Rene Ritchie is very biased. He has to be as his livelihood depends on Apple. I take his words with many grains of salt. The only reason he's quoting Sinofsky is because it gives him a way of excusing Apple's software stumbles of late.
Also, nobody is harder on Apple than the people who know the company best. He’d lose credibility if he pretended everything was all rainbows and unicorns when they clearly are not. He clearly cites how unacceptable some of these bugs are—that’s not being biased.
Like Ritchie, I go back to the days of when the Macintosh Operating System shipped on floppies and didn’t have pre-emptive multitasking or memory protection—everything ran in the same memory space. The entire system would crash pretty regularly due to INIT (system extensions) conflicts, for example.
I can count on one hand the number of times my Mac has kernel panicked over the last few years and I regularly run beta versions of macOS.
I am not sure what your point is. If macOS has fewer kernel panics on semi-closed hardware (what laptop/PC hardware is more open these days?) than Windows or Linux on a bazillion drivers, then macOS would be preferable to me if the hardware us acceptable, even if supporting a bazillion drivers is a greater feat.
The point is that Apple provides both OS and drivers for a relatively small set of hardware. In these conditions, the fact that it has kernel panics at all is just Bad. Kernel panics should not happen in 2018, we have the knowledge and the technology to make it happen. It's bad for Windows and Linux as well, but they have the drivers excuse at least - MacOS has no such excuse.
Rene Ritchie is very biased. He has to be as his livelihood depends on Apple.
No, he quoted Sinofsky because he’s one of the few people in the world who understands what it’s like trying to operate at this scale, since he was at Microsoft during it’s heyday.
Corner cases that affect only .01 percent of the installed bases aren’t a big deal when you’re operating at a few million; it’s entirely different when it’s more than a billion devices.
The software issues haven't been corner cases lately. iOS 11 is just... bad software. High sierra has had some rather embarrassing issues too and, I'll say again, they aren't corner cases.
What difference does 1mil vs. 1bil make when they're deploying software on identical hardware? The type security and stability bugs showing in modern macOS and iOS are unacceptable at 100.000 installs. What does volume have to do with accepting empty root passwords?!
