Marco on Apple’s yearly software release schedule:
The problem seems to be quite simple: they’re doing too much, with unrealistic deadlines.
We don’t need major OS releases every year. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features. We need our computers, phones, and tablets to work well first so we can enjoy new features released at a healthy, gradual, sustainable pace.
I fear that Apple’s leadership doesn’t realize quite how badly and deeply their software flaws have damaged their reputation, because if they realized it, they’d make serious changes that don’t appear to be happening. Instead, the opposite appears to be happening: the pace of rapid updates on multiple product lines seems to be expanding and accelerating.
I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, when I started working at the Apple Store when I was in college I loved telling customers about the Mac and showing them all the ways “it just worked”. When the iPhone came out, it was absolutely amazing and to this day it is the easiest phone for almost anyone to pick up and start using right away. Apple products usually still “just work”. But there are undoubtably more problems than their used to be and it is certainly a result of new features being added faster than the issues can be properly tested and resolved internally. The reason the original iPhone “just worked” so well is because it didn’t have to do very much and the features it had were the best of any device we had ever seen. Now we are getting more features faster than ever, and as a nerd I’m excited about the ability for developers to do new things that haven’t been possible on iOS before. But these features being implemented at such a rapid pace is coming at a cost. And its hard to say “it just works” with the same confidence anymore.
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