Makosuke

monstrosity said:

Not as many as now. Apple has become a joke under Cook.

It's possible that the number or severity of MacOS bugs has changed over the last few years, but speaking as someone who's done Mac support for an office of a couple dozen people since the System 7 era, I have not noticed any particular increase in the number or severity of OS bugs at launch.  I don't know that it's gotten any better either, but not worse, particularly when you look at the relative complexity and features of the OS today versus the OSes of old.

Examples:

MacOS 10.5.0 had a severe Finder bug that would flat-out delete files or entire directories if you tried to move them between disks or network locations and there was some sort of write or network error.  10.1.3 had exactly the same bug.  I remember people losing data to one or the other of those.

10.3.0 had a Firewire bug that would completely corrupt a connected disk that used the popular Oxford 922 chipset with firmware 1.02.  That one was particularly brutal because a lot of high-end external storage enclosures used that chipset.

All those were squarely in the Jobs era, although if you go back before Jobs I remember all too well that MacOS 8.5 had multiple disk bugs that would corrupt data, and it was two months before Apple released 8.5.1 to patch them. Having directory repair and data recovery software in your toolbox back then was virtually a requirement.

And then there's OSX 10.7, the last release of the Jobs era, which wreaked such havoc on the server platform that even after waiting for 10.8 to upgrade I still ended up needing to replace the entire SMB implementation with a 3rd party one, and the built-in implementation wasn't really usable until either 10.10 or 10.11.

None of which excuses this mail bug, particularly if it was indeed reported in the beta.  Only to note that it is surprising to me how people seem to see long-past MacOS releases through rose-colored glasses and so quickly forget all the annoyances and bugs of the past.