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Comment by song | Hacker News Reader

Macos used to not have a yearly schedule. New versions took the time they needed. I think it's actually a better model, it allows engineers the time to test and make sure things work. Having arbitrary deadlines just increases the amount of crunch time which usually increases the amount of bugs.

Other than that, I wish that Apple did another Snow Leopard and focused for one year purely on fixing bugs in macos x instead of introducing new features.

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Although I like looking forward to the next macOS name unveiling and seeing new themed wallpapers, I think operating systems should get a regular stream of small updates for individual features and builtin apps, instead of monolithic yearly releases branded as distinct products.

As for API sets, SDKs and third-party app compatibility, they could still be tied to yearly milestones, e.g. "macOS 2020 January", so there would be no breaking changes for apps which advertise compatibility with that, at least until 2021.

Isn't that kinda what Windows 10 does now?

Rolling updates is the reason I loved using Arch Linux instead of the more common Ubuntu.

Though if quality control is bad, rolling updates means many broken updates spread over the year instead of an optional huge broken update every October. Right now I'm on Mojave, works well enough, and I can wait until next summer to update to Catalina, when hopefully the major bugs have been ironed out.

Exactly, a long time between releases pushes teams to get their feature into this release even if just 90% ready. If the Mail.app team could ship updates not just annually, I’m sure they’d make faster progress and ship more stable releases.

You can have releases based on a timed schedule, or you can have them based on a set number of features. You either release every year, making sure it's solid regardless of what new features are in place. Or you based it on when the requested features are ready and solid. If you try to do both, you're in for a bad release.

Mountain Lion, El Capitan, and High Sierra were all essentially 'Snow Leopards'

Snow Leopard also introduced major new features, like Quicktime X and the App Store. It wasn't quite what people seem to think it is now, 10 years later.

To expand on your point, Snow Leopard came out 2 years after Leopard did.

Snow Leopard is still my favourite MacOS, anything past that I've never been super keen on.

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