I can't remember which of these it was but one of these actually "bricked" my Mac Pro on the OS upgrade, at least from the casual Apple fan perspective or the Genius bar perspective.
I took it into the Genius bar and they had nothing other than "we will wipe it and get it working."
It turned out I was able to boot to single user unix console mode and clean up the issue in an old school style. I have no idea if that is even possible anymore, but in any case I have never had another issue with OSX as severe as that one.
Modern Mac OS got really quite high quality at some point but it's easy for people to forget it had a lot of growing pains between 1999-2008 or so.
I agree. About a year into the Intel transition, around 2007, it was incredibly stable.
I was doing hardcore computation 24/7 on a MacBook, including model checking real-time systems, and I vividly remember the exact day I experienced one kernel panic.
The rest of the time, everything was rock solid. It's sad both quality and aesthetics degraded during the 2010s, where the system somewhat converged to iOS UI patterns and lost skeuomorphism.
Apple did skeuomorphism really well, which is hard. No idea why they moved to flat designs, which are easy to copy by competitors.
I took it into the Genius bar and they had nothing other than "we will wipe it and get it working."
It turned out I was able to boot to single user unix console mode and clean up the issue in an old school style. I have no idea if that is even possible anymore, but in any case I have never had another issue with OSX as severe as that one.
Modern Mac OS got really quite high quality at some point but it's easy for people to forget it had a lot of growing pains between 1999-2008 or so.