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But Apple frequently can't manage the upgrade of a recent vanilla version of their own OS on their own hardware.
I'm holding off on yet another version of Mac OS right now because it bricked my friend's Macbook Pro.
I suspect that ironically installing it on my hackintosh will be smoother but by all accounts there don't seem to be many reasons to install it:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/11/macos_catalina_fail/
Fox-
Aye, that's a very accurate and hard hitting rant. The network/cloud stuff in particular.
When I bought an Android tablet, despite it being from a completely different manufacturer than my phone, as soon as the tablet knew my Google account it said "I see your phone is on the local wifi. Would you like me to update from that rather than drag everything down from the Net?". Smooth as anything.
When I bought my gf an iPad, not only did it fail to sync from the Net properly but something about the mere attempt caused her iPhone to refuse to do any more backups. She refused to touch either device until she could get to a Genius bar, for fear of lost iTunes data etc.
Again, your first thought might be "owning everything should make them better at this". But I think a competitive ecosystem based on open standards with many players in it can force good integration. In contrast, Apple's discipline has slipped and they rely too much on user patience and the Genius Bar to resolve unexpected scenarios. Which is not so good now that they've downgraded the Genius Bar.
itsbruce
The fragility of the upgrade process has always annoyed me. Boggling that they own the hardware and the OS and still fuck that up for a significant percentage of users.
So I try to upgrade the last macbook I bought to the latest version of macOS. Fails hard. I'm told I need to create a special USB boot key to get the upgrade to work. OK, I try that. Turns out it can only be done from a computer already running the latest macOS.
You fucking what? I need the disk, but only somebody who doesn't can create it? There's zero good technical reasons I can't create the disk image from an older macOS version, so it's either a stupid technical decision or a stupid process decision. Kindly line up all the stupid people so I can shoot them in the head.
Even Windows is better than that, while the various alternatives (Linux/BSDs/BeOS etc) can upgrade you from pretty much any conceivable combination of circumstances you might have arrived at in the last two decades - on a huge range of hardware. But Apple frequently can't manage the upgrade of a recent vanilla version of their own OS on their own hardware.