Microsoft released a major update to Windows 10 (the so-called "Anniversary Update") on August 2nd, 2016. According to MS, there will be no Windows 11. It'll likely be milestone updates from here onward, which is basically what Apple is doing with their yearly MacOS major releases (incremental improvements and additions to the feature set with very few changes to the look and feel).
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Apple Seeds First Beta of macOS Sierra 10.12.5 to Developers
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Microsoft released a major update to Windows 10 (the so-called "Anniversary Update") on August 2nd, 2016. According to MS, there will be no Windows 11. It'll likely be milestone updates from here onward, which is basically what Apple is doing with their yearly MacOS major releases (incremental improvements and additions to the feature set with very few changes to the look and feel).
Knowing about a problem doesn't mean you can just snip your fingers and it is solved. And you can be assured that Apple has probably hundreds of confirmed but unsolved issues in its software at any given point in time. And that comes before knowing that after you implemented a fix, you need to test it for a couple of weeks before you can release it. Thus any fix they came up with ten days ago couldn't be put into 10.12.3 anymore as that was already too far into its testing cycle.
I hope you developers have good internet download allowances... it seems like you're downloading a new operating system every day...
Well, I would presume that they have a feature list of what's scheduled to go into 10.12.5 pretty well nailed down before starting to build it. These were features/bug that didn't make the cut for 10.12.4, for whatever reason, or were brought up after the list for 10.12.4 was finalized, and weren't critical enough to warrant changing the list.
This happens all the time in software development. I've personally, at my job, got a backlog of over 60 features - some of them bugs - waiting to be scheduled into a release. It all comes down to priority and schedule.
Yes, but they say Windows 10 will be the last version and, since Windows 8, Microsoft is treating minor updates as entirely new OSs: 8.1, 8.1 Update, Windows 10 November Update, Anniversary Update, Creators Update...
Every major platform today updates at least once per year: iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, even Linux distros.
This update seems welcome on my end, seems a lot more smooth and snappier, along with memory management seems a lot better. Kernel Task is at a steady 800mb. My usual apps seems to be loading up a lot quicker as well.
10.12 was perfectly stable for me on launch day, no reason to think 10.13 won't be.
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I wouldn't call Anniversary Update and Creators Update minor, it's akin to going from 10.12 to 10.13 in macOS land.
This is why they were creating infrastructure to improve the stability of future releases.
It's all about risk management, i rather have x number of well understood and prioritized bugs deferred to the next release, then fixing bugs up to the last minute, and risking to break the software completely.
Since yesterday's update, my 2014 Retina iMac 27" doesn't wake the internal display from sleep anymore. My external display wakes just fine, and I can VNC in to see what should show on the internal monitor. I have to do that to restart it to get my display back. What a pain! Here's hoping this update fixes that!
For me, with a clean install, 10.12-10.12.3 had a lot of weird Preview bugs. HDMI black-screens upon wake. Permissions bugs. And a general sluggishness after a few days of uptime - thus a twice weekly reboot is required on my machine.
Maybe 10.12.4 fixes those, but I doubt it.
I am uninterested in almost all the stuff that Apple is working on for macOS (Pages, iCloud, Siri, Emoticons, watch-unlock, TouchBar - I don't need/want any of it)
And older models after patching a private framework (since we're talking about a Beta for developers):
Source: https://pikeralpha.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/4398/
yes, you are right. in fact microsoft is releasing the Creator update in April which is considered a major update too.
Depends on the nature of the bug, does it not? Obviously a critical flaw (such as for a payroll system, paying someone the wrong amount) has to be fixed or you can't release. But not all bugs are that critical and some can be deferred to a later release, or even never fixed and just listed as known issues if they never satisfy the cost/benefit analysis to make them worth fixing.
Wouldn't happen to be on one of the new Macbooks with touchbar would it? We've got two in the shop here for employees, imaged one to 10.12.4 yesterday and installed Fusion, same problem. Took the one we did last week with 10.12.3 on it and installed the Fusion demo, no issue. Upgraded that one to 10.12.4 and Fusion immediately broke. Did the same upgrade on my older retina (non touchbar) MBP and upgraded Fusion to the latest version, no issues.
OSX 10.12.4, Fusion 8.5.6. Issue seems related to video and I know they added Night Mode in the last patch, but get the same behavior on the Touchbar Macs regardless of if the feature is off or on.