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.

neilm said:

Both my active email accounts are IMAP, so to a large extent they can be recovered/rebuilt from their respective mailservers.

If I'm reading reports correctly, this is one of the big issues--the corrupted messages are getting synced back to the server via IMAP, so that's actually a liability not a defense.  Once the problem messages get synced, they go bad on ALL devices syncing from that IMAP server.

This makes sense if its not just a problem reading things on disk, but actual corruption--Mail looks at its local (bad) copy, looks at the server, sees that they are different and that its version is "newer" than what's on the server, so it pushes the changes to the server.

This is why I haven't upgraded yet.

neilm said:

We should also remember that all system upgrades now undergo extensive public betas, yet bugs, sometime important ones, still get through. Should we blame the beta users for also "failing" to uncover those bugs?

I'm not in the camp of overreacting or threatening to switch to Windows or something, and as usual it is not and has never been (since way back) a good idea to upgrade a critical production system to a new OS on day one, but (accurate or not) there are claims that this bug was reported during the Betas.  If so, and if it is not one of those super-rare things that only affects like 5 people (which does not seem to be the case), Apple should have held up the GM until they fixed it, since data loss bugs, particularly those that propagate to cloud sync services, are so bad.

On one hand, people screaming that the sky is falling seem to forget that there were massive, severe bugs in many MacOS releases of long ago.  I remember well the outcry over 10.7, and 10.8, and 10.10, and how most people claimed OSX wasn't even usable until 10.2, and how the entire fileserver was virtually unusable in a cross-platform production environment between 10.7 or 10.8 and around 10.10 or 10.11, and there have been severe new bugs at release of just about every version of OSX with the probable exception of 10.6.

On the other, this is very bad, and if it was reported in the Betas should not have been released in the GM version.  I've upgraded at least one of my home Macs within a day or so of release day ("Eh, I've got a backup") to every single version of OSX from the public beta through 10.14.  I'm holding off on 10.15 because I use Mail.app and I simply can't afford to have it sync bad emails to two different work IMAP servers.