> We are heading rapidly towards the corollary to “it just works” being “and if it doesn’t, just wipe everything and re-install”.
Is this really all that bad? In the era of everything living in the cloud, it generally takes me only a couple hours to setup a system again from scratch. Not that I've ever had to do this on macOS personally (though I did once on iOS), but if I had, I wouldn't be terribly upset about it.
> If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t you consider that abysmal engineering?
This is a ridiculous analogy. Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service).
macOS today doesn't always just work. I run into bugs sometimes and get frustrated. But whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most basic dev tools working, or boot up Linux and have to fight to get a core function like system updates or audio working, I'm reminded how much closer macOS still is to "just working" than anything else out there.
Is this really all that bad? In the era of everything living in the cloud, it generally takes me only a couple hours to setup a system again from scratch. Not that I've ever had to do this on macOS personally (though I did once on iOS), but if I had, I wouldn't be terribly upset about it.
> If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t you consider that abysmal engineering?
This is a ridiculous analogy. Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service).
macOS today doesn't always just work. I run into bugs sometimes and get frustrated. But whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most basic dev tools working, or boot up Linux and have to fight to get a core function like system updates or audio working, I'm reminded how much closer macOS still is to "just working" than anything else out there.