Comment And vendors are terrible about SQA-ing updates. (Score 1) 181
The other side of the coin is that I am very dilatory about installing any kind of update to anything because a) experience shows that the chance of an update breaking something in a serious way is something like 10-20%, b) the problem may not be obvious in the first five minutes or the first week of operation.
My wife's PC has now been rendered unbootable TWICE by Microsoft pushing through bad updates. I personally will not install a Mac OS update until I've taken the time to do a local backup to a hard drive, a remote backup to a cloud backup service, and waited two weeks to see if Apple retracts and re-releases the update, and read Macintouch for user reports to see what kinds of problems people are having.
I've already bought a new router once because the manufacturer's firmware update broke it and it was easier to buy another than to troubleshoot it.
I haven't got the time or energy to do that on a dozen household appliances.
The software industry has got to figure out a way to make sure that updates are one or two orders of magnitude safer and more reliable to install than they are today.