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Comment by Cymen | Hacker News Reader

There have been at least a couple of posts here that had thread discussion about this approach at Apple leading the focus to be on features over bugs. That things don't get fixed. Before holding Apple up as an example of good, best to look into those as those complaints/comments here mirror things I've seen on other venues in terms of features versus working software being shipped by Apple.

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That emphasis on features over bugs is a myth. Look at almost any Apple developer’s assigned Radars and they’re mostly bugs. Pay attention to Craig Federighi’s initiatives and stability, security and bug fixes have taken a top-priority at least over the past year or so. Look at iOS 12 and Mojave for public examples of this focus. People complained that iOS 12 didn’t have a lot of new features, but it’s almost universally acclaimed as far more stable and performant than iOS 11. Same for Mojave. Compare that to the release of Sierra for example.

That could just come down to Apple's cycle. They tend to do one release with a lot of features, then one release for stability. The precedent was set with Leopard and then Snow Leopard, repeated with Lion and Mountain Lion, and so on.

And yet, compared to, say, Microsoft, are their bugs any worse or more intrusive? Apple's software has at least been relatively stable for a long time. That is not a track record Microsoft has.

With Microsoft, I'd say it depends wildly on the team. I've known .NET to be rock solid stable. Similar for Visual Studio - most Visual Studio bugs I've experienced turned out to be ones that JetBrains was injecting through the plugin API. Office, too, is a pretty well-turned piece of software, especially considering its size and age.

It's largely the Windows team that has a hard time getting its act together.

.net frameworks like wpf are horribly buggy and horribly designed. Of course if you talk about the system libraries and vm then it’s pretty good but same with any language. That shit is engineered and not user-storied

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