X.0 releases are always a mess at launch. Even everyone's beloved Snow Leopard had issues at launch, despite everyone remembering it as the perfect version of OSX.

https://www.rubenerd.au/the-myth-of-snow-leopard/

> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.

> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.

I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)

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Barbing 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Gives me hope!

Apple marketing teams are brilliant and can figure out a “quality first” angle to help Ternus announce & defend a slowdown for Apple software teams.

In a paradigm of quality-focused releases every other year, what if they released the betas two years of their new-feature releases ahead of time? & superfunded QA & maybe even responded to every bug report (at least “acknowledged, thank you” & filling out the “Recent Similar Reports:” column). Could even the new-feature releases be just as low-defect as the quality-focused ones?

Slightly too extreme but… If they pretend software’s like their brand new iPhone hardware, that it needs a multi-billion-dollar recall if they make a big enough mistake, maybe that mindset would be a good balance (as I don’t feel hardware innovation’s been stifled by that reality, that it better be dang perfect).

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xp84 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What’s funny is that it’s not the public or even the board that is demanding that Apple release whiz-bang moonshot software features every year. Users do want shiny new hardware, but besides necessary hardware drivers, 90% of users LOVE it when the core OS and the UI stays stable for years. So they can get used to it. Instead of reshuffling the UI of every app every 12 months like iOS has been doing for 10 years. And evolving the visuals in big and small ways constantly. Both of these are not fooling anyone into overestimating Apple’s innovativeness.

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kevin_thibedeau 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They're copying the auto industry when it came up with yearly models. FOMO drives sales. They've cultivated a customer base that is supremely susceptible to it.

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NetMageSCW 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m not so sure - 90% of commenters complain every time a new OS doesn’t have any new shiny useless features. (Look at all the comments saying the 18 Pro is an S release.)

	▲	wat10000 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		People don't care about most new features. They'd be happy with a handful that are really impactful for them. The problem is, everybody has a different notion of what those are. In any case, I don't recognize the world people are talking about here. I ran the 27 betas all summer and upgraded to 27.0 on day one and it's been great. The betas were definitely betas, but quite good. 27.0 was (and 27.0.1 still is) excellent. I don't have a single issue I'm hoping the next point release will fix.

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specialist 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes and: UI churn is disruptive for the elders in my life.

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dylan604 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember 10.6.6 being the perfect version. At least, if you owned the 2010 MacPro. It was perfect as it was the last OS that was compatible with that hardware.

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VCFundedGenYer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ehhh, Even the .0 release of Snow Leopard was incredibly polished. I was there. It was still great.

It's not like now where they rush a yearly release and more than half the OS is nonfunctional until the .1 update several months later.

The point is to slow TF down on the OS updates. We never needed yearly releases. Going back to the pre-Lion model of OS upgrades is the way.