Dude obviously has graphics card issues. Refuses to take it in to be serviced. Acts all surprised when an OS update includes revisions to the graphics drivers, which caused the bad behavior to worsen. Decides the right course of action is to pen an internet screed against Apple because, well, I have no idea.
The funniest part is, NVidia and ATI produce the graphics drivers, so if he wants to be mad at someone, he should be mad at them.
I would have agreed with this argument had he installed a custom graphics card but this is not the case here. It came included with the product, so its Apple's responsibility to make sure it works. Say you buy a new car from Ford and the tires wear out in 6 months, despite Michelin being the manufactures, wouldn't you still blame Ford for it?
Alright, let's take a HN friendly example. Say you run a medium B2B startup and one day the API that a lot of other businesses depend on goes down. The reason could be attributed to a strange bug in the new Ruby/Django/PHP update. Would you still pass the blame to Ruby/Django/PHP or would you accept responsibility for it?
GPU driver issues? I don't care if they are Nvidia's (or AMD/ATI's) bugs, Nvidia (or AMD/ATI) is your GPU vendor, you have them fix that shit and just deliver that to me in an OS update. Otherwise your shit is busted.
If my Honda car had some firmware in it programmed by some 3rd party shop in China and it started acting up, I would damn well demand Honda figure out how to get it fixed regardless of whose bug it was. They are the ones who sold me the integrated solution, it is now their problem. Same thing with Apple devices, especially since they've chosen to create an ecosystem of computers with no user serviceable or replaceable parts.
Apple may or may not have an official fix. Either way it it takes time for Apple to QA before pushing it out to tens of millions of users.
not exactly the intended behaviour of driver updates
Besides, some people in the referenced Apple discussions thread report that even after flashing the firmware, the problems continue.
Articles like this one are popular as well. Just write some nonsensical nostalgic story about some sort of computer or digital device, whining about how the company who built it has sold its soul and you are golden as far as HN kudos are concerned.
The reason people like this type of article is probably because, 'back then' was when they knew very little about computers. Now, when you reach a certain level of experience and knowledge, that magically looking Mac will suddenly be 'just a computer'. People don't want to go back to the olden days here you'd type commands into your Commadore 64, but they want to go back to that naive state of mind where when your computer did want you wanted it to, it felt like magic.