Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

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Mac OS X: The 2000-2003 period included three full releases (not counting 10.0, since that was the culmination of several years of work), and didn't have quality problems. The 2003-2011 period had four releases. So I don't see an obvious lesson that one year is sustainable.

iOS: 2007-2011 four updates at one year intervals before the decline in quality that lots of people perceive starting with iOS6. Again, hard to say one year is the culprit.

I do think Apple needs to restrain itself, and work on figuring out which features can be shipped without compromising quality. But whether it needs to do longer releases or do smaller releases is hard to say.

As for Mac OS, when I read Siracusa's review, I was thrilled. There aren't consumer features, but they're doing so many things to make desktop machines more responsive and efficient. It's even more exciting than Snow Leopard.

The period between 2000 and 2003 is kind of hard to draw any conclusions from or the classify as "not having quality problems". That period started with quality problems and saw Apple scrambling to make Mac OS X a reasonable OS to replace OS 9. For example, 10.1 re-introduced disc burning which was missing from 10.0. OS X 10.0 was also riddled with kernel panics and really sluggish. 10.1 continued to have pretty severe crashes and sluggishness, and I remember Jaguar being the first thing that approached actual usability. Panther arguably ended this transition period (where people were still unsure whether to "make the jump") and ushered in the more stable phase I'm referring to (2003 - 2011).

And sure, if Apple only focused on a very sensible amount of changes, then of course a year would be enough. The problem is the contention of a 1 year release cycle and "150 new features!".

I'm not sure the intial problems really sabotage my point. They were able to, year after year, squash bugs while adding substantial functionality that was missing in 10.0.

I guess "not having quality problems" was a poor phrasing. The point is that they weren't suffering from a quick release cycle. But perhaps it's ambiguous.

> when I read Siracusa's review

Are you referring to his Yosemite review? Is it out yet?

No, I was thinking of Mavericks. I was clearly too tired to be commenting yesterday.

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