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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
by 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...