That's just what people like to say without any quantifiable metrics (usually just with some random data points about this or that bug, but not quantifiably compared to previous releases).
Millions of people use it everyday for professional work, including in film and music studios, where stability and timely performance are much more paramount than for some corporate cubicle running Excel.
I've not seen anything actually actively deteriorate. The Finder is much better, Spotlight is much more robust than before, apps run fine, etc.
There have been bad moves, like the change to their custom DNS responder thing which was not ready for production. Or some glitches here and there. But I've seen such things all the way down to 10.1 were I started. There will always be bugs when you add new features (and even when you don't add anything, as technologies around your OS also change).
Plus the upcoming release is a "Snow Leopard" like bugfix affair too, which will help things.
> Millions of people use it everyday for professional work, including in film and music studios, where stability and timely performance are much more paramount than for some corporate cubicle running Excel.
I use Mac OS X for more than 10 years and I have seen no problem other than normal sporadic bugs that are always fixed in the next minor version. I don't see any reason to believe that it got worse over the years.
I've been using OS X for under a year, and I've run into two major problem that, in my opinion, are completely inexcusable.
* Trying to save files in Pages/Numbers, I get an error "Cannot save file. File does not exist." (Well of course it doesn't exist, I haven't saved it yet!) Lost several hours of work multiple times because I couldn't save files. And that is a total shit error message.
* Trying to move folders on a remote server. I get a dialog that says "Finder wants to make changes" and asks for my admin password. (What changes? WTF?) Files got deleted when moved. And also a total shit 'warning' message.
OS X is far more frustrating and useless than any other OS I've ever used. It doesn't give reasonable error messages, and it doesn't keep your stuff safe. It's a confusing minefield.
As long as everything I do is in a non-Apple application, I can get things done. And don't even get me started on OS X mouse support.
> OS X is far more frustrating and useless than any other OS I've ever used. It doesn't give reasonable error messages, and it doesn't keep your stuff safe. It's a confusing minefield.
All software sucks. The only reason you think OSX sucks more than other OSs is because you haven't had time to discover the work-arounds for annoying buggy behaviour.
The server file deletion might be, but I'm doubtful. In either case, it was OS X that was giving useless error messages. Like this, except I wasn't moving it to trash:
That's the best thing about Windows. It works even for the things that are called 'exotic' in the Mac world (which is a euphemism for 'sloppy programming')
Apple is one of the top product makers period. Products are more than just hardware or even software. If you doubt me, look at their market capitalization.
Individual products will always have their pros/cons, and the company will have strengths (design) and weaknessess (social, some cloud services).
But to say they're bad at software just isn't true.
