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Who else is going to wait for the .2 or .3 release for better stability? It used to be that Windows was the one that was always made fun of for its instability

Who else is going to wait for the .2 or .3 release for better stability? It used to be that Windows was the one that was always made fun of for its instability and bugs, and everyone would upgrade to a new version only after SP1 was released. Well, at one point it got even more funny (for other reasons) when the very first release of Windows Server 2008 was actually Windows Server 2008 SP1 (so the first "service pack" released later was SP2). [1] The scene on the OS X/macOS front has not been good for a long time with respect to .0 releases. If there is one release of Mac OS X that will be held dear and always remembered of fondly, that'd be Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It came nearly two years after its predecessor, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and had only under-the-hood improvements. [2] But subsequent releases after it have become more bloated and not provided a great experience in their .0 versions. After a long gap, OS X El Capitan was supposed to be like Snow Leopard, with improvements mainly in stability and performance. The problem with bloated and less stable major releases is that whenever a better release comes along, many Macs may not be eligible to upgrade to them. This leaves the owners of those machines stuck with a relatively newer but somewhat crippled OS with no easy way forward. It would be good to have Apple focus more on the stability and performance aspect in every single major release, but that's just a dream. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008#Service_Pack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008#Service_Pa... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard

pfranz 10y ago
I think your feeling that Apple keeps dropping support for computers by releasing bloated, less stable releases is a bit off base. I can't remember who, but I was hearing an ex-Apple employee (it was someone like Don Melton who lead the Safari and WebKit team) talk about Snow Leopard after they left Apple. They were saying the "No Major Features" tagline was something that was thought up by marketing very late in the process. Also, the bug count was on par with other releases. Sorry to drop such a bold claim without a specific citation. I think if it was more rock-solid than other releases it was more luck than anything else. While that may not have been their goal marketing/Steve Jobs might have picked up on how that version developed. Snow Leopard dropped PPC support, which I'm sure streamlined a lot of things and shrank the size of their fat binaries. Finder was rewritten in Cocoa--which is very user-facing (and could have introduced major bugs). With the drop of PPC support it dropped support for the largest number of computers I saw in use by friends and family. OSX releases from Mountain Lion (2012) until just today with Sierra, didn't drop support for any computers. Even then, the newest computers they dropped support for were from 2010.[1] I'm not saying new versions aren't slower than predecessors. OSX 10.0 was incredibly slow and I think there was a lot of low-hanging fruit to increase performance (heck, moving desktop rendering/compositing to the GPU lightens the load on the CPU a lot). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Sierra#System_requirements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Sierra#System_requiremen...

pfranz 10y ago

I think your feeling that Apple keeps dropping support for computers by releasing bloated, less stable releases is a bit off base. I can't remember who, but I was hearing an ex-Apple employee (it was someone like Don Melton who lead the Safari and WebKit team) talk about Snow Leopard after they left Apple. They were saying the "No Major Features" tagline was something that was thought up by marketing very late in the process. Also, the bug count was on par with other releases. Sorry to drop such a bold claim without a specific citation. I think if it was more rock-solid than other releases it was more luck than anything else. While that may not have been their goal marketing/Steve Jobs might have picked up on how that version developed. Snow Leopard dropped PPC support, which I'm sure streamlined a lot of things and shrank the size of their fat binaries. Finder was rewritten in Cocoa--which is very user-facing (and could have introduced major bugs). With the drop of PPC support it dropped support for the largest number of computers I saw in use by friends and family. OSX releases from Mountain Lion (2012) until just today with Sierra, didn't drop support for any computers. Even then, the newest computers they dropped support for were from 2010.[1] I'm not saying new versions aren't slower than predecessors. OSX 10.0 was incredibly slow and I think there was a lot of low-hanging fruit to increase performance (heck, moving desktop rendering/compositing to the GPU lightens the load on the CPU a lot). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Sierra#System_requirements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Sierra#System_requiremen...