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Comment by Almondsetat | Hacker News Reader

You realize OS innovation has ground to a halt when the first feature advertised in a new version is screen savers

Not really. Consumer behavior is not what technical people expect it to be. The main reason people update their phone OS is for new emoji. People love this stuff.

>The main reason people update their phone OS is for new emoji

I can't avoid the anecdata game, so: what generation are you? I don't know a single person who would update their phone for a new emoji.

The real question is: why are emojis tied to operating system updates in Apple land?

To get people to upgrade! It's extraordinarily effective. They seem to always do it in the first major patch after a major release, to kinda ensure everyone gets a stable version of the OS.

Because it convinces people to install the latest updates!! That's the whole point.

On the cusp of Millennial and Gen Z

Millenial (mid)... and know even Gen Xers and Boomers who would upgrade for new emoji.

OS to many consumers (and consumer extends even to web developers/data scientists) means graphical shell.

I've upgraded (mainly) to get new emoji first.

Some are quite funny.

Anecdata, but I feel most people don’t want to upgrade the software at all regardless of the features.. :p

A few years ago, people here were complaining that MacOS was too unstable from all the new features, and that they wish Apple would just do a few feature-less stability releases.

Can't win.

Nah I'm pretty okay with it, and many other colleagues are as well.

Some of the outrage you see is to be attributed to people expecting fixes of their pet peeves and not getting them, I think.

It's a press release, advertised to customers, yes.

If you are a dev, look for the release notes.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

Apple advertises the things that 99% of the people buying their products care about. That doesn't mean that things aren't changing under the hood.

I do wish they had a developer-focused version of these announcements, though. A lot of very interesting stuff usually never gets mentioned officially at all.

It’s their job to get people to click the upgrade button, so developers can rely on the new advanced libraries, and if the impression they make is “basic maintainance update with some colorful snazz” it is more likely to happen.

I upgraded to the beta version and am having a bug with an app that relies on WebKit so for me I wish I’d waited for the .1.

macOS has felt “feature complete” to me for years now. There is nothing I really want from an OS. I only upgrade for the security benefits and so I can keep all my systems on the same release, since new systems can’t be downgraded.

I actually appreciate not doing relentless “innovation” just for the sake of doing it. Microsoft does this by slapping new UIs on top of old every damn release. They often don’t even remove the old stuff, they just mask it with “innovation.” macOS does this too, but not nearly as bad. In Windows there are like 7 different layers of UI. You can click a half dozen times in the settings in Windows 11 and basically time travel back to Windows 2000.

I think the reason I don’t hate this stuff on macOS as much is because most of the changes are iOS-ification, and I use iOS so I somewhat intuitively know how to navigate the changes.

>macOS has felt “feature complete” to me for years now. >Microsoft does this by slapping new UIs on top of old every damn release

This OS upgrade looks like it's mostly slapping new UIs on top of old, so I'm not sure this is "doing it right".

Microsoft keeps the old UI. At least Apple replaces it.

One of the last macOS versions had - click the mouse in the lower right corner and notes pop up. That's a new OS feature, really? I mean, I haven't really thought about it, but what's left for desktop OSes these days that they need to produce new releases every year.

You should see the dismal state of innovation in 'innovation is dead' comments!

The new screen savers were bumped up the priority queue because Apple has a bunch of QD-OLED computers coming next year and they're worried about burn-in.

Got a source for that?

This is not the first macOS release (well, maybe the first one where they called it "macOS") where the headline feature involved screens and widgets.

I look forward to them removing all this functionality in four or five years, and then reintroducing it as a stunning new innovation in another four or five years after that.

Adobe has been famous for this annoying behavior for over a decade. Remove some cool features only to reintroduce them, sometimes years later, as a breakthrough. Annoying, but it didn't prevent them from quietly innovating.

it's pretty much for putting a new wallpaper on the yearly hardware iterations so as to differentiate them.

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