Apple Operating Systems Jump to 26?

Article Comments
42

I think the main issue with the annual release cycle is not just the annual release itself, but that it’s an annual major release, that is, a release that can break backward compatibility and cut off older hardware. Forcing people to accept that every year can mean your Mac falls off the scales or you need to update your old FM Pro for $500 regardless of actually released feature set just makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

With some annual cycles lately having brought little new to the table if at all (with many pre-announced features not coming until half a year later with some dot update) does for a lot of folks not create the justification for breaking backward compatibility or cutting off older hardware. I personally find that an understandable concern.

Apple could get out of this conundrum by either not breaking compatibility or ending support on a quite annual basis, or by ensuring that there is so much value in the major updates that do, that people consider it a justifiable price to pay for that kind of progress. And, for the latter to work, judging by how things have been going the last half decade or so, it appears Apple needs substantially more time than just 12 months to create that kind of value proposition, IOW in effect stretching that major update cycle to perhaps 18 or 24 months. Minor improvements (not to mention security fixes) could still be issued as soon as they’ve been properly readied.

6 Likes
43

Yes, and there’s the elephant in the room.

Justified or not, designating a software release “major” and doing that major release annually could be seen as a cynical move to break older hardware releases.

I have a MBPro purchased in fall 2018. It was spec’ed above the baseline by my employer, and is still more than functional. But, it has an Intel processor and no TouchID facility. So, it fell out of the supported software cycle 2 years ago.

Many, many hardware and software improvements have been made to the MBPro line since that machine was designed. (The keyboard is the most prominent example, but it’s just a small example.) I just acquired my new working MBPro, and the M4 Pro chip is stunningly fast.

But…I still like that slim, fast MBPro from 7 years ago. And I’m still not persuaded that Apple had any reason to cast it into the “legacy” bin other than they wanted me to buy a new one.

They couldn’t really force me to unless I wanted to have a platform that runs current versions of the apps I depend on. So, hello Sequoia! And 5 months from now, goodbye Sequoia!

To be fair, I only installed Sequoia on my 2019 iMac this month, and pro apps were still being updated on Sonoma until now. That’s a break from past releases, when a MacOS major upgrade would arrive and immediately be followed by feature updates for Final Cut Pro and other apps that could only be installed on the new platform.

3 Likes
44

We seem to have this “Apple shouldn’t upgrade every year” discussion a lot, don’t we?

The reality is this:

  1. Apple’s biggest hardware product and profit-driver is the iPhone
  2. In order to compete with other hardware phone makers, they feel that they must release a new iPhone every year.
  3. In order to get enough people to buy the iPhone when it’s released, they feel it must contain new features that didn’t exist in older models.
  4. In order to support those new features, they feel it needs an update to the OS with new APIs, which they feel requires a new release of iOS.
  5. Much of Apple’s strength lies in providing a platform where new features in the iPhone are matched in the Mac and the iPad, so those require new APIs that communicate with each other (and with iCloud)

So imagining an Apple that will not update their OSes every year, or not introduce new features, I think is a fantasy so long as they must compete with other mobile devices and OSes that update every year.

I do hope that an Apple chagrined by the failure of promised Apple Intelligence features for this year has learned a lesson and will not repeat anything like that anytime soon. I’d love to see underpromising and overdelivering in 2025/26.

Yes, Apple should do a much better job of fixing bugs, documenting new APIs for developers, documenting new features for users, communicating back and forth with people who report bugs, etc. But I really can’t imagine that we are ever going back to an Apple that waits to release new OSes “until they are ready and bug-free” (I put that in quotes because I don’t think that ever happened anyway.)

5 Likes
45

I think that’s true, and it is an issue bigger than Apple.

I’m by no means the first to suggest this, but the way we think of “platforms” has shifted in a dramatic way, and I don’t think it gets enough attention.

The conventional wisdom used to be that people and businesses bought platforms to run specific apps, usually third party apps. People bought Apple ][ computers to run Visicalc. People bought IBM PCs to run Lotus 123. People bought Macs to run Pagemaker. The expectation was that platforms would be steady, stable foundations for running important tools over time and in predictable ways. New platform features would be introduced from time to time, but new features that had a major impact on how a platform worked were very serious matters and were very carefully tested and planned for.

Today’s platforms, or at least their business models, are much more about selling the platform vendor’s in-house services ecosystem, e.g., Apple Music, Apple Store, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Co-Pilot, etc.

Ironically, as platforms invest less in attracting third party software vendors, there is less incentive for third party vendors to take advantage of platform-specific features, often reducing the overall user experience. (Witness the old controversies over writing apps with Electron rather than using native frameworks.)

It’s hard to miss the ensh*ttification that follows.

Harrumph.

5 Likes
46

No one is stopping you from continuing to use it.

47

Of course. And I do. Not the point, of course, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

2 Likes
48

It’s my point. You have the same computer you purchased. You like it and it clearly works well for you. It’s probably roughly about as secure as it was when you got it. Apple hasn’t taken any of that away from you.

49

Okay.

So it also looks like a first step towards a unified OS. As features harmonise it’ll be a lot easier to identify when you can simply state the year of release rather than a feature being available on a bunch of OSes with different version numbers.

2 Likes
50

Okay. Again, I understand your point, and agree with the main outline.

And, there is a nevertheless involved:

Nevertheless, while my MBPro designed in 2017 works fine, it is frozen in time. I used it on the Web, but no more security updates for it. I used it to produce video, but no more codecs or feature updates for the software.

As I have done with my 2011(!) iMac and my iPad Air 2, I will put it to other uses. But it can’t be in my main workflow anymore because the OS bars it from those security and feature updates.

That’s what Apple has taken away. And if I were not the persistent type, I’d have simply bought a new laptop 3 years ago a la Windows.

I am not complaining. Apple has done so much right over the years that I have no reason to. But the annual major OS upgrade cycle leads to situations like this.

2 Likes
51

Thanks! Then don’t tell me what I agree to or don’t agree to.

Apple has taken away nothing that you had. The computer works just as it did when you got it. You’re making the decision not to use it, even though it works just as well as it did when you got it.

52

Alright, no more of this back-and-forth—it’s not constructive.

The only substantive change that is in play here is the public version number of these operating systems. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the internal versions that developers query when targeting different operating systems will retain the old version numbers.)

There is nothing new about annual updates. As I pointed out in the article, iOS has received major updates every year since 2007 (18 years), and macOS has received major updates every year since 2012 (13 years).

How quickly Apple discontinues support for a particular model depends on numerous variables, but support usually lasts for at least 5 or 6 years, often longer.

https://tidbits.com/?s=real%20system%20requirements

And as has been pointed out, you can keep using older machines with older operating systems as long as you like. Particularly if you can use a Web browser that continues to receive security updates and avoid sketchy websites and apps, there isn’t much to worry about.

5 Likes
53

MacTracker is indispensable to me. I’ve been using Macs since 1985, and overall Apple has been pretty bad at naming things in a useful way. If they start naming operating systems and hardware more logically, that’s a good thing.

I can only assume the marketing argument must have evidence supporting it, but it’s not one I can embrace.

54

Operating systems have always been numbered (not counting the earliest days).

The oldest distributions had different version numbers for the System file and the Finder, but by the time of System 6, there was a consistent numbering scheme.

Internally, Apple, like most software companies, uses code-names for projects. This makes perfect sense because the version number used at release time isn’t necessarily known at the time development starts. And, thanks to an inquisitive press, these code-names would typically leak to the public at some point.

Where much of the confusion got started was when (starting with Mac OS X 10.2, “Jaguar”) Steve Jobs decided to start using these code-names as product names. From that point, most people, both in and out of Apple, started using these names instead of the numbers. After dozens of releases, that has become very confusing.

And, of course, the fact that Apple (and just about everybody else these days) has obliterated the meaning behind major and minor version numbers, has made it hard to know which releases are very important and which are less important.

Once upon a time, major version number changes (e.g. from 6 to 7 or 7 to 8) indicated a major architectural change to the software, usually accompanied by breaking compatibility with the oldest hardware. Microsoft still (mostly) follows this - the shift from Windows 8 to 10 and then from 10 to 11 included major changes in hardware requirements. But Apple does not. There is no way to know, from version numbers alone, which upgrades are major workflow-breaking changes (e.g. dropping PPC hardware support from 10.5 to 10.6, or drppping PPC application support from 10.6 to 10.7) vs those that are mostly just cosmetic changes or changes to bundled apps (e.g. 10.7 to 10.8).

But this is not just an Apple thing. We see lots of software projects all over the place choosing to bump “major” and “minor” version numbers based on a calendar schedule or for marketing reasons instead of reflecting the magnitude of the software changes.

For instance, the Linux kernel used to be pretty strict about major/minor/patch versions from its beginning up to version 2.6 (which ended at 2.6.39.4. But then they decided that the first number isn’t likely to change ever again (version 1 to 2 changed all kinds of system calls that broke nearly everything) so they now bump it every 20 releases (3.19 went to 4.0 for no technical reason whatsoever). Which make as little sense as anything else in the industry these days.

4 Likes
55

My favorite numbering system is for the TeX typesetting system, written by Donald Knuth. Version 3.1 was followed by Version 3.14, then Version 3.141, and so on. The most recent release is Version 3.141592653; my understanding is that when Knuth dies, the final version of TeX will be designated Version π.

Dave

8 Likes
56

Yep. As I understand it, Knuth decided that the feature-set would be forever fixed after version 3, so all subsequent releases would simply be bug fixes. So as time progresses, the quality of the software approaches (but can never actually reach) perfection. Hence the idea of limiting each digit to the corresponding digit of pi.

And, similarly, the associated Metafont font-rendering engine has a version numbering scheme that asymptotically approaches e.

Of course, these versioning constraints don’t apply to add-ons and forks of these projects, like LATEX.

1 Like
57

Here’s a thought, lets go back to system 9 and give Copland another shot :smirk:.

4 Likes
58

The recent version scheme used by the Perplexity app is simple and easy to understand. Other software developers should take note. Here’s a screenshot for version 2 showing the year-month-day.x scheme that began a week ago.

Screenshot 2025-06-07 at 8.44.27 PM
Screenshot 2025-06-07 at 8.44.27 PM1284×2102 298 KB

3 Likes
59

Clever… and a good way to recognize a fundamental truth. After a revolutionary new technology is born, the improvements tend to get less and less significant until something else that is new and revolutionary. Of course, it’s up to the users to decide what is revolutionary and our definitions are likely to differ.

1 Like