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Apple's Decision to Delay Some New Features and Focus on Software Quality Extends to Mac
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Sounds like Apple has no need to hold WWDC this year. Nothing to talk about! They were getting pretty boring anyway.
Don't get it why people complain about HS, there are some minor bugs, it's stable as a rock on my Macs.
You would think with so much money in the bank they could do both
Other than those embarrassing security gaffs, High Sierra has done a really good job running on my flashed 4,1 cMP. Not bad considering it’s not even an officially supported setup.
I can’t tell what you mean here. Windows 10 unified the desktop OS with an already dead App Store. That OS is a compromise of oversized UI elements and scetchy High-DPI font scaling. I was a big Windows Mobile user at one time, but Windows just seems aimless right now, and I don’t think it’s achieving a big thing that MS hoped (UWP adoption). I hope Apple doesn’t stumble into the same mess. Not to say it can’t be done—it’s a matter of being done well.
I can’t tell what you mean here. Windows 10 unified the desktop OS with an already dead App Store. That OS is a compromise of oversized UI elements and scetchy High-DPI font scaling. I was a big Windows Mobile user at one time, but Windows just seems aimless right now, and I don’t think it’s achieving a big thing that MS hoped (UWP adoption). I hope Apple doesn’t stumble into the same mess. Not to say it can’t be done—it’s a matter of being done well.
Windows 10 seems to be pretty rock solid, excluding the recent BS from Intel. Even moreso if you're using the business branch. Truth be told, back when I was trying to use Windows at work, I had more issues with program compatibility than I did with the OS.
Right... because Apple doesn't ship a current zsh now for anyone who wants it. Oh, wait...
(save us from OSS religious zealots...)
Just fix the bug that affects video playback. Im sick of having to touch my trackpad to unfreeze the image in my video despite the sound continuing. At first I thought it was a youtube fault, but it does it on quicktime, Netflix, video in google photos. Plain annoying.
Considering that I've been thinking of upgrading to High Sierra and a number of people here on MacRumors recommended me to avoid (thanks), I'm glad to hear news like this.
I recommend you to upgrade! But only if your Mac is full SSD, if not you can wait (But I see no reason why everything is smooth as butter here).
I'd almost argue that the Mac needs it far more badly than iOS does. Since Snow Leopard, there have only been two acceptable releases out of six. One in three is REALLY bad, especially for Apple and ESPECIALLY when compared to Microsoft's previous pre-Windows-as-a-Service track record of one in two.
iOS could stand to lean a bit and lose much of the bloat that causes devices like the iPhone 5s and the iPad mini 2 to go from being speed-demons to slugs over the course of not much time and certainly iOS 11 could've used more time in the oven, but the track record for stability, at least, is much better with iOS than it has been for macOS in the post-Snow Leopard era.
iOS could stand to lean a bit and lose much of the bloat that causes devices like the iPhone 5s and the iPad mini 2 to go from being speed-demons to slugs over the course of not much time and certainly iOS 11 could've used more time in the oven, but the track record for stability, at least, is much better with iOS than it has been for macOS in the post-Snow Leopard era.
In the meantime google and Microsoft will further leapfrog Apple. Siri still stays a joke and not able to understand. The pace maps is going with one flyover a year and three more transits for cities the next six months. And some minor hardware changes every 5 years. iOS is getting a joke too, especially on iPad. Where is the nimble and innovative Apple that was eager to bring the best products to market that justified the higher prices?
I interpret this as doubling down on the doubling down. They've made some serious missteps this past year, and now they are correcting course.
Apple was originally built by a small, passionate team, with a laser focus. Fast-forward to today and they have brought in many more developers, many of which have their own vision for what they are working on. This has introduced inconsistencies.
I think it's really a leadership problem, and maybe this change in course is meant to give the leadership some room to catch their breath.
This is welcomed and expected, my only curiosity is that development on next MacOS/iOS surely switched into high gear 3-4 months ago (and likely had finalized the feature set well before that). I'm surprised they would completely change the feature set when WWDC is about 4 months away....
The design changes will be made across both platforms, I think that is the reason they are holding both the updates.
I can't stand Siri. The Google assistant is the #1 thing I miss when I had a Pixel 2. Siri is almost completely useless. And now sometimes she will give me a liberal response to certain questions instead of redirecting me to a website or something. It's beyond irritating. Siri was bad enough ... now it's Siri with a liberal agenda. Just lovely. Google assistant just gives me ... you know ... data.
Where are the users that see the glass half full instead of half empty? Where are the users that truly appreciate how amazing and complex today's tech is, and enjoy what is available today?
By the way, Siri works great for me.
Even back to Snow Leopard, when this whole "Tick, Tock" stuff started, they were playing a lot under the hood. I wouldn't call them "quality" focused, but rather "foundation" focused. Low level improvements, frameworks, etc that are supposed to support the new features and work they want to do going forward. But playing around heavily under the hood really bit them hard this time.
A good example of this "foundation" focus is APFS. Most users don't care one bit about it, except it enabled some things like "instant" copies which make iOS Drag-n-Drop not suck horribly when it comes to performance with larger files being dropped.
I don't think this signals a change in work already done though. But it isn't uncommon for something to crop up during development work and someone to say, "Wait, this just isn't working, wrap up what is already almost done, but our plans for the next 4 months? Gone, we're doing this other thing instead." It is even easier when the new direction is to dig into the bugs that have been piling up, adding more testing, etc.
At least if they are doing things right. If you are doing things right, you give yourself plenty of opportunities to react to changes and realities of what is actually going on. Both in your work, and in the customer's reaction to it. But if they are still 100% waterfall, there's a bigger cost to doing this. But if you are planning all your features out in advance with no escape hatch in case things go pear shaped? You are doing it wrong.
Part of the problem is the number of cooks in the kitchen. Even with large codebases, you eventually get people stepping on each other's toes enough that you slow down the whole thing, not make it faster. If you want to do more, you need to be able to do it in parallel. And that's not a problem that's easily solved by tooling. I'd say the scaling issue with larger, legacy codebases is probably the biggest hurdle faced by older software companies like Apple and Microsoft. Google has been doing some interesting stuff here, while Facebook seems to be hurtling headlong into the same problem that older software companies created for themselves.
The main reason for the wait on features is agile/iterative vs waterfall/planned. Apple is still much more in the latter approach. To avoid the wait, they really need to start doing their work more iteratively on the small scale (weeks/month scale), rather than the large (year or more).
EDIT: I will point out that with more tweaks and small features landing in the point releases, Apple does seem to be capable of doing more iterative work. Perhaps they should be trying to aim for more quarterly releases in the near future. Release user-facing changes every quarter, and then integrate the lower-level framework/developer focused stuff yearly (so that devs can still rely a bit on a schedule on how they will get impacted by changes in the OS). As a developer, I wouldn't mind that approach, myself.
It's more that Apple still does this: implement the features first, then fix all the bugs once the features are "done" and the developer beta is out the door. History tends to prove out this model sucks for modern software development for two reasons:
- Waterfall assumes you can push the release date if your quality is not good enough. Apple's OS release schedule is date driven.
- Waiting to fix all the bugs at the end means you can't really estimate how much bug work you will actually have. So you make a terrible guess as to how long it will take to fix bugs based on another terrible guess on how many you will write/find during development.
I don’t know what to make of this.
As others have said, it feels as if the Mac has almost been in stability release mode since the UI refresh in Yosemite.
However, if they can:
- Focus on squashing bugs (APFS, we’re looking at you)
- And sorting out the mess that is iTunes and iCloud Drive
Then it will be a worthwhile release.
(An updated Mac App Store would be good too).
If this then lays the foundation for the rumoured combined MacOS & iOS development frameworks, then fine I guess.
My only worry is that if we only see these magical frameworks and (presumably) a UI and UX refresh in 2019, the Mac will feel as if it’s firther stagnating into 2018.
And if we don’t hear about these magical frameworks soon, I as a dev (which I’m not) would be wondering if I should bother sinking more time into my Mac apps if something radically new is around the corner.
Perhaps a very rough developer preview of this will need to be released around WWDC as well as the preview of whatever is going to ship in the autumn.
Please though, let’s not have any more epic sounding release names when the features are less than epic.
MacOS Small Hill?
macOS Gently Rolling Valley?
macOS Recreational Park?
macOS Boating Pond?
Perhaps not as catchy but more realistic.
In fact I’d prefer it if they simply stuck with High Sierra and kept on fixing that release with small point releases.
macOS Even Higher Sierra - aka the bird’s view version.
Ok, I’ll stop now...
As others have said, it feels as if the Mac has almost been in stability release mode since the UI refresh in Yosemite.
However, if they can:
- Focus on squashing bugs (APFS, we’re looking at you)
- And sorting out the mess that is iTunes and iCloud Drive
Then it will be a worthwhile release.
(An updated Mac App Store would be good too).
If this then lays the foundation for the rumoured combined MacOS & iOS development frameworks, then fine I guess.
My only worry is that if we only see these magical frameworks and (presumably) a UI and UX refresh in 2019, the Mac will feel as if it’s firther stagnating into 2018.
And if we don’t hear about these magical frameworks soon, I as a dev (which I’m not) would be wondering if I should bother sinking more time into my Mac apps if something radically new is around the corner.
Perhaps a very rough developer preview of this will need to be released around WWDC as well as the preview of whatever is going to ship in the autumn.
Please though, let’s not have any more epic sounding release names when the features are less than epic.
MacOS Small Hill?
macOS Gently Rolling Valley?
macOS Recreational Park?
macOS Boating Pond?
Perhaps not as catchy but more realistic.
In fact I’d prefer it if they simply stuck with High Sierra and kept on fixing that release with small point releases.
macOS Even Higher Sierra - aka the bird’s view version.
Ok, I’ll stop now...