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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.



So we now measure the reliability of a consumer-grade system on closed hardware by how few times it experiences a kernel panic?

That’s a very low bar. At least Windows has the excuse of having to work with a bazillion drivers.


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.




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