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That's not true. Snow leopard for example didn't have much user-facing features but included really important technologies that were highlighted at WWDC i.e Grand Central Dispatch. Developers don't need every release to contain new user-facing features.

But what about the customers. That's what I mean by spectacle. Consumers want to see a show, a presentation... pertaining to new features. At the end of the day, it's all about selling products.
 
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Just stop with the huge yearly updates. Just add features when there ready. Maybe announce a year long roadmap of features, but slowly add them over a year, instead of trying to rush everything for September. Also, put macOS back on a 18 to 30 month upgrade cycle

Completely AGREE. It's crazy and exhausting to have a "major" release every freaking year. By the time the kinks of the MacOS release has been ironed out.. they want to us to be ready for the next OS. It's like moving into place and fixing it up and just when you are comfortable, BAM... time to get ready to move out.
 
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Did I read an old article or is Apple "overhauling" their development process every year now and delaying features? Is this the "think different" thing that Tim was talking about earlier? Honestly, Apple is so broken. Year after they don't deliver and they fired Scott Forstall for one "mistep" That Tim ultimately approved.
 
But what about the customers. That's what I mean by spectacle. Consumers want to see a show, a presentation... pertaining to new features. At the end of the day, it's all about selling products.

Fair enough. However, I remember showing a friend the iOS 12 beta and they reaction was, "It doesn't really seem different". That didn't make them switch their iPhones though ;). I believe users want stability over features any day of the week.
 
Good. I am happy with iOS and I like iOS 13, but it has been buggy in some areas (Mail and HomeKit) for me. I am all for improvements when it comes to development as I don't really need new features any longer. I will take what comes, but I just need iOS to work well.
 
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And why did it take them this long to see their Butterfly keyboard is bad ?
And why did it take them this long to see people want more than 16GB ?
And why did it take them this long to see people need more horsepower and vlid cooling ?

So why does it take them so long to do anything ?
Usually over a period of time you have management making budget/resource allocations based upon whether there has been an overall need/utilization; not what the POTENTIAL need/utilization of that resource for preventative measures against failure. You see this in different products and services. Why do I need (X) resources for this particular facet of software/hardware since it's been operating with half of the allocated resources? People making decisions for resource allocation that don't actually do any development, research, or engineering of these products/services. So, these Resource Managers played the probability game and were winning for a while. More complete, real-world testing was cut back or not placed as a top priority because no "major" bugs have occurred in (N) months or years. Play stupid games; win dumb prizes.
 
I just hope that these feature switches are used carefully and not in a way that different big code paths must be included in the release and thus requiring more space just for the OS.
 
Fair enough. However, I remember showing a friend the iOS 12 beta and they reaction was, "It doesn't really seem different". That didn't make them switch their iPhones though ;). I believe users want stability over features any day of the week.

Well, that wasn't a good example. iOS 12 didn't really contain much features to excite customers... it was meant for stability. But I get what you mean. However, I would give a slight advantage to features over stability, obviously stability matters... but it can be boring without new features.

I think the problem is... iOS 12 brought so much increase in performance, bug fixes and less features. And iOS 13 was a change compared to iOS 12... so it would appear alarming. But I gotta feeling iOS 14 will bring upon the same idea of iOS 12... a focus on performance and bug fixes.
 
So if the S model is an incremental update to the previous iPhone (at least it used to be), then iOS should have an S model as well. iOS 13.5 for the iPhone 11s. Mail is still terrible for some people, including me. And my issue only popped up in 13.2.
 
I’m honestly shocked Apple isn’t using feature flags... our software team of 45 for our smallish company have been doing this for at least a year, and we thought we were way behind the curve.
I bet someone came in at Apple and said everything had to be “agile”, and thus more was paid attention to the process rather than the work, and the result is iOS 13.
 
Feature Flags (what the article is referring to) is certainly a good step, but this is by far not the only change needed. The fact that they have been re-introducing major security bugs that they fixed in prior releases shows that they have some configuration management issues that feature flags won't fix. And all of this is besides the idea that some of this stuff should be flagged by QA before being released in the first place.
 
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i mean. You would think they would have realized how bad it was after ios7,ios8, ios9,ios11

iOS 11 has to be the worst. I still remember how buggy that was. I think it just happen to be the combination of iOS 13 and Catalina being so bad at the same time, but I find iOS 13 to be a lot better than iOS 11 was.

The first version of Maps was also disastrous. Music crashed on me several times as well when it was first released.
 
What I do not understand is, it didn't help. When iOS 11 was buggy they announced this same strategy. iOS 12 features were delayed to iOS 13. Still when iOS 13 was released over a year later, it was buggy despite Apple developers having an additional year working on features like App Exposé on the iPad. Even as of iOS 13.2.3 these features seem unfinished. How is this possible? A total failure according to me. On iPadOS anyway. iPhone is pretty stable I think.
 
Apple needs to do something. Their operating systems are looking just a buggy and overloaded a MicroSoft. For whatever reason, I'm have to shut down and restart my device too often to make them work. They normally "just worked". Also, Apple does not need to tell me what their doing to "improve" their software, they just need to actually improve it and do it consistently.
 
If rather be on iOS 10.9.1 with all the same bells and whistles than 13 with headaches. Besides there would be a higher adoption rate where 98% of devices would be on iOS 10 by now.
 
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