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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Yet another reason not to ship 4 OSs the same month every year.

The poll system call is very likely the same exact implementation for all 4 though. If it was a bug in platform specific code then you'd have a point. It's not like they are shipping 4 complete rewrites.

Agreed MacOS/OSX, iOS, WatchOS, and TVOS all are user-land modifications of Darwin/XNU (Next-OS kernel), which is a modification of Mach (BSD-like research kernel).

I don't have macOS 10.12 installed, so I couldn't test it. But I put their test code into an iOS app, and the bug does occur on iOS 10.0.2, on an iPhone 7.

Not even that, just don't ship a new OS for your computer every year. I know they're not big changes like say, Windows 98 -> XP, but still.

Exactly, I'm all for more frequent releases but a yearly one is too frequent. I'd rather have stable features than UI/UX changes every year. Windows is doing the same.

It might make sense on mobile since features and abilities are changing rapidly. For desktop, I'd take stability over new features yearly.

Four?! MacOS and iOS I know, what are the other two?

tvOS and watchOS

Thanks. watchOS I know by name, tvOS is totally new to me. Funny that it has to be its own thing.

TVs inherently require a different UI and control mechanism than computers or handheld touchscreens. It's more or less a reskin of iOS, pretty nice, and you can cross-compile/cross-purchase iOS/tvOS apps fairly seamlessly.

I'm glad Apple chose to develop a different OS for each class of device, unlike say, Microsoft's insistence on the one-size-fits-all approach — it's what made the iPhone popular in the first place.

They didn't though, they're all Darwin/XNU underneath the hood, it's just the user interface is different, and some of the userland APIs don't cross over.

>TVs inherently require a different UI and control mechanism than computers or handheld touchscreens. It's more or less a reskin of iOS, pretty nice, and you can cross-compile/cross-purchase iOS/tvOS apps fairly seamlessly.

This isn't what an OS is. It is about 10 levels of abstraction below this. It handles managing virtual memory, IO, networking, process switching, processor interrupts, threading. All the low level nitty-gritty hardware details you need to worry.

These tasks are fairly generic this is why Linux can run on Smart Phones, Laptops, PC's, Watches, and Super Computers.

Nitpicking about what words mean when it isn't relevant to the substance of the discussion is always annoying -- but it's even worse when you're actually wrong.

What you are describing is called a "kernel", which is one important part of an OS. No one (or almost no one) uses "OS" as a synonym for "kernel".

Linux is a kernel. Desktop Linux (Ubuntu or whatever) is not the same OS as Android.

> >TVs inherently require a different UI and control mechanism than computers or handheld touchscreens. It's more or less a reskin of iOS, pretty nice, and you can cross-compile/cross-purchase iOS/tvOS apps fairly seamlessly.

> This isn't what an OS is. It is about 10 levels of abstraction below this. It handles managing virtual memory, IO, networking, process switching, processor interrupts, threading. All the low level nitty-gritty hardware details you need to worry.

> These tasks are fairly generic this is why Linux can run on Smart Phones, Laptops, PC's, Watches, and Super Computers.

You're talking about the kernel Linux, not about an operating system. An example of an operating system is GNU/Linux, which includes much more than just a kernel.

It isn't. All four OSes share the same kernel and many userland components, just the "shell" is different.

Yeah, Tim Cook and Jony Ive can't possibly have enough time to thoroughly test everything.

Why do people wait for things to go wrong then make blanket statements about a "better way"?

Right, because they are doing all the testing themselves.

I believe that was sarcasm. It seems unlikely in an organisation of Apple's size that its the same people doing the release/testing processes for all 4 operating systems.

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