“On stage at Apple’s World Wide Developers’ Conference in June 2009, Bertrand Serlet, the company’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at the time, announced that the forthcoming OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard would feature ‘no new features,’ — something Mr. Serlet suggested was ‘unprecedented’ in the computing industry,” Charles Moore writes for MacPrices. “In fact, Snow Leopard did have some new feature content, but Mr. Serlet’s point was that the main thrust of the version upgrade was to polish and refine the performance of OS X 10.5 Leopard with bugfixes and some mainly under-the-hood tweaking, rather than adding a raft of new features likely in need of refinement.”
“Apple affirmed that to create Snow Leopard, its software engineers had refined 90 percent of the more than 1,000 projects that comprise Mac OS X (which the OS was still called), an exercise that was successful in producing what is arguably the most solid and stable version of OS X ever — an achievement that still stands,” Moore writes. “Going on five years and and four full OS X version upgrades later, many Mac users whose aging machines are still capable of supporting 10.6 are still using it for production and productivity, with its rock-solid stability combining with it being the last OS X version to support Rosetta emulation for running ‘Carbon’ software applications ported from native Power PC to Intel.”
“That would include me,” Moore writes. “What Mac users need isn’t more new features in the OS, but rather a Snow Leopard style ‘no new features” bugfix upgrade.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sounds familiar.
Apple needs to do better. Our expectations, some of us as users of Apple products since the early 1980s, are not being met when it comes to operating system quality. Used to be, you could pretty confidently install brand new operating systems from Apple. Recently, we’re more inclined to wait for a few point releases than not. It’s downright Microsoftian. Lately, your software seems rushed, Apple. Is “rush job” really the impression you want to give your customers?
Slow down, Apple! Getting it right is far more important than getting it out. – MacDailyNews, December 22, 2014
In other words, take a step back, take a deep breath, and focus on making sure that what you have now just works. Because too much of it doesn’t (Wi-Fi connectivity for one ongoing, glaring, vexing example). Getting it right is far more important than having two “new” free OSes to release each year. Seriously, nobody outside of Cupertino very much cares. We do, however, care very much that Apple’s software and services work as flawlessly as possible. – MacDailyNews, January 5, 2015
Related article:
Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better – January 5, 2015