[lolinder]

Alternatively, is this evidence of a changing news cycle that is spending more time on the always-present background noise of social media complaints about updates? Do we perceive the rate of failure to be higher because news these days often takes the form of "let's summarize some reddit threads" and outlets realized that warnings about errors when updating software reliably get clicks?

[asdajksah2123]

Yes, because Apple can do no wrong.

You ask any long time macOS/OSX user and they will point to Apple software quality worsening well before anything comes up in the news media.

Heck, I'm in the camp that thinks Apple OSX software quality peaked at Snow Leopard and it has been all downhill since then, and this camp is massive.

I doubt we're being influenced by the "media".

[acdha]

Nobody is saying Apple doesn’t make mistakes but you don’t have to be an especially knowledgeable follower of the online media world to know that sites live and die by social media clicks driving ad revenue, and recycling a few tweets and Reddit posts into an article is one way to provide the constant churn of attention-grabbing posts which sites like Twitter demand.

[lolinder]

People always assume that anyone defending Apple is a fanboy of some kind or other. I'm not. I personally can't stand their products and wish that I didn't have to use a Mac for work.

What I am is skeptical that subjective pulse checks of social media threads are a good way to measure software quality. They're a decent way to measure public sentiment, not actual error rates.

[hylaride]

Yeah, I haven't seen an apple "fanboy" in the classic sense of the word in over a decade. I mean, the daring fireball guy always gives apple the benefit of the doubt, but I've ran into far more people with a borderline irrational hatred of apple to the point where they can't not complain.

I was a total apple advocate between 2004-2014. Now it's become just preferable to windows (although the trackpad on laptops is miles ahead of anything in PC land I've come across). I'm getting more and more annoyed at the iphone, but the alternative is a phone run by an advertising company...

[freedomben]

Yes, I think you have nailed it. I have seen this same phenomenon happen in nearly every niche that I pay attention to. Only thing I would add is that a lot of articles are based on tweets, often from random users where the article author did nothing to verify and just included the tweet as the source

[alt227]

To be fair, the media has been doing this for at least 10 years.