I don’t know about Google but I would say that the majority of Apple’s design refreshes are iterative in such a way that someone coming from the previous release is very unlikely to get “lost” when presented with the latest UI.
And this is the key. UI refreshes are fine as long as they don’t add unnecessary friction to the user experience.
Apple’s refreshes are also generally complete, cohesive and coherent. Yes they have the odd inconsistency here and there but largely the design system feels fully thought out at a high level. (I would perhaps put built-in apps like Podcasts and Music to one side here as I have far less charitable opinions around some of those UI updates - I’m mainly talking about the core OS experience).
I’m an experienced user of macOS and Windows and I cannot remember the last time I upgraded a macOS version and couldn’t just immediately carry on with my work without any major reorientation needed. Likewise with iOS. And Apple is iterating on their UI at a much faster pace than Microsoft.
And yet I have Windows VMs and Servers that I’ve used for years now and I still cannot fathom where they have moved setting X because it’s literally all over the place. Their UI updates are mostly incoherent, incomplete and just plain baffling.
The hash they’ve made of settings is just incredible. I have no idea how normal users navigate that crap. Even if you can stay in the top-level “dumbed down” layer of the settings UI it’s completely unintuitive in many places.
I’ve not seen an improvement to the start menu that has benefited my usability in any way since Windows 2000. I’m constantly confused with the various different start menus across servers running different Windows versions. Contrast that to the dock in macOS which has basically been the same simple and usable design paradigm for over 20 years with gentle refinement over that time. The only consistent thing Microsoft seem to keep doing to the start menu is they make more space for ads. FFS.
I’m not even going to get into the aggressive, seemingly-can’t-be-stopped forced updates…
I’m bullish on Microsoft’s .NET developer ecosystem and mainly positive about their Cloud strategy - the company has made some impressive changes over the last decade, but my god, Windows is a total car crash at the moment.