Not since Windows 98 have I seen such an unstable OS. I've seen less BSOD in the last 15 years than I've seen kernel panics in the last week.
But now, 10.9.x is a piece of shit. It hardlocks all the time (2-3 times a week), seemingly around external displays. I'm really feeling burned at this point. These 6-7 locks in the past 3 weeks since I got a new laptop are probably 50% of my macos crashes since 2007. It's really really disappointing, and is making me question why the hell I pay this much money for a laptop. Apple needs to pull their thumb out of their ass and fix their fucking os.
This [1] seems to have helped a little bit, but seriously, fuck apple. I'm hunting for a way to downgrade my laptop to 10.8
Edit: to be clear, the really appalling bit here is how frequently these locks occur. This isn't a subtle bug; it's a symptom of apple being asshole cowboys. Given the frequency of these crashes, I believe it's impossible they used their laptop with an external monitor at all or their devs would have hit these too.
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5538012?start=0&tstart=...
I had to unplug and just stick with the retina display to get anything done.
I actually lag 4-6 months behind releases now on both my macbook and my iphone. While I used to love being an early adopter and downloading the latest release the night it came out. Over the past few years I've had so many stability issues that I can't afford the annoyance, frustrations, and hit to productivity. It definitely seems that the quality of apple os's out of the gate have more problems then they did in the past.
Let's call it like it is: 10.9 needs some fixing. Plugging in an external monitor shouldn't be a big thing. I shouldn't have to tread on egg shells as far as what I do with such an expensive piece of equipment.
Is there virtualization software that is not unstable on OS X?
Some of the only kernel panics I have ever had we I think to do with VirtualBox's kernel module. VMWare feels faster too.
Anecdotal information is not particularly helpful but I have had almost zero 10.9.x kernel panic problems on any of our 11 machines except for one that had bad RAM and another that the hard drive was dying.
The only thing that bothers me is that, for some reason, all three have some difficulty reconnecting with the wifi after they wake up - they take more than 20 seconds to reconnect while the Linux laptops do it in less than 5.
Also, I would say I've had relatively zero problems in recent years. Every now and again there will be a weird freeze, but so infrequently (i.e., a few times per year at most) that I don't blame the OS for it because I don't have any useful info.
I used to have a problem (twice) of extreme slowness in networking, but a reboot fixed the problem.
And if it crashes for certain people chronically, then there's a syndrome that's reproducible. Meaning it is likely to affect a lot of people in similar circumstances.
The question is whether you can go from "2 or 3 friends of mine said they have more crashes than before" to "10.9.3 is more prone to crashing than 10.9.2." For all we know, the entire sample is using some 3rd party utility that crashes under the new update, which is bad, but is also not something you can completely blame Apple for.