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 37 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 43 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.