At work win 11 has already messed up twice. Once in an image and it black screened. As in it stopped working and no blue screen just black.

Its pretty bad. At least win 10 kept working.

That's a good point. Beta users save a lot, I mean a lot, of headaches for stable users. I am not sure if Windows even does beta and alpha versions anymore.

Microsoft stopped trying a long time ago. The benefits of having a monopoly. Windows would have to cease functioning entirely for them to lose their position.

No windows is pretty reliable with its updates. Most of the issues in windows are from HP and dell shipping bad driver updates.

Yeah I had an apple machine running filevault get locked out of its file system during an update and end up with no OS. Tried to revert back to before the update but the encryption keys werent working to unlock it. I had to install a new OS which isnt to bad on mac. Worst part was it wasnt even a major upgrade just a security patch.

As the article mentions, it's because Microsoft cut down their quality control to the point where they're just sending stuff out then reacting when people report what breaks. Sure they have their "insider" builds but that program isn't working very well to catch these issues that find their way into release builds.

Back in the day they had a massive testing lab and a big team of testers. Then they fired them all just over a decade ago. We can thank Satya Nadella I guess. He's more of a line-go-up man than a good quality products person.

They have the Windows Insider program, which is basically beta testing - and maybe sometimes alpha testing these days.

My Apple-using friends seem split on this when I ask them whether Macs are stable these days. I've heard from several people that their reputation for stability is a hangover from the past, and updates in recent years have been somewhat unreliable. But it would be hard to get good comparative data given that the companies won't be eager to share the numbers.

It's completely insane to me that businesses deal with it without suing their butts off. I can understand individual customers, they tend to be docile, but how did all this not cause massive losses to a litigious company yet?

They’ve gotten away with it for 10 years now. I’m sure they’ll continue to get away with it.

I’ve been on macOS since the Windows XP era and never in my life has the OS broken after a software update.

Come to think of it, same goes with iOS. I’ve been on iOS since the iPhone 4.

Enterprise lags behind Home and Pro. Consumers are QA for Enterprise.

War this a widespread issue? I know every computer can have one of issues, but Microsoft seems to have regular widespread issues and I was wandering about example where Apple also had widespread issues.

"Thanks to Microsoft's legendary approach to quality control, installing Windows patches these days is getting to be less like Russian Roulette and more like accidentally stepping on a rake left in the grass."

Oooof!

One lesson they took from RedHat, is it not?

They know that they know nothing. They do what they must and let be what comes. An enlightened monopolist corporation.

If that "AI" is getting feedback from fixes they make, then it makes sense. They are basically training it all the time. Except training it on their own devs seems to be pissing against the wind.

How do those fuckups keep happening?

I guess, they're still trying to reproduce the Ballmer Peak

The is a genuine question that I don’t have the answer to.

I would say that because nobody can muster the consensus on any real policy. There's plenty of legacy, with many different people and teams responsible, knowledge lost and so on.

And then this requires some sort of unified vision. Despite, eh, all the downsides, Apple can do that. MS can't.

They'd honestly have to make a separate "neowin" subsystem with new GUI and everything, and make win32 and win64 and all the old tooling optional and parallel. Because their approach to backward compatibility means keeping everything around. They can't fix the mess maintaining that.

Peobably also comes down to not many softwares deciding to fuck with systwm files.
Recently had a borked Win7 -> Win10 install that was unable to keep the Win11 upgrade stable.
After an update and reboot it stopped working.

Probable reason why: Some McAfee drive encryption driver embedded in the system files.
The drive wasnt encrypted. All files were externally readable by our backup software.
But removing the files from system32 borked the system and resulted in BSODs.

Is it this invasive on the mac side?