Mark Bernstein writes that there are always problems. He thinks the Mac and tech press is trying to drum up traffic by running articles critical of Lion. But he thinks the operating system isn’t to blame, and other factors cloud people’s judgment.

Whenever an operating system ships, everybody always runs around in circles to complain about it. Operating systems are big. They interact with everything. And they’re new, so they are a blame magnet. If you have an application bug, people will blame the operating system. If their disk is wearing out, odds are the operating system installation will push it over the edge and they’ll blame the operating system. If their network is wonky, what sort-of worked before might not work how – or might still sort-of work – and either way, some of them will blame the operating system.

And he also blames the press:

I blame a corrupt trade press. The way you get attention and make money – not much money – in this game is to start flame wars, and so “Apple ships lousy operating system! Scroll bars backwards! Apple doomed!” gets links and traffic and sells ads for off-brand iPad cases. And of course some of the financial press try to launch memes to manipulate stock prices – either because they play the market or simply to show what big lever-pullers they are.

I have some sympathy with that viewpoint; too many tech blogs are clamouring for hits rather than offering quality writing, and much of this comes from Apple rumours and anti-Apple sentiment. But there’s a nugget of truth in the Lion blame game. I cannot remember an Apple OS so buggy since the very early days of Mac OS X. I’ve certainly had way more problems in OS X Lion than in Snow Leopard, Leopard and Tiger. Apps crash far more regularly (mostly those that utilise the new auto-save feature), my Wi-Fi network that was fine under Snow Leopard absolutely refused to work using the same settings under Lion, and I’ve seen a ton of interface glitches, most notably with Save dialogs randomly getting really messed up and printing buttons and menus in the wrong place.

Of course, as Bernstein states, other factors could be at play here. For the first time, I installed a new OS over an old one, so perhaps there are clashes; although in my defence, this is how Apple wants people to install Lion by default. Perhaps my Wi-Fi network was screwy anyway, and Lion merely finally broke it. But I’m seeing too many issues, too many bugs, to suggest this is anything more than an OS that doesn’t have quite the same level of care that Apple usually enforces. None of the bugs have stopped me from using Lion and I certainly don’t plan to revert. But when TextEdit and Numbers crash for the nth time—despite neither app having crashed even once during my using them with Snow Leopard—that sets off alarm bells about the state of the system itself, rather than the state of tech journalism.

Hat tip: Daring Fireball.