5 ms·

Apple needs another "Snow Leopard" release - spend an entire year not adding anything - just focus on making everything work better, fix bugs, etc.

saagarjha 7y ago
They just did that with iOS 12/macOS Mojave. I guess they need another one?
- criddell 7y ago
  iOS 12 and Mojave are fine. Just stay there, fix bugs, and add support for new hardware.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    iOS 12 is fine for phones maybe, but iOS 13 (or iPadOS if you prefer) is a pretty big change for iPads in terms of power-user features. USB storage support, network drive support, multiple instances of apps, multiple apps switchable in slide-over, major improvements to Safari. I've run into some bugs, but I wouldn't switch back to 12. EDIT - Forgot to mention the contextual menus, which are new to iPads this year as well. I think iPhones with 3D touch hardware had similar actions available in some places, but it's a big addition for iPads and the fact that it's supported across all devices now means that 3rd party devs will bother to implement it.
    - criddell 7y ago
      Storage support is a sensible addition to the OS for sure. It should also be in iOS. I think the multiple app stuff was a mistake on Apples part. It complicates the OS significantly and starts to make it feel like a computer operating system. Improvements to Safari make sense, but then I'd consider that an application and not part of the operating system.
      - wlesieutre 7y ago
        Multiple windows is easy to ignore if you don't want it, but especially with the side-by-side multitasking view it's very nice to be able to group app instances together as they relate to things you're working on, and not sweating the fact that there can only be one web browser window. For instance, if I'm doing research on something, I might have Notes or MindNode running with a copy of Safari paired alongside it. Those research related tabs are kept in their own world, not mixed with my main Safari instance and it's accumulated tabs. And then let's say I'm writing an email about my travel plans and want to pull up the airline's website to look at my reservation. I can do that in a separate Safari instance instead of taking away the research sidebar from next to my MindNode document. And the new Mail message can be its own window while I write it. If I need to refer to another message in my inbox, I don't have to close the draft I'm writing to get back to my inbox, and then go fetch it out of the drafts folder when I want to get back to it. Just swipe over to the main Mail window and swipe back when I'm done. Or take an app like GoodNotes, where I have several notebooks on different subjects. I can open two of them at once instead of having to close notebook A, open notebook B, make a note, close notebook B, reopen notebook A every time I want to jot a quick note down in a different topic. There's an adjustment period if you want to get in the habit of thinking about the iPad this way. But being able to operate it in terms of different tasks and projects, leaving their workspaces intact and unpolluted to come back to later, is a much more productive setup than having to play "How can I best allocate my single instance of the text editor?"
        criddell 7y ago
        It's hard to ignore it when the introduction of the features destabilizes the rest of the operating system. I get how multiple windows is great for productivity, but I'd rather seem Apple push macOS for those use cases and keep the iPad as simple as possible.
        wlesieutre 7y ago
        I've not seen any OS stability issues, my main issue has been the Mail rewrite not listing messages reliably. Pretty frequently messages show up as a blank white box. But it hasn't been crashing. 13.2 had an issue with apps terminating and having to be relaunched every time you backgrounded them, but that hit the iPhone too so it wasn't an iPad multi-window problem. Speculation I saw was blaming iPhone 11 camera RAM requirements for more aggressive memory management, but who knows.
    - clairity 7y ago
      yup, of the 3 (mbp, iphone, ipad), my ipad pro is the only the only one i've updated with the latest OS, mainly for the improvements to multi-tasking windows and having the "today view" on the home screen. i've had no major (additional) bugs pop up yet.
  - driverdan 7y ago
    OS X was fine for a long time before Mojave. I can't remember the last release that added a feature I cared about.
- benologist 7y ago
  I think they need to do it to hardware too, they will be selling shitty butterfly keyboards for 1 - 2 more years while they stutter out upgrades. The 13" MBP upgrade is expected to be another 6 - 7 months away which is just incoherent, Minis and the iMacs are all over a year old again albeit they at least don't have the butterfly keyboards.
Xixi 7y ago
People remember fondly of Snow Leopard 10.6.8, but the introduction of Snow Leopard 10.6.0 was very rough, certainly not bug free. Snow Leopard did change a lot of things under the hood (64-bit mostly, maybe Grand Central Dispatch). At the time I was depending on macports to install a lot of dev dependencies: mono was broken, and a bunch of other libraries were also not compiling anymore. It is to this day the only macOS (then Mac OS X) release that I had to downgrade from. But I'm more cautious now... still running Mojave. That said on principle I agree: I want an OS that works better and faster, not more features.
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  Bertrand Serlet used to go through ps output looking for threads so he could berate managers about not using GCD. So we had to uproot a bunch of stuff just to change the threading model used. It was a strange way to manage tens of thousands of people.
kalleboo 7y ago
They did that with iOS 12. iOS 12 was great. Actually made a bunch of old devices more usable. But then for iOS 13 they tried to catch up with 2 years worth of features in 1 year... They just need to either slow down the pace, or figure out how to scale their developer count better.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  iOS 9 as well. But then two versions later we were back to buggy iOS 11. And now the same with iOS 13. Personally, I think the annual release cycle is the problem. They keep having to release these “clean up” versions because they didn’t have time to perfect the originals. Of note on the macOS side, everyone’s fondly-remembered Snow Leopard was also the last non-annual release.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    > annual release cycle is the problem Yeah, this is a problem. They announce a bunch of features at WWDC in June, and everyone expects them in September. If their WWDC announcement was just developer API stuff, and they announced the iOS features a few weeks before release, they'd have a better idea of what was actually ready. Then they could release features in point releases spread across the year.
oefrha 7y ago
They should totally do that to macOS and i(Phone)OS, but personally I can’t wait to see what else they have in mind for iPadOS. Big fan of iPad Pro, could still use a lot more power user features though.
madeofpalk 7y ago
Wait, do you mean the Snow Leopard release that deleted your user account if you logged into the Guest account? That 'perfect' 'fix bugs' release?

saagarjha 7y ago

They just did that with iOS 12/macOS Mojave. I guess they need another one?

criddell 7y ago
iOS 12 and Mojave are fine. Just stay there, fix bugs, and add support for new hardware.
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  iOS 12 is fine for phones maybe, but iOS 13 (or iPadOS if you prefer) is a pretty big change for iPads in terms of power-user features. USB storage support, network drive support, multiple instances of apps, multiple apps switchable in slide-over, major improvements to Safari. I've run into some bugs, but I wouldn't switch back to 12. EDIT - Forgot to mention the contextual menus, which are new to iPads this year as well. I think iPhones with 3D touch hardware had similar actions available in some places, but it's a big addition for iPads and the fact that it's supported across all devices now means that 3rd party devs will bother to implement it.
  - criddell 7y ago
    Storage support is a sensible addition to the OS for sure. It should also be in iOS. I think the multiple app stuff was a mistake on Apples part. It complicates the OS significantly and starts to make it feel like a computer operating system. Improvements to Safari make sense, but then I'd consider that an application and not part of the operating system.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      Multiple windows is easy to ignore if you don't want it, but especially with the side-by-side multitasking view it's very nice to be able to group app instances together as they relate to things you're working on, and not sweating the fact that there can only be one web browser window. For instance, if I'm doing research on something, I might have Notes or MindNode running with a copy of Safari paired alongside it. Those research related tabs are kept in their own world, not mixed with my main Safari instance and it's accumulated tabs. And then let's say I'm writing an email about my travel plans and want to pull up the airline's website to look at my reservation. I can do that in a separate Safari instance instead of taking away the research sidebar from next to my MindNode document. And the new Mail message can be its own window while I write it. If I need to refer to another message in my inbox, I don't have to close the draft I'm writing to get back to my inbox, and then go fetch it out of the drafts folder when I want to get back to it. Just swipe over to the main Mail window and swipe back when I'm done. Or take an app like GoodNotes, where I have several notebooks on different subjects. I can open two of them at once instead of having to close notebook A, open notebook B, make a note, close notebook B, reopen notebook A every time I want to jot a quick note down in a different topic. There's an adjustment period if you want to get in the habit of thinking about the iPad this way. But being able to operate it in terms of different tasks and projects, leaving their workspaces intact and unpolluted to come back to later, is a much more productive setup than having to play "How can I best allocate my single instance of the text editor?"
      - criddell 7y ago
        It's hard to ignore it when the introduction of the features destabilizes the rest of the operating system. I get how multiple windows is great for productivity, but I'd rather seem Apple push macOS for those use cases and keep the iPad as simple as possible.
        wlesieutre 7y ago
        I've not seen any OS stability issues, my main issue has been the Mail rewrite not listing messages reliably. Pretty frequently messages show up as a blank white box. But it hasn't been crashing. 13.2 had an issue with apps terminating and having to be relaunched every time you backgrounded them, but that hit the iPhone too so it wasn't an iPad multi-window problem. Speculation I saw was blaming iPhone 11 camera RAM requirements for more aggressive memory management, but who knows.
  - clairity 7y ago
    yup, of the 3 (mbp, iphone, ipad), my ipad pro is the only the only one i've updated with the latest OS, mainly for the improvements to multi-tasking windows and having the "today view" on the home screen. i've had no major (additional) bugs pop up yet.
- driverdan 7y ago
  OS X was fine for a long time before Mojave. I can't remember the last release that added a feature I cared about.
benologist 7y ago
I think they need to do it to hardware too, they will be selling shitty butterfly keyboards for 1 - 2 more years while they stutter out upgrades. The 13" MBP upgrade is expected to be another 6 - 7 months away which is just incoherent, Minis and the iMacs are all over a year old again albeit they at least don't have the butterfly keyboards.

Xixi 7y ago

People remember fondly of Snow Leopard 10.6.8, but the introduction of Snow Leopard 10.6.0 was very rough, certainly not bug free. Snow Leopard did change a lot of things under the hood (64-bit mostly, maybe Grand Central Dispatch). At the time I was depending on macports to install a lot of dev dependencies: mono was broken, and a bunch of other libraries were also not compiling anymore. It is to this day the only macOS (then Mac OS X) release that I had to downgrade from. But I'm more cautious now... still running Mojave. That said on principle I agree: I want an OS that works better and faster, not more features.

CoolGuySteve 7y ago
Bertrand Serlet used to go through ps output looking for threads so he could berate managers about not using GCD. So we had to uproot a bunch of stuff just to change the threading model used. It was a strange way to manage tens of thousands of people.

kalleboo 7y ago

They did that with iOS 12. iOS 12 was great. Actually made a bunch of old devices more usable. But then for iOS 13 they tried to catch up with 2 years worth of features in 1 year... They just need to either slow down the pace, or figure out how to scale their developer count better.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
iOS 9 as well. But then two versions later we were back to buggy iOS 11. And now the same with iOS 13. Personally, I think the annual release cycle is the problem. They keep having to release these “clean up” versions because they didn’t have time to perfect the originals. Of note on the macOS side, everyone’s fondly-remembered Snow Leopard was also the last non-annual release.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  > annual release cycle is the problem Yeah, this is a problem. They announce a bunch of features at WWDC in June, and everyone expects them in September. If their WWDC announcement was just developer API stuff, and they announced the iOS features a few weeks before release, they'd have a better idea of what was actually ready. Then they could release features in point releases spread across the year.

oefrha 7y ago

They should totally do that to macOS and i(Phone)OS, but personally I can’t wait to see what else they have in mind for iPadOS. Big fan of iPad Pro, could still use a lot more power user features though.

madeofpalk 7y ago

Wait, do you mean the Snow Leopard release that deleted your user account if you logged into the Guest account? That 'perfect' 'fix bugs' release?