I do agree with you that Apple must stop updating OS X annually.
I wish there were more caps between the release dates. They could've improved Lion a lot (giving it Mountain Lion features with updates and Mavericks features as well)
If I was responsible for OS X development then Mac OS X would have had Siri since Lion. It was the first question that popped into my mind when I used Lion for the first time.
Also, many people are switching to PC because Windows tends to get security updates much longer (and apps are supported way longer) than on OS X.
Try running Chrome on Vista (the latest) and try running Chrome on Leopard…nope.
Re Siri on OS X:
What I like about Apple is their overall tendency to not add features until they can be pulled off brilliantly. That's what you see time and time again: A company adds feature X and announces it to the world, but in practice the feature turns out to be flaky or badly implemented in some important way. Traditionally, and generally speaking, Apple will add the same feature a while later, but their implementation usually really works without breaking the overall flow - it becomes something that slightly enhances some aspect of your daily work but you don't really notice until you don't have it or until you're faced with one of the worse implementations of the same feature.
Either they had more pressing features to implement first before prioritizing Siri on macOS, or Siri simply wasn't good enough for desktop use yet. The latter would naturally also be the direct result of the former.
Re supporting apps and OSes for a long time:
This is a double-edged sword. Do we really want Apple to spend a considerable amount of their resources on maintaining parallel platform support for hardware (and for that matter for software libraries) that turned out to be evolutionary dead ends? Isn't it better to say "Hey, sorry, at that time we were in the middle of a transition phase, and mistakes were made. You may continue using that hardware at the latest software level it supports, but if you need later features you really should get yourself a newer machine."
From an Internet security standpoint, that creates a problem, but you always have the choice to mitigate such issues by either following good security practices when connected to the Internet, or by air gapping the machine from the Internet.
(An interesting thing to note, is that both important institutions in the Linux community and Microsoft have joined Apple in gradually limiting their support for 32-bit i386 architectures since a good while back).
Yes, having a release schedule decided on for economical rather than technical reasons risks causing instability in early versions of the new operating systems. The last couple of upgrades were not at all flawless for me. I have good backups and can roll back when stuff hits the fan, but since Apple began their scheduled releases, I've had lingering issues for between one and three months after each upgrade. That's not a good track record - it means that at least some users actually spend between 10 and 25 percent of the release cycle in a larger or smaller degree of frustration. It's still way better than my experience with early adopting operating system versions from some other vendors, but it's a testament to the actual problem Apple is facing now that they have to make their investors happy on cue each successive fall season.
