I wouldn't call dealing with this sort of thing on every other update rare.

I wouldn't call dealing with this sort of thing on every other update anything but rare. And I've been using Macs since 2003 (along with Linux, Windows, etc).

It's the effect of:

(1) millions of Macs updating at the same time (fastest OS updates in the industry) vs a smaller number of Linux users scattered upon every distro and updating at random piecemeal intervals (and Windows users fragmented into 2000000 possible configurations and OEMS, with different pain points and issues, that nobody cares for, and is not newsworthy, plus the blame can be dilluted between MS and the PC vendor.).

(2) Apple doing bolder changes with releases than Windows or Linux does (adopting new things faster, custom processors and co-processors and SOCs, whole new languages, new filesystems, etc), so risking more problems.

(3) Apple news sell (few would care for "Asus botched the production run of one of its 200 models"), so they magnify the issues that 1000 or 10,000 people see as if they concern 100,000,000+ users (or half a billion in the case of iOS).

(4) Hackers and tinkerers being angry that they're not pandered by Apple, as if they ever were the target group for Macs, and as if curation and the concept of the walled garden is not central to macOS/iOS (in the positive light: not "I can't get off the garden" but "it's a peaceful garden where I can focus on X things, creeps, crazy people, junkies, etc don't get to screw around -- and yes, this means that to achieve that I can't do any arbitrary thing I might want either").

I'm seeing more and more this sentiment about "not being the target group", and using it to justify crappy business decisions.

Around the PPC change, Apple took the grand strategy of backing away from this idea of controlling what their users were able to do with their machines. Now they're moving back to their "we say what our machines are for and if your use case doesn't match then screw you" attitude.

Many of Apple's business decisions of late have been nothing but hostile to the idea of allowing users to do what they want with their devices. As a very long time Mac OS user, this whole idea of a "walled garden" was never central to the Mac, and while Apple have always been a sufferer of NIH syndrome, it seemed in the mid-2000s that they had finally got over this and started playing nice with the rest of the industry. So much for that.

They don’t happen on every other update, or even every tenth update. You’re hearing from a small self-selected population of users who had undiagnosed hardware issues, dodgy power, hacked up system config, etc. and generalizing it to the vast majority of users who clicked install and resumed working 20 minutes later.

I've been using Macs for 29 years, only one update has gone bad (El Capitan after updating, the boot would never complete. I restored from Time Machine, and did a clean install, then it worked fine). Hardly "every other update". Meanwhile I've hosed so many Linux installs by somehow getting mismatched package versions

At least with Linux you can actually fix it

If you know how, have time, don't have an opportunity cost/better things....

There's also a pretty big opportunity/time/effort cost to contacting Apple support, describing your problem, fighting with them over whether the defect is covered under warranty, actually packaging the thing and shipping it to them, waiting for the fix/replacement, hoping the replacement isn't similarly screwed up, and setting up all your programs and files again when they 'fix' the problem by wiping your machine or giving you a new one.

That's correct, but as a parent said, this kind of issue is very rare. I can't actually remember another mac os upgrade actually bricking machines. I may be wrong, though.

What's way more common is random hardware failures, unrelated to the OS. I've never had to deal with apple support and hope I'll never have to, but HP enterprise support isn't frictionless either. A colleague of mine had a swollen battery, which wasn't user replaceable (guess not only Apple has bright ideas). He called up the support, which went relatively fine but in the end he had to send the computer in for repairs for two weeks and was advised to save his data as the machine would be wiped. Luckily removing the SSD was possible and didn't void the warranty...

In my experience, "Not user replaceable" on enterprise laptops means a few normal screws release the back cover to get access to the battery.

The next business day, on-site support presumably costs extra. (We have it for servers, but I don't deal with laptops until they're out of warranty.)

I'm sad to say my experiences with Apple support for my work laptops have been palpably worse than my dealings with my state's DMV (to use the stereotype of 'bad customer service'). I am currently stuck waiting for a screen replacement for a 6 month old 16" MBP (something that was promised in 3 days but I found today, after 4 calls and as many answers, that it might be ready this week); I'm using a 4+ year old MBP in the meantime - the latter needs a battery replacement but my numerous encounters with Apple support/Store have made me generally allergic to dealing with them. If there's a magical Apple cs experience that exists, it certainly has eluded me every time. Edit0: syntax.

And if I had endless time, presumably I could reach englightenment, with seems like a better use of my time.