I am a 20+ year user of Mac computers, and have noticed a distressing trend over the last 5 years of increasing bugs in Apple's software.
This is an interesting read:
https://tidbits.com/2019/10/21/six-reasons-why-ios-13-and-catalina-are-so-buggy/
Some excerpts:
Quote
...iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 Catalina have been unusually buggy releases for Apple. The betas started out buggy at WWDC in June, which is not unexpected, but even after Apple removed some features from the final releases in September, more problems have forced the company to publish quick updates. Why? Based on my 18 years of experience working as an Apple software engineer, I have a few ideas...
...Apple is aggressive about including significant features in upcoming products. Tight schedules and ambitious feature sets mean software engineers and quality assurance (QA) engineers routinely work nights and weekends as deadlines approach......products on an annual release schedule, like iPhones and operating systems, must ship in September, whatever state they're in.
...During development, Apple triages bugs based on the phase of the development cycle and the bug severity. Before alpha, engineers can fix pretty much any bug they want to. But as development moves into alpha, and then beta, only serious bugs that block major features are fixed, and as the ship date nears, only bugs that cause data loss or crashes get fixed.
This approach is sensible. As an engineer, every time you change the code, there's a chance you'll introduce a new bug. Changes also trigger a whole new round of testing. When you're close to shipping, a known bug with understood impact is better than adding a fix that might break something new that you'd be unaware of.
Bugs that generate a lot of Apple Store visits or support calls usually get fixed. After all, it costs serious money to pay enough support reps to help lots of users. It's much cheaper to fix the bug. When I worked on Apple products, we'd get a list of the top bugs driving Apple Store visits and support calls, and we were expected to fix them.
Unfortunately, bugs that are rare or not terribly serious—those that cause mere confusion instead of data loss—are continually pushed to the back burner by the triage system....
...Apple is lousy at fixing old bugs....
...In an unprecedented move, Apple announced iOS 13.1 before iOS 13.0 shipped, a rare admission of how serious the software quality problem is. Apple has immense resources, and the company's engineers will tame this year's problem.
In the short term, you can expect more bug fix updates on a more frequent schedule than in past years. Longer-term, I'm sure that the higher-ups at Apple are fully aware of the problem and are pondering how best to address it. Besides the fact that bugs are expensive, both in support costs and engineer time, they're starting to become a public relations concern. Apple charges premium prices for premium products, and lapses in software quality stand to hurt the company's reputation...
