Is the core of Apple rotting? A look at Mac OS X problems and quality

Having been a professional software engineer (C++, Java, assembly code, drivers, compression, encryption, threading, server code) for 25 years, and having used Macs since they first appeared back in the early 1980’s, I have a long and deep perspective on the evolution of Mac OS X (now just “OS X”).

What I see happening with OS X is not pretty.

When one runs into a problem, the focus is on fixing it or working around it; it is easy to forget about documenting it as this series of pages now does. Worse, users have been trained to accept excuses from tech “support” whose main job is to deny culpability and assign blame to the user (“reinstall the system in its entirety that you are responsible for messing up, somehow”).