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> They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it This is a myth, though a myth created by App

by lapcat 2y ago

> They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_changed_features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c... Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS X 10.5.8. There were some really bad bugs in those early Snow Leopard releases. The Snow Leopard that everyone remembers and loves was not version 10.6.0 but rather version 10.6.8 v1.1, which was released almost two years after 10.6.0. Major OS updates invariably introduce more bugs than they fix. That's an iron law of software development. What Apple used to do, which they no longer do, is spend a long amount of time just fixing bugs in minor updates to the operating system. Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule. Worse, Apple doesn't just fix bugs between those yearly updates; instead they keep introducing new features even in the "minor" updates. So we never get a "stable" version. It's constant change for the sake of change.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Yeah it seems like there’s a serious fundamental problem, or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence. Because they still managed to fix all the egregious bugs by August every year, as late as Mojave in 2019. From my recollection at least.
- JimDabell 2y ago
  > Yeah it seems like there’s a serious fundamental problem, or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence. My argument is that they were never building and have never built software at a sustainable pace, even before the yearly cadence. They race ahead with tech debt then never pay it off, so the problem gets progressively worse. A while back, that merely manifested as more and more defects over time. More recently, they began failing to ship on time and started pre-announcing features that would ship later. And now they’ve progressed to failing to ship on time, pre-announcing features that would ship later, and then failing to ship those features later. This is not the yearly cadence. This is consistently committing to more than they are capable of, which results in linear growth of tech debt, which results in rising defects and lower productivity over time. It would happen with any cadence.
veidr 2y ago
Yeah, I personally remember "10.6.0 utterly fucking sucks" (though it got better) — hard to remember the details, which is probably in my personal best interest, but I remember fairly vividly shouting that to friends over beers somewhere. And I also remember 10.7 actually being better and where I thought Mac OS X (and its macOS rebrand) peaked, for interactive/workstation use. However I ran a 10.6.x virtual machine (that yes, ran Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1[1] for the last decade of its service life) until 2021 for a bunch of long-timeline server functions, so I guess Snow Leopard was pretty good overall, in the end... [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/106449 https://support.apple.com/en-us/106449
- ben7799 2y ago
  I can't remember which of these it was but one of these actually "bricked" my Mac Pro on the OS upgrade, at least from the casual Apple fan perspective or the Genius bar perspective. I took it into the Genius bar and they had nothing other than "we will wipe it and get it working." It turned out I was able to boot to single user unix console mode and clean up the issue in an old school style. I have no idea if that is even possible anymore, but in any case I have never had another issue with OSX as severe as that one. Modern Mac OS got really quite high quality at some point but it's easy for people to forget it had a lot of growing pains between 1999-2008 or so.
  - nextos 2y ago
    I agree. About a year into the Intel transition, around 2007, it was incredibly stable. I was doing hardcore computation 24/7 on a MacBook, including model checking real-time systems, and I vividly remember the exact day I experienced one kernel panic. The rest of the time, everything was rock solid. It's sad both quality and aesthetics degraded during the 2010s, where the system somewhat converged to iOS UI patterns and lost skeuomorphism. Apple did skeuomorphism really well, which is hard. No idea why they moved to flat designs, which are easy to copy by competitors.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> It's constant change for the sake of change. This is far from isolated to Apple, too. It's a cancer that's infested virtually every single software company in the entire world at this point, and it's endlessly frustrating. If they don't have some New Shiny Version to show off to the tech media and blogosphere everyone starts acting like the software itself is a dead man walking. I also think it's partially down to all these same companies trying to justify subscription billing with a constant trickle of "new stuff" that the application in question does that you're meant to feel like you'd be missing out on. I don't ascribe to this notion whatsoever. I in fact far prefer my software that barely changes at all over time. My most reliable and useful computer is my huge Ubuntu box that lives in my laundry room which handles... I mean frankly it would be easier to say what it doesn't handle, which is anything Apple adjacent because that's all proprietary, and it doesn't handle my security cameras because I couldn't find a linux-based solution for that. Literally every other automated function outside those two categories is handled by that machine, with a mix of software I've downloaded and configured and a fair bit that I've written myself. I say all this to say that machine barely changes at fucking all. I do security updates of course and occasionally have to tweak something but the apps on it are the same, it serves the same internal websites, it runs the same scripts, like clockwork. I LOVE that thing and my life would be in an utter shambles if some overpaid tech executive had the power to randomly change how it works to justify his salary.
- keyringlight 2y ago
  The way I see it is like fashion or fashion-adjacent, at least on the consumer side. One of the big accomplishments of Jobs direction is that they made computing cool, something you'd want to display instead of a functional beige box you hide away. It's not in the background, you have these colors, elegance or attention to detail on computing you want to be seen, and new major models need to be different to keep customers engaged along with being the status symbol. With further progression on integration/miniaturization and lower power consumption/heat output for general computing, the devices have shrunk to their bare minimum as slabs, there's very little physical to display so the fashion needed to move to software (and what online services it can be a client for). Stasis is death when you rely on selling, and maintenance is a constant cost which no one really wants to pay for. As a side note, it's interesting to compare attitudes to the physical side to PC, where for years there was almost a pride that PC was a minimalist functional box (besides the occasional fun/weird exception), but that contrasts against now where it's hard not to get components with windows or embellished with LEDs and logos on display (and there's another weird contrast, where on one hand you have internals on display, on the other trying to minimize or hiding away the cables as though the inner workings were ugly)
LegNeato 2y ago
As the person who personally ran 10.6 v1.1 at Apple (and 10.5.8), you are wrong(ish). The new version of the OS was always being developed in a branch/train, and fixes were backported to the current version as they were found. They weren't developed linearly / one after another. So yeah, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. But if you are comparing major OS versions, Snow Leopard was different. Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval. In feature releases it was bottom up "here is what we are planning to ship" and in Snow Leopard it was top down "can we ship this?". AFAIK Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind (the first release I worked on was Jaguar or Puma), and was a direct response to taking 8 software updates to stabilize 10.5 and the severity of the bugs found during that cycle and the resulting bad press. Leopard was a HUGE feature release and with it came tons of (bad) bugs. The Apple v1.1 software updates always fixed critical bugs, because: 1. You had to GM / freeze the software to physically create the CDs/DVDs around a month before the release. Bugs found after this process required a repress (can't remember the phrase we used), which cost money and time and scrambled effort at the last minute and added risk. This means the bar was super high, and most "bad, but not can't use your computer bad" bugs were put in v1.1...which was developed concurrently with the end of v1.0 (hence why v1.1s came out right away) 2. Testing was basically engineers, internal QA, some strategic partners like Adobe and MS, and the Apple Seed program (which was tiny). There was very little automated testing. Apple employees are not representative of the population and QA coverage is never very complete. And we sometimes held back features from seed releases when we were worried about leaks, so it wasn't even the complete OS that was being tested. A v1.1 was always needed, though the issues they fixed became less severe over time due to larger seeds (aka betas), recovery partitions, and better / more modern development practices.
- lapcat 2y ago
  > As the person who personally ran 10.6 v1.1 Do you mean Mac OS X 10.6.8 v1.1? Otherwise, I don't know what you mean by "v1.1". In retrospect, I'm guessing that you meant N.1, e.g., 10.6.1. But 10.6.1 certainly didn't solve all of Snow Leopard's problems. Like I said before, the "stable" Snow Leopard everyone loves was the result of almost two years of minor updates. > you are wrong(ish). > So yeah, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. In other words, as you admit, I'm 100% right. ;-) Every new major OS update introduces new bugs, that didn't exist in the previous OS, some of them horrible, and Snow Leopard was no exception. Remember this one? It's hard to find a worse bug than total user data loss: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-bug-responsible-for-loss-of-user-data-gaining-notice.801736/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-bug-respon...
deergomoo 2y ago
> Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule I cannot think of anything that less needs yearly major updates than macOS. It's a mature, 25 year old OS that, unlike iOS, is used for an enormous range of professional work. I need to it be fast, stable, and predictable. The last thing I want is change for the sake of change, which largely describes the last 5-10 years of the OS. Wanna make Notes.app compatible with the new features in this year's iOS? Just update Notes. I don't need a whole new OS to get new features for a notepad.
- phillipcarter 2y ago
  Effectively supporting the workflows people have on an OS necessarily involves significant OS updates given enough users and enough workflows.
  - wpm 2y ago
    What workflows were people doing that required macOS Sequoia? Which ones were improved? Enabled? Hindered?

by lapcat 2y ago

MichaelZuo 2y ago

Yeah it seems like there’s a serious fundamental problem, or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence. Because they still managed to fix all the egregious bugs by August every year, as late as Mojave in 2019. From my recollection at least.

JimDabell 2y ago
> Yeah it seems like there’s a serious fundamental problem, or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence. My argument is that they were never building and have never built software at a sustainable pace, even before the yearly cadence. They race ahead with tech debt then never pay it off, so the problem gets progressively worse. A while back, that merely manifested as more and more defects over time. More recently, they began failing to ship on time and started pre-announcing features that would ship later. And now they’ve progressed to failing to ship on time, pre-announcing features that would ship later, and then failing to ship those features later. This is not the yearly cadence. This is consistently committing to more than they are capable of, which results in linear growth of tech debt, which results in rising defects and lower productivity over time. It would happen with any cadence.

veidr 2y ago

Yeah, I personally remember "10.6.0 utterly fucking sucks" (though it got better) — hard to remember the details, which is probably in my personal best interest, but I remember fairly vividly shouting that to friends over beers somewhere. And I also remember 10.7 actually being better and where I thought Mac OS X (and its macOS rebrand) peaked, for interactive/workstation use. However I ran a 10.6.x virtual machine (that yes, ran Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1[1] for the last decade of its service life) until 2021 for a bunch of long-timeline server functions, so I guess Snow Leopard was pretty good overall, in the end... [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/106449 https://support.apple.com/en-us/106449

ben7799 2y ago
I can't remember which of these it was but one of these actually "bricked" my Mac Pro on the OS upgrade, at least from the casual Apple fan perspective or the Genius bar perspective. I took it into the Genius bar and they had nothing other than "we will wipe it and get it working." It turned out I was able to boot to single user unix console mode and clean up the issue in an old school style. I have no idea if that is even possible anymore, but in any case I have never had another issue with OSX as severe as that one. Modern Mac OS got really quite high quality at some point but it's easy for people to forget it had a lot of growing pains between 1999-2008 or so.
- nextos 2y ago
  I agree. About a year into the Intel transition, around 2007, it was incredibly stable. I was doing hardcore computation 24/7 on a MacBook, including model checking real-time systems, and I vividly remember the exact day I experienced one kernel panic. The rest of the time, everything was rock solid. It's sad both quality and aesthetics degraded during the 2010s, where the system somewhat converged to iOS UI patterns and lost skeuomorphism. Apple did skeuomorphism really well, which is hard. No idea why they moved to flat designs, which are easy to copy by competitors.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> It's constant change for the sake of change. This is far from isolated to Apple, too. It's a cancer that's infested virtually every single software company in the entire world at this point, and it's endlessly frustrating. If they don't have some New Shiny Version to show off to the tech media and blogosphere everyone starts acting like the software itself is a dead man walking. I also think it's partially down to all these same companies trying to justify subscription billing with a constant trickle of "new stuff" that the application in question does that you're meant to feel like you'd be missing out on. I don't ascribe to this notion whatsoever. I in fact far prefer my software that barely changes at all over time. My most reliable and useful computer is my huge Ubuntu box that lives in my laundry room which handles... I mean frankly it would be easier to say what it doesn't handle, which is anything Apple adjacent because that's all proprietary, and it doesn't handle my security cameras because I couldn't find a linux-based solution for that. Literally every other automated function outside those two categories is handled by that machine, with a mix of software I've downloaded and configured and a fair bit that I've written myself. I say all this to say that machine barely changes at fucking all. I do security updates of course and occasionally have to tweak something but the apps on it are the same, it serves the same internal websites, it runs the same scripts, like clockwork. I LOVE that thing and my life would be in an utter shambles if some overpaid tech executive had the power to randomly change how it works to justify his salary.

keyringlight 2y ago
The way I see it is like fashion or fashion-adjacent, at least on the consumer side. One of the big accomplishments of Jobs direction is that they made computing cool, something you'd want to display instead of a functional beige box you hide away. It's not in the background, you have these colors, elegance or attention to detail on computing you want to be seen, and new major models need to be different to keep customers engaged along with being the status symbol. With further progression on integration/miniaturization and lower power consumption/heat output for general computing, the devices have shrunk to their bare minimum as slabs, there's very little physical to display so the fashion needed to move to software (and what online services it can be a client for). Stasis is death when you rely on selling, and maintenance is a constant cost which no one really wants to pay for. As a side note, it's interesting to compare attitudes to the physical side to PC, where for years there was almost a pride that PC was a minimalist functional box (besides the occasional fun/weird exception), but that contrasts against now where it's hard not to get components with windows or embellished with LEDs and logos on display (and there's another weird contrast, where on one hand you have internals on display, on the other trying to minimize or hiding away the cables as though the inner workings were ugly)

LegNeato 2y ago

As the person who personally ran 10.6 v1.1 at Apple (and 10.5.8), you are wrong(ish). The new version of the OS was always being developed in a branch/train, and fixes were backported to the current version as they were found. They weren't developed linearly / one after another. So yeah, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. But if you are comparing major OS versions, Snow Leopard was different. Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval. In feature releases it was bottom up "here is what we are planning to ship" and in Snow Leopard it was top down "can we ship this?". AFAIK Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind (the first release I worked on was Jaguar or Puma), and was a direct response to taking 8 software updates to stabilize 10.5 and the severity of the bugs found during that cycle and the resulting bad press. Leopard was a HUGE feature release and with it came tons of (bad) bugs. The Apple v1.1 software updates always fixed critical bugs, because: 1. You had to GM / freeze the software to physically create the CDs/DVDs around a month before the release. Bugs found after this process required a repress (can't remember the phrase we used), which cost money and time and scrambled effort at the last minute and added risk. This means the bar was super high, and most "bad, but not can't use your computer bad" bugs were put in v1.1...which was developed concurrently with the end of v1.0 (hence why v1.1s came out right away) 2. Testing was basically engineers, internal QA, some strategic partners like Adobe and MS, and the Apple Seed program (which was tiny). There was very little automated testing. Apple employees are not representative of the population and QA coverage is never very complete. And we sometimes held back features from seed releases when we were worried about leaks, so it wasn't even the complete OS that was being tested. A v1.1 was always needed, though the issues they fixed became less severe over time due to larger seeds (aka betas), recovery partitions, and better / more modern development practices.

lapcat 2y ago
> As the person who personally ran 10.6 v1.1 Do you mean Mac OS X 10.6.8 v1.1? Otherwise, I don't know what you mean by "v1.1". In retrospect, I'm guessing that you meant N.1, e.g., 10.6.1. But 10.6.1 certainly didn't solve all of Snow Leopard's problems. Like I said before, the "stable" Snow Leopard everyone loves was the result of almost two years of minor updates. > you are wrong(ish). > So yeah, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. In other words, as you admit, I'm 100% right. ;-) Every new major OS update introduces new bugs, that didn't exist in the previous OS, some of them horrible, and Snow Leopard was no exception. Remember this one? It's hard to find a worse bug than total user data loss: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-bug-responsible-for-loss-of-user-data-gaining-notice.801736/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-bug-respon...

deergomoo 2y ago

> Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule I cannot think of anything that less needs yearly major updates than macOS. It's a mature, 25 year old OS that, unlike iOS, is used for an enormous range of professional work. I need to it be fast, stable, and predictable. The last thing I want is change for the sake of change, which largely describes the last 5-10 years of the OS. Wanna make Notes.app compatible with the new features in this year's iOS? Just update Notes. I don't need a whole new OS to get new features for a notepad.

phillipcarter 2y ago
Effectively supporting the workflows people have on an OS necessarily involves significant OS updates given enough users and enough workflows.
- wpm 2y ago
  What workflows were people doing that required macOS Sequoia? Which ones were improved? Enabled? Hindered?