According to Computerworld and several other sources, a bug in Mac OS X Snow Leopard has the potential to delete all personal data from a Macintosh. CNET says that Apple has acknowledged the problem and is working on a fix. CNET also reports that “Snow Leopard has been plagued with bugs since its release, including problems with the Finder hanging or crashing, incompatibility with certain apps, and the AirPort connection dropping.”
I mention this because it’s important to note that every operating system update has issues after it’s first released. There were issues with Leopard when it was released, such as the “blue screen of death” problem. Similarly, there were problems with Vista when it first came out, and issues with Windows XP. There have been issues with Linux releases as well. Undoubtedly, Windows 7 will have its problems, too.
Apple’s software isn’t immune to bugs, including serious bugs like this one that can cause significant data loss. Having said that, it’s only fair to note that this bug isn’t widespread (in terms of the number of users affected) and that it does require the use of the Guest account, which I suspect not too many Mac owners utilize. What’s surprising, though, is that such a significant bug would have slipped past internal testing and code reviews at Apple.
Microsoft learned that offering Windows 7 for public beta testing was beneficial. I saw first-hand that issues which might have impacted my opinion of the software on initial release were corrected during the various beta versions Microsoft released. On my main HP notebook, for example, the earlier releases of Windows 7 caused a blue-screen at shutdown. (My desktop and netbook systems had no such issue.) I submitted those crash reports to Microsoft and a later beta release resolved the issue. Similarly, applications that didn’t work with earlier betas started working in the later ones. It was very clear to me that Microsoft was in fact receiving and acting on the feedback from users like me who had issues with Windows 7 during beta testing. Because so many thousands (if not millions) of people tested Windows 7 in real-world conditions during the betas, I believe Windows 7 will be a smoother transition than it might otherwise have been. (For instance, had I not been allowed to participate in the beta, the blue-screen issue with my HP notebook might not have been found until after Windows 7 hit the marketplace and LOTS of people had the problem.) Will it be a perfect, trouble-free transition? I doubt it, but I do believe it will be smoother than it might have been had Windows 7 been kept relatively secret and available only to developers who paid for a TechNet subscription.
I’d like to see Apple learn that same lesson. Would a public beta program have eliminated the problems being seen by Snow Leopard users? Would it have caught and fixed the “blue screen of death” issue in Leopard? There’s no way to really know. Maybe these are, as Apple implied in its public responses on various web sites, isolated issues that affect only a very small number of people. But if even a couple of these people had been given the chance to test a beta version of Leopard or Snow Leopard, it’s possible the problem could have been found and fixed when it affected only a single beta tester (who presumably would have expected potential problems) rather than hitting many users who actually paid for the software.
To be fair, Apple does beta test OS X releases. However, beta testing is generally limited to software and peripheral developers who have a paid development kit subscription and non-disclosure agreement with Apple. While it is quite reasonable and logical to expect third-party developers to report bugs in OS X that affect their products or which affect basic OS X usage, it’s not reasonable to suggest that these same people will catch the bugs a typical end user will see. End users will hit parts of OS X that developers have no need to touch. They’ll load OS X on systems that contain components and peripherals that developers (and even Apple’s own testers) may not have access to. Thus, it seems only logical for Apple to have some kind of public beta testing to catch the sort of things developers and Apple itself might miss. Unfortunately, such a program would potentially “spill the beans” about upcoming OS X features since beta testers would undoubtedly share information with others. While Apple might argue that this could hurt their sales by leaking feature data to the public ahead of release dates, public beta testing doesn’t seem to have affected the sales of Windows 7 so far. About the only way I can see it hurting Apple is if they pull a feature out of OS X between the beta and the final release, but even that could be “spun” as a way of protecting Apple customers from features that showed significant problems during testing. They’ve had to do that before.