Hacker News Reader

Comment by headwayoldest | Hacker News Reader

If memory serves GMs are normally a one and done thing. It may be buggy and inadvisable (wait for 10.x.1), but the GM normally ships more or less unchanged.

View on HN

Historically GM's were pretty rock solid. Not anymore. Apple is now like everyone else -- release early/often.

More an effect than a cause. When it was hard to convince people to update, and an automatically-updating OS was scary, and pipes were too small to download big patches, then you had to get it right the first time. Nowadays, as long as the OS works well-enough out of the box to suck down the newest point release, all is well from the end-user's perspective. Except maybe there's some weird out-of-box bugs until they've let their computer sit around for a few hours and restarted it once.

That sounds like an excuse.

I think the goal should always be to ship as bug free as possible. Having the mindset that you can push bug fixes later is just pure laziness.

There are other things than laziness that push the scale toward shipping bugs. In Apple's case, there's the fact that they only have so many OS engineers, and those engineers have to ship new code with each release, to, for example, create drivers and expose APIs to enable software to take advantage of new hardware features. Bugs are strictly less important to solve than making sure that everything shown in the keynote—every feature that sells the new computers each year—actually works on release.

The real problem is the yearly release cadence. Apple's hardware pipeline is maybe too good—it's not giving the software engineers enough time to polish the software.

The El Capitan beta was pretty solid in my experience. I've been using it as my primary OS since a month and there have been only minor bugs.

Yeah, there are often several RCs, but usually only one GM. I do vaguely remember some Apple OS release in the past, in which they released a GM and then had to do a second one, but I can't recall the details (even if it was iOS or MacOS).

GMs have gone up to at most 3, I believe.

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/09/third-yosemite-golden-ma...

GM (Golden Master) = RTM (Release To Manufacturing) = the point where it becomes a bit of a hassle to do a recall because you've started putting copies of your OS in boxes somehow (whether pressed on a disc, or flashed to new machines' SSDs, or whatever.)

If Apple does a second GM on a product, they're likely "rewinding" their pipeline, reopening sealed boxes to re-image computers. Not something they will do if they can at all help it!

They're calling this a "GM Candidate"

  https://www.dropbox.com/s/a2ge8vhirmine5o/Screenshot%202015-09-09%2022.16.22.png?dl=0

Could be an evolution of lingo, or just that they're saying GM are always a candidate but oh god please almost always the same as RTM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com