the UMN story has shown that all OS software is large, complex and bug ridden.

I personally dont love how OSX is becoming more of a walled garden, but I also think that given the fact that bad people exist to make sure we cant have anything nice its a reasonable reaction to try and make the OS more secure. The days of the OS is your playground are ending. I wish that werent true but there are crappy folks out there that want to steal your data, identity, scam you, commit computer crimes against you.

I will reiterate that I think Big Sur was probably the smoothest big release of MacOS Ive been through(since Tiger). Others may have different experiences, but I can only speak to mine.

Software quality is a moving target. iOS 2.0 was exceptional quality in 2008, if a competitor released something akin to iOS 2.0 now they'd be laughed at.

Additionally, the comment was in response to a comment about audio interfaces, so it's relevant on multiple accounts.

Counterpoint: I don’t know or care what that feature is and I’ve never encountered anyone complaining about it.

It's basically sending your system audio to an audio channel (e.g. to an app). You could e.g. route a Skype call audio to record it.

Handy when you need it, not exactly a metric for OS quality to offer one.