Hacker News Reader

Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I think that Apple is a victim of its decision to release new OS version every year. Users expect a lot of changes from iOS n+1 or OS X m+1. You can't just fix all bugs and release a new version. And constant feature improvement introduces new bugs and deadline frames won't allow to release properly tested fixes for old bugs.

I believe that feature-wise OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 are quite nice. Apple really should adapt something like Intel's tick-tock strategy. Release iOS 8 with new features at 2014. Release iOS 8S with all bugs fixed in 2015. Release iOS 9 with new features at 2016 but allow customers to downgrade to iOS 8S if they want to, for at least a year. They'll have to support 2 iOS versions, but people will have a choice between new features and stability.

View on HN

> I believe that feature-wise OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 are quite nice.

My feeling is that this embodies the problem pretty well. Apple releases, typically, weren't seen (by tech people) as "quite nice", feature-wise. The "ahhh" moments in keynotes were more or less experience-related. iOS 8 and Mavericks keynotes, however, were full of "ahh" moments related to technical advances.

It seems (to me) that they jumped on the "creeping featurism" bandwagon.

Internal product churn and massive refactoring is bad. Make the UI themeable and keep the core mostly the same. However there is drive to converge the iOS and OSX APIs to where there may only be one platform.

> I think that Apple is a victim of its decision to release new OS version every year

Why? Why is one year the problem, would two years fix it? Why not 14 months?

I'd say a fixed cadence, especially when combined with a relatively inflexible scope (pre-announced features, features tied to new hardware, etc.), is, at a minimum, a significant contributor to the problem. If there's an unexpected problem late in the development cycle, what's going to give?

Contrary to this, as they experience more instances of the fixed cadence, they will have more opportunity to measure their capacity and adjust the scope accordingly.

What needs to 'give' is over-promising. And the best way to achieve that is to maintain a fixed cadence so that they can gather a more and more accurate understanding of what can be delivered with high quality in that timeframe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com