QA is becoming an endangered species. As a software engineer I despise that my end users are my beta testers. Only a handful of times in my career have I had the luxury of a QA team and they were worth their weight in gold.
Of course business doesn't care, all they see is cost centers. Who cares if the bug count is 10,000 or 200, right?
My theory is that companies like Apple and Google - and, actually, smaller businesses even more so, because they can't afford a QA team - have intentionally offloaded much of the QA phase to the public.
In a way, it's a result of the "agile" approach, to "release early, ship often". And the larger the userbase, the more effective they are at finding and reporting bugs and edge cases. It also cuts down on the cost by reducing the time/effort spent on testing new features thoroughly.
What grinds my gears is when a company doesn't have a centralized bug database where the users can contribute and see the progress being made. If I recall correctly, Apple's support forums are like a blackhole of issue reports. Most of the time it's a bunch of users with the same problem, trying to solve it on their own; no input from an employee/developer; no way to know if they're aware or working on the bug; and no clear path to a solution.
I'd go the other way for big organizations like Apple and Google -- they need to do public testing, because the bug that impacts 0.1% of their users will impact hundreds of thousands. And no QA team, regardless of how they're empowered or resourced, will find every 0.1% bug (or even every 1% bug). You need broad beta testing in those cases, just to get enough hands on.
There is a need for public betas, but a private QA team could catch a lot of bugs before release, and catch regressions. The public beta builds might not be much better, but they'd likely at least come with reported known issues.
Of course, iOS was nototorious for not alarming on January 1st because Steve wanted to sleep in (actually I don't know why, but I think it happened at least 2 years in a row, and maybe three)
Of course business doesn't care, all they see is cost centers. Who cares if the bug count is 10,000 or 200, right?