A Mac, well thats your problem!! Only joking!

Yeah I've heard that 8 had quite a few bugs in it (looking on other forums etc) but from my own experiance with 8.5 its fine, I cant recall it crashing once (thats the kiss of death aint it!) So It might have all been fixed.

8.0 in my humble opinion was a rush to get Autodesks name on maya.