Microsoft did and does today. Personally, I've submitted 6-7 bugs to them over the years, for Windows and other products, have gotten patches delivered in weeks, and rolled into a normal update roll up on 3 occasions. With a security issue, the program manager for the product called me back personally and arranged to have engineers onsite work with our folks in mitigation.

Having a support contract helps a lot. Apple doesn't really even offer that.

With one fairly epic failure from them, my employer was big enough to get a sad Apple guy to fly up and express his heartfelt sorrow. Very touching. His SE helpfully suggested that we restore our phones (15,000 of them). That was about the extent of it.

It's just their way, each vendor is uniquely obnoxious. But the unpredictability limits what you can do with their products.

HFS+ in general makes my butt pucker. It's the only one that occasionally eats itself under regular use. Usually so badly that a restore from backup is the only solution.

It's not like Apple doesn't have the cash either. They could take some of the money that is trapped overseas for tax reasons and open up a field office somewhere (Ireland? China?) who's only job is to run through Radar from top to bottom and close out/fix every issue.

You're in luck, there's the new APFS in store for macOS 10.13 :)

My guess is they switch the numbering system over and call it macOS 11. There's no sign of Apple breaking from the lockstep yearly releases with iOS feature integrations, and next year is their one shot to make the version numbers line up.

Even though AppleTV nigh unto runs iOS, and you could even sort of ask the system what version of iOS-ish it is running, the version numbers for tvOS were always annoyingly not the same as iOS ones (I think always earlier by a major revision).

Let's just say that I have no intention of trusting a new Apple filesystem with important data anytime soon.

I don't think APFS does user data checksumming. It only checksums filesystem metadata, but not user data.

What do you mean by 'eats itself'? I haven't had any big issue with HFS+ since 10.3, before that only on 10.2 and OS 9.1 once.

MacOS refuses to recognise that there is even a filesystem on the drive, and if you have to do recovery it involves just scanning the remnants filesystem looking for magic numbers without any metadata (like filenames!). I've seen it happen on three different laptops now (not all mine unfortunately, mine are at least backed up!).

The recovery tools are kind of touchy too, they only work on certain versions of MacOS and are kind of difficult to track down. The only saving grace is that Time Machine is so easy to use that people sometimes actually turn it on.