As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development. In hardware, you give a lot of thought to potential failure modes and contingencies before building something, which takes time. In software, I’ve rarely seen a product whose first version is completely free of bugs. Shipping with some bugs and fixing them through iterations is standard industry practice, whereas it’s less acceptable in hardware.

I think Apple is more of a hardware company than a software company these days. They invested enough time, resources, and patience in ARM for it to now compete with the once-mighty Intel x86 architecture. That kind of progress requires patience, so I don’t think we can simply call Apple a slow company or say it isn’t innovating.

> As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development.

A sloppy mechanical engineer can be sued for malpractice and lose their license to practice. If they do something unethical they can't blame it all on management and could end up being held personally responsible with fines and even jail time.

Sometimes I think it we might be better off if the same held for software engineers.

Apple is always a hardware company first, they always have been. The software is supposed to be a reflection of their hardware perfection and passion (we can discuss this later).

I didn’t use slow in a negative way. On the contrary, my context behind that “slow” was “patient, detail obsessed and immaculate”. Also I didn’t mean that they are not innovating. Again, they innovate and bake well, then release things, which is how I like my hardware.

Thanks for your reply though. Seems like I missed the point I was trying to make by a mile.