There were comments in the beta release notes stating that the first upgrade from a previous OS version could take a very long time. Not only do us beta testers get quick access to those release notes and are expected to read them, but we're also prepared for betas to be potentially disastrous.
For the public release, which is what this thread is about, there needed to be a prominent warning that the upgrade could well take many hours. It seems that many people, reasonably assuming that an upgrade appearing to hang for an hour or two had frozen, rebooted their machines and then "bricked" them. Having an upgrade, or any process, sit for minutes let alone hours without any indication that it's working, is stupid.
In the old days we'd look at our PC cases for the hard disk light to flicker. And even if there was no light, I could put my hand on it and feel it reading/writing. Staring at a black screem with a cartoon pic of an apple and a line which doesn't move, with no warning saying it'll take hours, and with no indication that something is happening, the natural reaction is to power off/on.
The upgrade should be written in a way that either the recovery partition works, or the main partition works, if not both. I'm no OS developer (can you tell?), but that sounds fundamental to me. Sure, we often get warnings stating "do not power off during the firmware upgrade" for stuff like TVs and AVRs etc, but those upgrades take minutes and a reset back to factory defaults pretty much always gets the device working again whatever state it's left in.
Many people upgrade their apps and the OS, whether laptop or phone, as soon as a red badge tells them to. So it's not unexpected that as soon as Apple pushes out an upgrade notification that people pretty much immediately click on it.
I feel sorry for those who have bricked their machines due to what, in my opinion, is Apple's mistake.
