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Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

When Steve Jobs was away due to his illness, Bertrand Serlet presented Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) at the WWDC June 2009 with the startling slide that said "0 new features". There was sustained applause from the crowd. But in fact there was a very significant under-the-hood new feature called "Grand Central Dispatch". It is a low-level API that removes a lot of the pain of multithreading. Essential for OS X and iOS developers, as it turns out.

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Dear God I wish they would do another 0 new features release.

It used to be that the excuse was bug fixes don’t sell. Maybe not, but buggy software does lose customers. They may bring in the newbies with features, but you retain with bug fixes.

I really don't think the general population abandons entire operating system ecosystems, because of buggy software.

I think in part they do, otherwise OS X wouldn't have gained as nearly as much marketshare on the promise that "It just works"

OS X gained market share because of the insane popularity of the iPod, and subsequently the iPhone. Gained nearly 4% post iPhone launch.

There are other negative effect as well. People will do everything they can to not get the latest updates. See: Windows 10

Which is totally nonsensical, mostly fed off of nonsense news perpetuated through the general public. I don't like Windows 10 because someone on the internet said it was bad. It's a great OS.

I will never install it until they have dialed back their forced updates. I plan on using 8.1 until I can't, and then jumping to another OS. I had a number of blue screens from updating windows 8.1, and I see photos of windows force updating at crazy times. No forced updates from the brickmasters, thank you.

Your observation is shared by hosts of the ATP podcast.

Bug fixes do sell when paired with minor development, major impact features. Push the load to a couple of built-in apps to make them more smooth and focus on under-the-hood stuff.

The press will praise that as the best thing since sliced bread - a modern, polished and stable OS release.

Of course this would be a one-off thing and we'll get another major release with features, features, features!

Ah! So that's why a lot of us still think of Snow Leopard as the best OS X release ever.

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