This is 100% correct. I guess the people that are upset reboot their macs dozens of times per day... So waiting must be infuriating? Otherwise I can't think of any reason why shutdown times are relevant.
It's not JUST that the shutdown times are a problem; it's that they are symptomatic of a bigger issue.
What SHOULD happen is the app is told "shutdown", it saves some small amount of state, and the kernel kills the process. If that does not happen, then it means the app is not responding appropriately to kernel messages; which in turn means that when the kernel force kills it, there may be unsaved state which is not pushed out to disk. Then next time you start the app you learn the happy news that some file or other is inconsistent and needs to be deleted.
Now, sure, if this happens for third party apps, there is nothing Apple can do about that. (Except name and shame them...)
But it doesn't only happen for 3rd party apps. Mail is a NOTORIOUS example for not handling shutdowns properly. Safari used to be a problem, though I don't think I've had an issue with the most recent version. Screen Sharing sometimes gets confused at shut down.
There are also strange HW things that occasionally seem to happen at the kernel level where, after all apps are killed, the screen just stays grey showing a spinner for 60 seconds. WTF is going on there? If data is being pushed out from caches to disk, the process is taking way too long, which suggests that something else is going wrong --- which again is very worrying --- the last thing you want is for your HD to be in some sort of inconsistent state during a period as delicate as shutdown/startup.
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People who are saying that Apple allocates only a fraction of their team to OS X and puts most of the team for developing for iOS: Is there any evidence of this anywhere on the internet?
Would be great if you can find that, as, I, myself would like to know how many resources Apple really allocates for OS X. For me, this is probably one of the biggest factors in purchasing the next Mac because it shows what direction the company is heading in. I would expect premium software from a premium machine.
It's a somewhat meaningless distinction. Things have been pioneered on iOS and moved to OSX, or vice versa. At the core OS level, for example, ledgers (resource management), sandboxing and location have all moved from iOS to OSX, likewise for the Layer Manager and Core Animation at the UI level.
And of course tools (LLVM and all its toolchain pieces, XCode) apply to both --- eg blocks and other such improvements to Objective C, or optimizations past and future (coming up soon we'll have better auto-vectorization in LLVM, polyhedral optimization [restructuring loops for better cache behavior], and more aggressive link-time whole program restructuring/optimization).