They need a "Snow Leopard-style" release. This was the macOS version that came after Leopard and it was explicitly a release with no new features. It just focused on performance, efficiency, and reducing overall memory usage. Famously Apple even advertised it as having "zero new features". Recent macOS releases feel like they're going in the opposite direction. Really wish their next release would be more like Snow Leopard.

This is all I want. My Macbook Air is already stupid fast. Now I want the OS to support working faster. I would love nothing more than a ton of small quality of life updates.

Windows also need this for 10 years, since Windows 10 launch. But never happened. I guess it's just not really viable, as they need to continue selling new devices...

I still don't understand how there can be like 10 different UI styles in Windows 11 with no progress to getting that fixed. It feels more likey they are adding new ones instead...

They should go back to the Windows 2000 theme, that was the best one.

They should go back to the Windows Vista theme, that was the best one. Liquid Glass proved it.

WinUI looks good for me. Improvements on efficiency are needed before it can become mainstream though.

AFAICT from the marketing, macOS 26 didn’t come with any new features.

[I get your point; I just refuse to consider to a ridiculous reskin no one asked for to be a “feature.”]

Wow I didn't realize that. Though since the re-skin caused a huge number of popular Electron apps to have big performance issues... it didn't seem that performance/optimization focused to me.

I’m being sarcastic of course - this isn’t a Snow Leopard release and it wasn’t marketed as such. There are in fact new features in v26: live translations and a revamped Spotlight. But these are treated almost as footnotes, with most of the advertising devoted to Liquid Glass: https://www.apple.com/os/macos/

Worth noting Snow Leopard also had new features, most notably the App Store. But it was marketed as a performance upgrade. v26 / Tahoe’s new features (excluding the UI reskin) are comparably small. But instead it is a massive slowdown & bloat release :(

I'm hopeful we'll actually get this, if for no other reason than the fact that probably almost everyone at Apple uses macOS all day at work.

I agree with your sentiment, but let's not rewrite history too much. Snow Leopard didn't have any new feature, but under the hood it was a massive undertaking IIRC: it introduced a 64-bit kernel and 64-bit system applications like Finder, Mail, Safari, etc. It also replaced many 32-bit system frameworks. Until Snow Leopard MacOS X was still mostly 32 bits.

When Snow Leopard came out it was very buggy, and many apps simply did not run on it. I've been a Mac user since 1993, and I think it's the only version of macOS I ever downgraded from. Don't get me wrong, it eventually became rock solid, the apps I needed were eventually upgraded, and it became a great OS.

But let's not mistake MacOS 10.6.8 for MacOS 10.6.0. And maybe let's not compare macOS 26.0 to MacOS 10.6.8 either, it's not quite fair. Ever since Snow Leopard I've been waiting at least 6 months before upgrading macOS. I don't intend to change that rule anytime soon...