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Comment by fiatpandas | Hacker News Reader

You would think with all the smart, detail oriented, outgoing people at apple, SOMEONE would have pulled the person responsible for shifting to a yearly cycle and tell them: "look, this accelerated release cycle, it's not resulting in quality software. It's hurting our reputation. It's not performing on 2 year old hardware. People are losing faith in our ability to release stable bug-free builds. Users shouldn't have to cross their fingers when upgrading. This is Apple."

But no, that's probably not happening.

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I don't even understand who they're competing with by doing yearly updates. It's probably a big scramble to get features released and for what? To beat Windows 8? To beat linux? They don't have any threats when it comes to desktop operating systems, so they should slow down and make some quality updates.

It keeps the size of each update much smaller and less error-prone. Each update contains a few significant changes and lots of minor ones.

It's a good strategy for a variety of reasons:

  - it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis

  - it lets apple break/disable bad apps that have entered the ecosystem
  
  - it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world.

  - it lets the actual periodic security updates be used only for critical fixes.  Try loading Windows 8 and you immediately have over 200 critical hotfixes that take nearly a day to download and install on 2 year old hardware.

  - Apple's biggest strength is attention to UX details.  Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.

None of this excuses buggy releases, but overall it's significantly less buggy than any similarly ambitious OS out there.

>it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis

I doubt they will be making significant changes every year. 2014 was the exception

>it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world

Too many key utilities are extremely outdated due to GPL3. Apple also seems to be moving away from free software wherever it can

>Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.

They seem to be letting the consumers do a lot of the testing (with the open beta for instance). Many features seem half baked, conceptually, and in execution.

Away from Free Software™, yes. Away from open-source software? Not at all. The MIT/BSD-licenced parts of OSX get updated all the time.

MIT/BSD is free software too. What they're moving away from is copyleft.

> it lets apple break/disable bad apps that have entered the ecosystem

You can easily do that with patches and blacklists.

> it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world.

That's hilarious, sorry. Nobody who cares for "OSS binaries" uses anything shipped by Apple -- we all use Homebrew and equivalents, because anything shipped by Apple is invariably ancient.

> Try loading Windows 8 and you immediately have over 200 critical hotfixes that take nearly a day to download and install on 2 year old hardware.

That can be easily solved with release-specific service packs, and it's not an excuse to wreck the entire UI.

> Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.

Such "massive" research, if it's anything remotely valuable, doesn't change every 12 months. You don't have breakthroughs in UI design every 12 months.

You know what changes every 12 months? Fashion.

Lets them make new features that go with their new devices. In the device space they compete with firms that make new phones three times per year.

Wait, what?

In terms of market share, OS X is to Windows as Windows Phone is to iOS. Sometime about a year ago, Windows 8 alone already had higher market share than all versions of OS X combined, and has only been increasing the lead since.

Windows 10 is looking to be the spiritual successor to Windows 7, combining the improvements that came in 8 with a UI that's more palatable for many. And, now there are ample PC hardware options that rival or surpass Apple's in many aspects, which is a lot of what sold MacBooks to average consumers in the past.

I would guess that Apple is taking Windows 10 very seriously.

> You would think with all the smart, detail oriented, outgoing people at apple, SOMEONE would have pulled the person responsible for shifting to a yearly cycle and tell them

Let me ask you a question off the topic, have you ever successfully take your boss aside and tell him he's not managing the situation right and the whole project stinks? (Paraphrasing what you're basically saying) A lot of people would be afraid to speak up.

I doubt the Apple managers are encouraging the engineers to speak their minds. Look at the recent reports of how badly the iCloud and Map divisions were managed, not to mention the ways SJ practically pushed his employees over the limits for his own vision and not listening to anything else.

Apple has smart engineers but I doubt they have managers that understand what QA is all about and focusing on quality than numbers.

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