Both. They're a $3T company. They have the resources to do do both.
I know it feels like they've got one guy there who can only work on one thing at a time but they could hire a 2nd person...
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Mac OS X Snow Leopard Launched 15 Years Ago Today With '0 New Features'
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Both. They're a $3T company. They have the resources to do do both.
I know it feels like they've got one guy there who can only work on one thing at a time but they could hire a 2nd person...
I wonder if we can have a Snow Leopard moment soon when we finally get to kick off all the intel support code and move to just compiled for Apple Silicon version?
I miss the day of paying for bug fixes - because that's what Snow Leopard was but Apple manages to market in a way that people felt like their money was worth spending.
I appreciate the nostalgia I'm reading... but Leopard was so over ambitious in what they attempted to deliver (they were really in high competition with Windows in those days), it was a bug filled mess. It was essentially Apple's Windows 98 Second Edition moment.... just pulled off far better. When Microsoft did it, people were furious they had to pay for it (though it was far cheaper than a standard Windows upgrade). Apple did it and people lined up around the block - and bravo to them for pulling that off. I was one of those people... but I don't see Apple through the Kool Aid jar anymore.
I appreciate the nostalgia I'm reading... but Leopard was so over ambitious in what they attempted to deliver (they were really in high competition with Windows in those days), it was a bug filled mess. It was essentially Apple's Windows 98 Second Edition moment.... just pulled off far better. When Microsoft did it, people were furious they had to pay for it (though it was far cheaper than a standard Windows upgrade). Apple did it and people lined up around the block - and bravo to them for pulling that off. I was one of those people... but I don't see Apple through the Kool Aid jar anymore.
They kind of did that already though. I forget the version... the one after it looked like a box of pastel crayons threw up on the iPhone. There were a few new features that were akin to snow leopard's "no new features" like a whole new Safari, but it was mostly bug fixes. These threads were lit up with anger over the lack of features if I recall.
The Increase Contrast option is like a penalty box that removes the last colors from the window UI (since it turns off transparency), turning it to plain white (or black in dark mode) only
I think you highly overestimate the weight of Intel support on your Apple Silicon system. I am sure there is substantial opportunity for improvement in MacOS but it's not Intel support that is holding it back.
if adding or keeping intel support is adding to the work load and requiring complexity then why would that not have an impact on the OS development.
I agree that it being there likely makes zero difference in the decision not to release a pure bug fix OS update over trying to cram in more crap that likely nobody uses into the OS. I could imagine if they did do a release of just bug fix OS that it might negatively impact sales as users might just say I'll stick with the bug free OS that likely improves the performance of the Mac rather than buying a newer Mac to get back some performance inside the bloatware macOS we now have.
All agree. Also on the former, I'm not saying more Intel+AS releases is the same amount of work as just AS-only releases but I don't think it is linear either. If it was a new and/or relatively unsupported architecture and Apple was a small company it could be significant. But at this point, is continued Intel support more than a rounding error in terms of Apple's workforce/developer resources?
Plus there are upsides. Cross-platform support tends to surface hard-to-reproduce bugs and if you've got a solid engineer making the base code run well on a 2018-era i3, think how fast it will go on an M4...
I've honestly not seen any speed related performance problems on any modern macos machines, including not just my last gen intel machines but also some much older ones running the latest OS via OCLP. What I *have* noticed is an increase in the number of bugs I encounter, and seeing longstanding bugs unresolved.
What performance issues are you running into?
In addition to general feeling and complaint common to many people on this forum, I've recently measured substantial slowdown between MacOS Catalina and Monterey on an Intel MacBook Air 2020. Normally the UI / "experience" slowdowns that people complain about are hard to measure and isolate while easy to measure things like the speed of CPU-bound programs don't vary much.
However I was surprised while QA'ing a utility I wrote (pure ANSI C) on Catalina and Monterey to find that it ran >60% slower on Monterey. Further testing has revealed measurable slowdown across a range of core system calls. I am sharing here since you asked, and want to isolate this further and test across more machines and both more recent and older versions of MacOS before "publishing". I probably won't get to that for another few weeks. For now fair to consider it an unsubstantiated "rumor"...
Market capitalization is an idea pushed by the equities trading industry, but doesn't mean much to the daily cash flow at Apple.
Market capitalization may not be real but in the context of a well-established/followed company with real revenue and profit, it represents the scale of the access to financial resources they have to make worthwhile investments.
But if you prefer, they have >$100B in free cash flow on ~$400B in revenue.
The larger point is they are not constrained for capital. It's not like they are a small business that can't undertake worthwhile investments because of access to capital. 100 developers/programmers would be a rounding error on their income statement.