> Apple does have some bugs to iron out, but in six month's time when they're fixed, everyone will forget and start complaining about something else.
That's the whole point: we'll start complaining about something else because in 6 months when the bugs are theoretically fixed we'll have another OS X release waiting for us right around corner (approx 4 months away) which will put us right back at square one!
Tiger's lifespan was from November 2005 through October 2007. So, if we accept the premise that all the OSes were equally buggy and it also took Tiger 6 months to get the bugs worked out, then you still had another 18 months of a stable OS.
This reasonably allows customers to decide whether to be early adopters or waiters: its perfectly fine to hold off those 6 initial months since you then still get 3/4 of the products lifespan with some assurance that its stable. That's just not the case anymore, if you wait those 6 months then now you've got another release right around the corner, you're perpetually in upgrade mode. Not to mention that most the bugs will probably ship in the major release anyways since (non-security) bug fix release have more or less merged with the new features that introduce new bugs release.
My MacBook Air is running 10.8 Mountain Lion. I regularly receive security updates (including the pushed NTP fix), as well as application updates like Safari and iTunes, and 3rd party updates for apps like Chrome, Firefox, MS Office for Mac, Evernote, DropBox, Coda, etc.
I don't know what the "official" lifespan of 10.8 is, but it has every appearance of being fully supported by Apple today. And yes, it is very stable.
I loved Mountain Lion and also found it to be very stable. I stayed on it as long as I could, but the new versions of several of the apps I use required Mavericks, and after holding out for a while I upgraded. Mavericks was when I started noticing issues... Graphics driver issues, trackpad gestures randomly not working for periods of time, WindowServer crashing when opening the notification center (wat?), so on and so forth. Mac OS is still my favorite, but I've gotten an irking feeling that in the interest of capturing the mainstream market and making things look pretty and full of features, Apple has skimped on stability and quality. Just my two cents
One big question which I have not seen addressed is major release support. Has that changed with the quick release cycle? I think it used to be current and two previous major versions --which in a 2yr release cycle means six years of patches/bug fixes. But with the current release cycle could mean shorter support, unless they support current plus three or four previous releases.
That's the whole point: we'll start complaining about something else because in 6 months when the bugs are theoretically fixed we'll have another OS X release waiting for us right around corner (approx 4 months away) which will put us right back at square one!
Tiger's lifespan was from November 2005 through October 2007. So, if we accept the premise that all the OSes were equally buggy and it also took Tiger 6 months to get the bugs worked out, then you still had another 18 months of a stable OS.
This reasonably allows customers to decide whether to be early adopters or waiters: its perfectly fine to hold off those 6 initial months since you then still get 3/4 of the products lifespan with some assurance that its stable. That's just not the case anymore, if you wait those 6 months then now you've got another release right around the corner, you're perpetually in upgrade mode. Not to mention that most the bugs will probably ship in the major release anyways since (non-security) bug fix release have more or less merged with the new features that introduce new bugs release.