It’s not a PR stunt at all. If there is any PR benefit, it is totally incidental and not at all planned.
The reality is that a core part of how the company’a product works is broken with the latest version. That means that customers of tools like Super Duper (and presumably also Carbon Copy Cloner) who rely on the tools for bootable backups need to potentially hold off on upgrading to 15.2. Considering that this is a tool a lot of Mac admins use, this is a thing you want to let people know about, if for no other reason than to reduce or try to anticipate support loads.
And unfortunately, filing Radars often doesn’t solve these sorts of issues. And the customer is always going to blame the third-party. So it is incumbent on the third-party to let people know the issue while at the same time, hopefully apply pressure through negative publicity to get the problem fixed.
Phil Schiller (Apple’s head of marketing and the App Store) once said that “running to the press” doesn’t work, but it absolutely does. And especially when it comes to changes that might be bugs (but could also be signs of feature removals), getting public sentiment on your side is often the only recourse third-party devs have.
Yes, that ensuing discussion could be PR as a side effect, but no respected third-party devs (certainly not ones as longstanding as the Super Duper folks) are using this as a marketing opportunity.
They just want their business to not suffer because of a bug they can’t control or fix.
Well, Apple has a super weird bug tracker that you can report stuff but you are kept super in the dark - I remember reporting Safari bugs in the early days of WASM and it was zero communication until the bug got fixed.
No, I used Radar in the pre-NeXT days. I even still have the state diagram mug from when it was introduced in the early 90s. At that point it was a client-server app, because the web didn’t exist yet.
Now, it may be that the Apple bug database is always called Radar, regardless of implementation, like the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Radar was always Apple, I think NeXT had their own issue tracker called Recall. However when I worked on Rhapsody in 1997 issues were tracked with Radar.
More of a tool that exists for 15 years or more, and is an important tool for some of us. When my mac broke down in, hmm, maybe 2010-ish, my superduper-created bootable clone allowed me to instantly continue my work on a freshly bought mac (just boot from the clone). No Apple utilities give you that.
