I think you've touched on something key: people's acceptance of bugs is often outweighed by the new features they get. In other words, if the "new functionality" is perceived to outweigh the costs of the lack of reliability, the product will be deemed "less buggy" because people "understand" why there are issues.

This made total sense in some of Apple's biggest products: OS X and iPhone. When OS X first came out it couldn't even burn CDS, but we all "understood" the magnitude of the project and thus gave it some slack. Similarly, the iPhone lacked a lot and was slow, but it was such a revolution that we let it slide -- in fact we let the rest of the products slide.

The problem today I think is that these decisions are being made for reasons that users don't deem "worthy". Introducing some new music services is not a good enough reason to break my iTunes. The fact that a new watch was released is not considered important enough to let other platforms languish. We "get" why less attention is being paid to other products, but unlike with the phone, its not deemed a good trade off.

In other words, I don't think Jobs was distracting us with promises, but with actual shiny things that made the bugginess worthwhile.

>> Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio...

Classic Mac OS was buggy by design - it didn't have multitasking and memory protection, it was single user... Windows had that same problem before 2000 (well, NT 4, but not many people used that).

I use OS X daily and I use Windows 7 daily. I have far fewer issues with OS X for whatever reason that may be. My computers don't magically reboot or bluescreen nearly as much. It might happen every 6 months at the most, where with Windows it probably happens every 2 months.

> Microsoft finally got a handle on security & software quality just as the world ceased to care about them.

Not quite. They got a handle on security when Linux list a fire under their ass.

Competition, true honest to market competition, spurs improvement.

The thing about Apple is that they may have competition on hardware, but they have no competition on Software.

If you buy a Mac or a iPhone, you have already thrown money at Apple. But you can easily assemble a PC without Windows and then install Linux on it.

Keep in mind that the latest US warship is not running Windows, but RHEL. That is a very big wake up call for Microsoft, where before we have seen the likes of Win2k (US ship) and XP (UK submarine) used around the world.

OS X and iOS are both way more stable than any pre-OS X Apple OS. I can't believe people forget it.

When people talk about OS X having issues, they often mean some new feature is a little flaky. Classic Mac OS lacked basic stability and security features like preemptive multitasking and memory protection. Classic Mac OS was just like the pre-NT Windows: crash prone.

I agree with this sentiment. We can complain all day, but the fact that we have these devices and software that have been made accessible to us by Apple is astounding from a historical perspective. My parents are in awe of the calendar app, and apple maps, etc. As they should be!

OSX also is still the best development platform despite it's flaws.

Perception problem is the right description. Let us take a devil's advocate view and try to fit the facts into a narrative that inverts the public wisdom.

Microsoft is making over 4 times what it made in its glory days, growing year by year, across a wide range of products and services. Windows and office account for only half of that, making them a diversified company with plenty of potential for revenue growth. Windows 10 is by far the most successful windows release ever, with more active installs than os x (any version). Basically the only place microsoft is truly failing is phone.

Apple by contrast gets two thirds of their revenue from the iphone. They have nothing else that even comes close, and nothing that could replace it if iphone sales start dropping. Mac sales are down, ipad sales are down, and the apple watch is a dud. Since 1990 apple has basically had two hits: ipod and iphone. I did not mention ipad because it is just another iphone model, which you can tell by its sales slumping as iphone screen sizes moved up. Success for Apple is rare, and most of what they do isn't all that amazing. The apple tv isn't going anywhere, even after the refresh. The apple watch distinguishes itself from other smartwatches only by its price. Basically the only place that apple is truly succeeding is phone.

Perception is everything. How you choose to look at the facts determines which facts you see. Apple is perceived as strong and microsoft as weak, but the facts give you the option of going either way.

Regardless, apple has few excuses for any quality issues. They have the resources, and they have had enough time (given that aside from the watch everything else is half a decade old or more). Personally my mac and ipad anno 2015 have the same amount of glitches as my mac and ipod anno 2005. For me, Apple doesn't seem to be getting worse, but they don't seem to be getting any better either.

> We just didn't care because Steve Jobs was really good at distracting us with promises about how great things were going to be, really soon now.

I tend to characterize the "reality distortion field" as a magician-like talent to focus an audiences attention on a particular subject.

We cared when we tried using System 7 Macs to control industrial machines, as I did.

If you treated 16- and 32-bit Windows nice -- typically running one program over long time periods -- they were quite stable on the plant floor.

We have two different theories here. We're smart people, right? We should be able to figure out if we just percieve software quality to be worse or if it really is.

So how do we measure this in some valid manner?

> I remember getting plenty of sad Macs under System 6 and 7

When System 7,8 crashed, it crashed hard. Complete system lockup. And it crashed rather often. No recoverable... progressive crash like Windows.

When you say the world doesn't care you might be nearly right from a consumer perspective but that's not really their target market. Outside of cool IT and design companies almost everyone's business machine is running Windows, a lot of servers are running windows too and sql server and visual studio are at an all time prominence for business software development.