Actually, in my opinion, it is far more predatory than simple marketing. It provides the opportunity to sunset older hardware and coerce users to purchase new ones with each upgrade. As an example within hours of the release of IOS 13 there was not a single new iPhone 7 for sale anywhere, including authorized independent vendors, yet they were freely available the day before. After IOS 13 was release the only iPhone 7 available were refurbs. I know this for a fact as I was checking for the best prices for them the day before IOS13 release and all the major vendors had them but the next day they had all disappeared from their websites.
Egad!
I just discovered my boss was considering buying an iPhone 7!
Should I quit now - before it turns out he is still using a Nokia??
I was just begging the question – I understand the why Apple does this. I just disagree with it. 
The point I was trying (but failed) to make is that tying a major OS release to a date driven by a hardware release cadence (irrespective of the state of the OS) can easily result in buggy, incomplete software.
I disagree, I don’t think that iOS 13 has anything to do with discontinuing the iPhone 7 since the 7 runs iOS 13. It makes much more sense that with the iPhone 11 Apple revised its hardware offerings. The iPhone 8 was lowered in price and became the lowest cost iPhone. It’s a hardware decision.
Hopefully the rumored lower-cost iPhone will appear in winter or spring. This is rumored to have the iPhone 8 form factor but new insides. Whether this will replace the iPhone 8 (same price, better insides) or be even lower in cost (I hope) is unknown.
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That same dynamic was in place when I left Apple in 2004. The difference was that engineers with old, unfixed bugs risked getting a call from Steve asking why the F*** this bug still isn’t fixed.
But also, let’s not discount the working conditions in effect at Apple. All reports from Apple indicate the Cook/Federighi regime has brought with it much more of a sweatshop atmosphere than when I was there. “Schedule Chicken” is another way of saying “working your employees to death”. A clear symptom of this is when engineers adopt slogans like “not a regression” to avoid suffocating under the workload.
Why does Apple have to release a new OS every year?
I have a slightly different view than everyone else. Obviously each new version of the Mac OS offers new features, which are a nice selling point. But I think that the new features are sort of a side-show for what is really important in each new OS, something that Apple slows down development of to their extreme peril.
Each new version of the Mac OS brings with it three absolutely essential things: Security improvements, reduced maintenance and improved reliability, and better integration with Apple’s other devices. All three of these are key areas where Apple is head and shoulders above the competition.
With regard to security, malware and hacking are constantly evolving, and if Apple didn’t evolve the Mac OS with it, the Mac OS would quickly become painfully vulnerable. The security of Apple devices is a HUGE selling point. You never pick up the newspaper and read about an entire company using Macs whose computers were all infected and millions of dollars of data loss/lost work ensued. I hear from Windows users constantly who have had catastrophic problems with their computers and they are keen to never have them happen again.
As far as reduced maintenance and improved reliability, computers have become a household item that users expect to use with no headaches and little thought…like a refrigerator. Reliability sells. Not only that, but fewer tech support calls means money saved for Apple. Users don’t want to have to do ANY routine maintenance to keep their computers running reliably. It doesn’t receive much press, but with each new version of the Mac OS, the Mac is requiring less maintenance and it protects the integrity of your data more and more. In fact, Macs are becoming so easy to maintain, that I’m considering dropping my Macintosh Routine Maintenance Web site.
Finally, the better integrated the Macintosh is with Apple’s other devices, the more Apple devices consumers will buy. I’m sure that Apple has sold a ton of Macs because they work so well with iPhones and iPads and Apple Watches. This sort of integration MUST get better and better to keep users in the Apple camp for ALL of Apple’s devices.
I don’t see how Apple could drop the yearly Mac OS update and maintain the above advantages.
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Not very well. I had Office 11 at work, when I updated to Catalina it said “Microsoft Office will need to be updated to continue to work.” I took that to mean it would need an update, not that we would need to buy a new version, which I would call an upgrade. Adobe did the same thing with its new Creative Cloud app 
Now I have to uninstall Adobe Creative Cloud and look for an alternative.
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I love the actual content of this article, but I think both the headline and introduction are wrong and misplaced.
The problem with Catalina and iOS 13 aren’t that they’re unusually bad. The problem is they’re exactly the same quality as (nearly) every other major release, and it just isn’t acceptable anymore. A further problem is that Apple is actually trying to fix these problems by rapidly releasing fixes, but it’s too complex to do that.
The six points listed are absolutely the reason. But saying “this is unusually bad” is not just wrong but counterproductive. As long as we keep justifying bugs in major releases as “well, it’s not usually this bad” we give them an excuse to continue. No, it’s always been this bad. As long as things keep going this way, it’s always going to be this bad. It’s time to accept that and use new techniques to stop the problem.
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Not only is the “new major release every year” forced schedule wrong, but also Apple’s procedure for releasing things has gone completely off the rails.
A couple of days ago, a major Xcode update (11.2) was released. That means it’s eligible for submitting apps to the App Store. But this Xcode contains a bug where many apps built with it are likely to crash on launch unless the user has updated to iOS 13.2. (The crash involves the presence of a UITextView in the storyboard; many apps have that.) This bug was not present in the preceding Xcode 11.2 beta. So it was added silently and released as final without public testing. That’s not just nuts; it’s stupid.
That is emblematic of how the whole of iOS 13 feels to me as a developer: radical changes are rushed into production without sufficient testing, care, or thought.
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And here’s an article from Mark Gurman talking about how Apple is planning to address this software quality problem with future releases.
As a former Apple QA employee, I’m not sure whether I’m allowed to agree with the article, but I think I can agree with this comment.
(Repeating my comment on a later article, so that the comment can be found here, too.)
I have no evidence, but I will tell you what I expect is the case.
Apple developers, like so many of us, do not know what a successful test is: They think software testing is running tests to see if the software works as intended. If it works, they think that is a successful test.
I don’t want to be ruler of all software, but if the role was forced on me, my first executive order would be that no person could work at software development unless a) they had studied The Art of Software Testing and b) they understood and agreed with what Glenford J. Myers wrote in that book. Wrote 40 (count 'em, forty) years ago.
Software testing is exercising a program with the intent of causing it to malfunction.
“A successful test case is one that detects an as-yet undiscovered error. [Myers]”
I have not read the 3rd Edition, which Wiley is now selling. I hope they have not watered down the message. It should be all in Chapter 2 - The Psychology and Economics of Software Testing (fourteen pages). It’s in the book!
The rest of the book is details based on the facts of Chapter 2. The 3rd Edition was published 8 years ago, so the remaining chapters will not be right up to date. That does not matter. Unless it has been watered down, the message is in Chapter 2.
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I guess you’ve forgotten Yosemite, which had a network bug that required Apple to restart the beta program. It took them almost a year to figure out that their “improvements” to networking weren’t, and to revert to the previous technology.
All these problems got worse when Apple shortened the OS development cycle from roughly 18 months to 12. This happened with the (early) release of OS X 10.10 Yosemite. It hasn’t gotten much better since. Clearly marketing is more important than quality control at Apple these days. That their reputation hasn’t suffered more is a testament to similar issues with the competition. It’s an industry problem, not just an Apple problem. This is undoubtedly due to the relative improvement in competing products, like Samsung phones and Windows PCs, rather than an absolute decline in Apple quality control, though their QC is nothing to brag about. It’s been lame for many years now.
My iMac restarts four times a day since upgrading to Catalina. Every time it goes to sleep or is inactive for a period of time. I’ve taken to shutting it down at night.
The corner they’ve backed themselves into, now, is that new hardware capabilities (mainly coming from iPhone, these days) require new APIs and new software to use those APIs, and many of those are low level and justified in being part of the OS:
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Metal? OS.
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Image processing? OS.
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Continuity? OS.
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iCloud sync? OS.
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Low level system integrity, T2 etc? OS!
etc.
(Who here remembers the challenges when Aperture v1 had to wait for OS updates to support new third-party camera hardware? That’s a big part of what killed it, in the end, IMHO. Leveraging the OS was a great idea, until they couldn’t deliver.)
So all the OSs have to stay in step, and have to be ready around the next phone hardware release because, the market - real one and financial one - has been led, to expect, demand even, something New and Different every year. At least they’re all on the same kernel and, UI aside, user-land.
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I agree with the desire for a longer development cycle. I would add to that more frequent updates and to consider security updates for people stuck with older equipment. People stuck on Social Security simply can’t afford to upgrade just because Apple has moved on. It is a simple fact. You may own your own home, but not have the cash flow to much more than live on. I know people in this situation.
Back to your question -> I completely disagree. I believe that in one form or another, most of the time management is the problem. For one thing, they aren’t just building ‘for the next iPhone’, they are building for it and all of the other products they have not yet abandoned (a very sore point).
As a former systems architect and senior systems programmer, I believe that if the proper roles were included in the design meetings with significant authority to lay out a design that the programing teams were able to build, then most all of this noise could have been neatly avoided.
Another point I love to make is that every module and program should go through regression testing as part of its build process. Basic software engineering…
Apple updates software very much more frequently than Microsoft or Google, and they do squash bugs quickly. They also do more to support older stuff. It’s probably a big reason why there was a lot of discussion here about selling very elderly Macs on eBay.
It’s a fact of life that as chips, etc. evolve software must evolve along with it. I can’t do as many yoga moves as I used to do, but as I can’t swap into a 20 year old body, I deal with it. And as I mentioned in a previous thread, I was very unhappy when just anout 2-3 months after buying my just released 9600 Apple announced a second version of the 9600 that could run OS X when it was released. And to add insult to injury, the new blue and white model looked a whole lot nicer than the blah tan box. But I totally understand why Apple needed to release OS X into the wild ASAP.
One of the many reasons why I have been a loyal Apple customer is that the company always pushes the boundaries. They constantly improve and update their software and hardware, and Apple’s devices work beautifully and seamlessly together. It’s what really differentiates Apple from the uncountable minions of Windows and Android hardware manufacturers. It’s also why Apple offers long term hardware and software support and more frequent updates.
Technology changes and evolves. Apple has thrived because its ecosystem always stays ahead of the game. But they are not the only company that ends support for older products:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-windows-7-support
And it’s not like Windows 10 ever had anything resembling a fan club.
Seconded. IMHO Apple should update for features only when ready, but update for security as soon as possible. But this whole fixed annual refresh of all OSes is marketing BS.
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