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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

Is this peak OS? Sure, these features are somewhat useful for busy individuals, but when was the last time we saw something revolutionary in OS design?

I'm not saying everything should be changing year-after-year, but it's hard to get excited for these WWDC keynotes when it feels like they are stretching app release notes to 15 minutes of a visual demo.

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Let's start with: what did you consider revolutionary in past releases?

Because just about everything was maligned from some people or others:

The App Store? Obviously a stupid idea, nobody will program apps with such a limited feature set.

Copy&Paste? Yawn. Should have been there from the start.

AR? Who needs that?

Face ID? An expensive gimmick.

And so on.

Personally I found this WWDC announcements way more interesting and a reason to look forward to than last year's iPhone announcement.

> when was the last time we saw something revolutionary in OS design?

Isn't part of the problem the endless parade of these "revolutionary...OS designs?" Precisely what makes them delightful appears to make them addictive.

I think these are some of the most exciting features that I've seen in iOS for a while, and I suspect it will push iPhone sales quite a bit as parents decide its worth getting their younger kids of that old refurb iPhone 4S.

Also great to see the focus on performance improvements on old models.

Siri Shortcuts (iOS 12) + Type to Siri* (iOS 11) is a revolution in mobile OS design imo

assuming Type to Siri works with Shortcuts.

They've delayed bigger features in iOS 12 because iOS 11 was such a buggy mess, according to [1].

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/30/apple-to-focus-on-ios-p...

This wouldn't be the first time Apple's had a perf/polish focused release. For example Snow Leopard had almost no major features and was mainly perf and polish over Leopard.

Isn't Snow Leopard a complete myth? Back then they told to the public, that this is only a polish release, but they introduced the built-in anti virus solution, a complete rewritten Finder and QuickTime for example. I remember that Snow Leo had lots of bugs in it's .0 release, it was only stable after some updates like every other OSX version.

The best gains would come from removing most of the "revolutionary" features added before. Bringing back hardware buttons and keyboards and reducing physical size would get me excited.

Edit: You'll see downvoters, the beeper's gonna be making a comeback. Technology's cyclical.

> Technology's cyclical.

Cannot wait to get back to horses.

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