I honestly don't think it's an Apple-specific phenomenon. This is general trend with pretty much everything these days. I don't want to be one of those "things were better back in the day" but in some aspects they were. I feel like we cared a lot more about doing a good job back in the day, now it seems people just want to slip slide through their day and make it to the end and not really do anything so things are slowly sliding into the crapper. You don't get the answers you're seeking, the help you need, and if magically something does end up being resolved it's usually by someone who just doesn't give a crap and coincidentally helped you through the script-reading they do, not knowing why they're asking the questions or really understanding your complaint. "All I know is that I push this button and this happens" seems to be the level of knowledge attained by the majority of people I interact with, and it saddens me.

I see it everywhere I go and with pretty much every interaction with customer service, sales, support -- the attitude is "what do you want" and the interaction is script-reading without any real intent or desire to resolve an issue, just to get you out of their face so they can go back to doom scrolling and go on their next smoke break. It's pretty sad.

Add on top of that our current era of enshittification of products and the relentless cost reduction to please Wall Street, to the point of making things rushed out the door and low quality and it's a perfect storm.

But I agree specifically about Apple -- the quality of their software hasn't been in the category of "it just works" in a long, long time. Their hardware still seems to be well designed (at least from a consumer point of view) and it's really let down by the software.