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Apple Pulls Third Software Update in Past Month Due to Issues
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Nothing should ship until it has zero bugs? Nothing should go to beta until it has zero bugs? Sorry, no school teaches that, and if one did then their valedictorian isn’t going to, and shouldn’t, get far.
I’m not making excuses for poor software at all. I’m explaining the reality of software development.
That's oversimplification. Bad beta releases lead to bad production releases. If the beta release has no issues, chances for production release being good are much better than when the beta releases are crap.
A beta release isn't like soft opening a restaurant. It's not a preview release. It's not a cool kids release to get features to people who know which toggle to set in Software Update. It's not a practice run.
A beta release is for testing. The earlier you get people testing, the better equipped you are to fix what you find. If you have hundreds of millions of devices out there, all used and configured differently, most with "send usage data to Apple" turned off, then the best way to find problems is to test against real devices. That's a beta.
No problems so far on my ultra 2, although the installation took a little longer than expected as others have pointed out.
No need to explain the obvious. The company that manages to release more reliable/stable beta releases has a superior (to Apple's) software development process. The fact that Apple software is getting worse and worse in quality is a widely acknowledged fact here at MR. Withdrawn releases just confirm people's observations.
There is a need to explain the obvious because it obviously isn't obvious to everyone... You don't seem to grasp what a beta is meant to do. You're still discussing it like it's something other than an incomplete test build.
Let's take iPadOS 18 as an example. Did you see reports of the beta releases of 18.0 bricking iPads? I didn't. Yet the final release appears to. If their beta release were able to surface those failures, then the final release wouldn't be causing these problems for customers. Failures in the beta would have indicated a superior development process.
A lack of failure in the beta test doesn't tell you anything about the process just like getting 100% on an academic test doesn't tell you anything. If the test is difficult, and someone misses an answer but learns from that mistake they're better prepared for the future than if they'd gotten 100% on a test that didn't ask that question to begin with.
It’s a beta, but if you’re going to make beta’s available to the general public you shouldn’t be bricking devices.
Software that crashes or bricks a device is not beta software, it is called alpha or pre-alpha software. Apple should stop with their yearly releases. Look at the massive improvement from macOS Leopard (2007) to macOS Snow Leopard (2009). Actually, Apple should release new software only every 3 or 4 years, there is no point releasing unstable software every year.
