I have to reluctantly conclude: macOS Monterey is a horrible product, quality-wi...

I have been a macOS user since the first appearance of MacOS X. After the initial start, macOS became a platform that I loved not just for the experience, but for its stability and performance. I would easily have a laptop running for many months without single reboot and without problems. I am reasonably technical (having been part of a team that won an Apple Design Award once) and I know my way around the lower levels of the OS. There too I could do the things I should be able to do and 'it just worked'.

The last years, my experience has been completely otherwise and I've reached the end of the line. A few months back I decided to move my older macOS versions (one Mojave and a few macOS Catalinas) to macOS Monterey and, boy, do I wish I had never done that (in case of Mojave, I really wanted to because there were no longer security fixes).

A list of issues I encountered in various versions of Monterey:

• A 4K LG monitor that isn't recognized as 4K but as 5K. Notable: that same monitor is recognised fine on the only M1 Mac over here. Note also: I have 5 different Macs in this household, this clearly is not a hardware problem if all the Monterey x86 Macs do not recognise the monitor correctly, but the same hardware before the upgrade did, the only x86 Mac still running Big Sur does, and the M1 Mac running Monterey does.
• A monitor that directly after the 'upgrade' on a Mini was only showing black until after an SMC reset, a problem that returned a few times
• If Display user preferences are set, it might crash WindowServer making it impossible for that user to log in (log in, Window Server starts up, crashes, back to login screen). I had to go in via another user, clean out the affected user's prerefences, after which logging in was possible again (though all preferences were lost)
• Booting a system with a USB SSD attached (SanDisk) via USB ends up in a situation that the whole disk isn't seen (missing from System Info) until you physically disconnect/reconnect the drive. Two Thunderbolt drives connect fine and so does a USB RAID
• Attached wired keyboards/trackpad (all Apple) unable to wake a system from deep sleep, you need to physically disconnect/reconnect them to get them recognised
• A monitor as second monitor on an iMac. When the monitor is turned off, the main screen works but input (trackpad, keyboard) gets stuck for a half-second or so all the time.
• If you use software that allows connections from the outside and you use the Application Firewall (ALF) to protect your system, at some point using ALF meant that a certain service would stop working after a few hours because the kernel had stopped passing connections on to the software. Stopping and starting the software made it work again for a few hours. This software ran fine under Mojave and several earlier versions. It seemed that the kernel ran out of resources and that stopping and starting the software freed them. I had to stop using the firewall as a result.
• Services that are started by hand work fine, but when started via launchd are unable to reach.
• And the latest: under 12.5.1 the system suddenly freezes for all connection requests (e.g. you cannot ssh in to the system, or use ARD, etc. Nothing that requires TCP/IP it seems. Ping works, but no TCP/IP port can be reached. Most of the time, this will resolve itself after a while as if the kernel gets 'stuck' and at some point gets 'unstuck', but sometimes it doesn't and you have to hope you are logged out and can click the restart button or you have to do hard reboot. The last time an unstuck happened after an hour or so.

And this list isn't even complete. macOS Monterey 12.5.1 in my experience is as buggy and fragile as anything I have ever had to work with in decades, and that includes older Microsoft Windows. This is now especially the case with anything having to do with sockets, ports, traffic, etc., i.e. kernel level stuff.

I have my suspicions about what may be in play here:

• Apple not spending as much energy on x86 as it does on M1 (which pisses me off as I spent thousands on all these machines)
• Apple working hard on adding security (e.g. the kernel being able to merge a read-only and writable volume into one file system, very neat, and a lot that is now connected to software being signed) but not doing a very good job at writing correct code that can handle all the different situations ('happy flow code')
• The 'unstuck' behaviour of 12.5.1 really feels like Apple has put in some stopgap measure to make sure that if the system gets stuck there is some sort of low level 'reset'. Or, Apple knows this is unreliable, but has implemented some sort of garbage collection that once in a while cleans stuff up so it starts working again

Apple has always been that weird combination of 'insane level of attention to detail' in one place and 'insane level of neglect' elsewhere. But I have to conclude that now that Monterey is at version 12.5.1 it still is buggy, fragile, unreliable. It is a P.o.J. and I am very sorry that after more than 20 years of Apple use I have to give up on ever having something as robust as it was years ago. And the history of recent versions have been that they have become worse and worse in terms of reliability over the years.

I have started to investigate moving parts of my (until now 100% Apple) landscape to another OS because the level of reliability has become so low that I have lost my confidence that it will be reliable any time soon.