> If Samsung announced that next year they weren't releasing a new Galaxy phone, the entire industry would freak out. The smartphone industry has only themselv

> If Samsung announced that next year they weren't releasing a new Galaxy phone, the entire industry would freak out. The smartphone industry has only themselves to blame for setting up this expectation. But it is possible to get off the train. I remember when Apple announced they were dropping out of the annual MacWorld San Francisco conference, because they didn't want to constrain their product release cycle. Apple survived that just fine. > In the Vista/7/8 era, Microsoft looked like they were falling behind because their competitors started releasing yearly, or even bi-yearly, feature updates. Competitors? Windows and Mac had near 100% market share on desktop. There was only 1 competitor. Vista was released in January 2007, but Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was infamously delayed until October 2007 because of iPhone, so this telling of history doesn't seem entirely accurate. Moreover, Mac OS X releases were already slowing. Here's a list of months since the previous major .0 release: 10.1.0 6 10.2.0 11 10.3.0 14 10.4.0 18 10.5.0 18 10.6.0 22 10.7.0 23 10.8.0 12 10.9.0 15 10.10.0 12 10.11.0 11 10.12.0 12 10.13.0 12 10.14.0 12 10.15.0 12 Thus, major Mac OS releases were slowing down year by year — which is totally sensible — but then Steve Jobs died after 10.7 was released in 2011, and only then did they switch to a yearly schedule.