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...Let's just take the iTunes examples again: the previous version already existed and was good enough to do its job. Why spend the effort on a new, worse versi

...Let's just take the iTunes examples again: the previous version already existed and was good enough to do its job. Why spend the effort on a new, worse version? The Apple would still be raking in the cash, even more of it since they wouldn't have spend some of it on this pointless endeavour. By your dint of logic, we could have just stopped programming tomorrow altogether and most of the things would be just fine, and we could spend all this huge amount of human effort on something else (something presumably more important). That'd be quite pragmatic, wouldn't it? So why do we not?

tempaway38641 3y ago
Never ending competitive upgrade treadmill, aka innovation. Even if you dont want to release an upgrade, the layer below that you rely on still will, and then you'll have to keep up.
- naasking 3y ago
  It seems like a mistake to conflate an upgrade treadmill with innovation.
  - tempaway38641 3y ago
    People innovating in the lower layers (e.g. Apple decides to move to ARM) creates an update treadmill for everyone in the upper layers
    - naasking 3y ago
      That doesn't make sense. If I'm on x64 Mac OS, why should Apple switching to ARM on their newer computers that other people are buying necessitate an update treadmill for me? Or anyone for that matter, even the people buying the new computers? Apple could just port the existing software over.