Here we go with the tutti-frutti, phoney-baloney, plastic banana, good time, rock-n-roll Apple PR "leaks," this time about Apple going "all-in" on bug fixes. The problem is much bigger than can be fixed in a week because it is strongly influenced by the insistence on secrecy first and releasing everything at the same time second. Until that culture changes, expect more of the same, no mater what Apple PR "leaks."
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Apple Briefly Paused Work on New Features for iOS 18 and macOS 15 to Clean Up Bugs
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I wish Apple would stop with the yearly updates and stop iOS-ifying macOS. I hope they pause all new features and just fix bugs and finally work on GUI design, fit and finish. This should be an every other year thing.
Each OS should look and behave relative to the devices they are used on (desktop versus mobile) while continuing to work seamlessly together. Bring back unique shaped icons for the desktop and subtle and tasteful textures, shadows and buttons.
iOS has been 'flat' and visually the same (give or take a few widgets) for over 10 years now - far longer than the iOS style it replaced was in use. Unfortunately, everyone seems to copy Apple's design style, so frustrating and often unintuitive navigation has become commonplace. It's time to bring elegance and design back into Apple GUIs.
There is a middle-ground between leather stitching gaud and boring, lazy, flat design with tiny links, arrows, 'x' buttons, while lacking options and features - all within a sea of blank GUI nothingness in some cases. I trust Apple and their endless resources to get there for both macOS and iOS/iPadOS.
Each OS should look and behave relative to the devices they are used on (desktop versus mobile) while continuing to work seamlessly together. Bring back unique shaped icons for the desktop and subtle and tasteful textures, shadows and buttons.
iOS has been 'flat' and visually the same (give or take a few widgets) for over 10 years now - far longer than the iOS style it replaced was in use. Unfortunately, everyone seems to copy Apple's design style, so frustrating and often unintuitive navigation has become commonplace. It's time to bring elegance and design back into Apple GUIs.
There is a middle-ground between leather stitching gaud and boring, lazy, flat design with tiny links, arrows, 'x' buttons, while lacking options and features - all within a sea of blank GUI nothingness in some cases. I trust Apple and their endless resources to get there for both macOS and iOS/iPadOS.
Did you read some other story (or no story at all)?
Nowhere in the story did it say what you just said. They are going right back to feature development on it.
Where?
Folks at Apple switch teams all the time. Like, not several times a year, but certainly over the course of their careers there.
And it's certainly possible — and does happen at Apple — to have some staff on the team focus on the next release and some other staff on fixes to the current release. There isn't 100% overlap between the people working on iOS 18 and those working on iOS 17.2, or 17.1.1, for that matter.
This is decided by the team. There is no Federighi edict on it.
And Gurman certainly does not have any idea about it, because the idea of a one-week bug fixing sprint is idiotic. You're losing velocity pulling everyone from what they're working on, and then you're only doing it for five days. Also, not every engineer's expertise is in bug-hunting. People who research prototypes for iOS 19 and beyond, or for Swift, or even for future apps. People working on Vision Pro (which has yet to see a stable release and therefore is not affected by any public-facing bugs). None of them are a good fit for "alright, boss got annoyed by some bugs, chop chop, fix 'em". That's a horrible way to run an engineering org, and given that Federighi was long a developer himself, he would know.
…? By whom?
Noo Snow Leopard was perfect and had no bugs, how dare you. /s
Not really, just been a while. Snow leopard was named the way it was because it was literally an entire release dedicated to bug fixes and stability improvements from leopard (and yes, its rollout was rough, but it became a massive improvement over leopard after those gm release issues were ironed out)
They need to do that again, not just a temp freeze but an entire release cycle where feature work is deprioritized and focus is on stability and bugs
The whole point of a beta is to find bugs and fix them, and allow developers to test their own apps so they have anything show-stopping fixed by the final release.
A dev beta is never 'feature complete'.
I tried to explain this above. It takes a long time to become familiar with a section of code and understand how it works. so teams are organized around blocks of code. Debugging code you have never seen before is really hard and times a lot of time. Mostly you just try and figure out how it works. It is a very unproductive process.
I hate car analogies but let's say you are designing a car and you have a teems that works on hydraulic brake cylinders and another that works on a wire harness When problems happen you need the specialists to look at the place where they are experts. You become the expert on a system because you worked on it for some years
Thank for posting this. Interesting article. I had no idea this device even existed.
Craig's new M3 came and he could not install the newest OS on it. Must have gotten really upset.
Because the people making podcast is hired, and overcast is made with love. Ez
Pause it for a full year, focusing solely on optimisations (including for battery life) and big fixes.
I'm someone who remembers Mac OS X Snow Leopard, whose goal was improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint, rather than new features. I heartily endorse ALL OS developers, not just Apple, to adopt this strategy from time to time. Our digital devices become more and more swamped with features we don't want, don't need or can't figure out how to use, or just don't work right, and take up more and more memory and bandwidth. It's good to see Apple hasn't completely abandoned this practice.
Guess when people don’t want your updates anymore and you’ve been sued for slowing down phones, might as well eventually learn
We need a tick-tock cycle of cleaning up/overhauling the system performance and bugs, and adding new features. Or just hire a LOT more engineers and managers to work on improving their processes for catching bugs?
What's funny about this whole buggy debacle this autumn is in the past I feel like I would get the most random bugs that nobody else had, and this cycle I am not experiencing any of these bugs, for the most part. Only my weather widget on my watch was glitching out but it still worked most of the time when it didn't work at all for others. So strange. And with the watch battery draining bug, I only noticed a slight dip on my Ultra 2. I haven't been experiencing any of the macOS, iOS, or iPadOS bugs.
What's funny about this whole buggy debacle this autumn is in the past I feel like I would get the most random bugs that nobody else had, and this cycle I am not experiencing any of these bugs, for the most part. Only my weather widget on my watch was glitching out but it still worked most of the time when it didn't work at all for others. So strange. And with the watch battery draining bug, I only noticed a slight dip on my Ultra 2. I haven't been experiencing any of the macOS, iOS, or iPadOS bugs.
This is an aside, but Apple didn't invent podcasting, nor claim to. Here's a fun clip on the matter featuring Jobs. (I believe this is from him showing the first version of iTunes that supported podcasts… 4.7?)