Interesting. On adoption rate. What are the reasons adoption rate matters? Hardware sales sort of, but are there more ? Presuming Apple’s not doing anything shady like making the new software slow down old phones, having every old customer on the latest OS doesn’t appear to be a large driver for hardware sales. Yet, it’s the lead point to most keynotes.
I have heard them say it enables them to innovate faster, but if we look at the last years don’t we see a steady decline in OS features introduced and a rise in application level features ( Mimoji). I’m not sure there’s something inherent in the OS that enabled them to build Mimoji app, is there ?
1 year, 2 years, 3 years… It won’t make any difference. If they have more time they’ll add more features. That’s an iron law of software development.
Locking feature release to particular flagship marketing releases is the fundamental problem. This becomes super hard the more interconnected things are.
There are a lot of ways to fix this (it’s not a problem unique to apple), but it takes time and will for a company culture to change.
Why does there need to be any regularly scheduled updates to the OS? Third party app devs don’t release updates yearly. Why not push out features as they are ready? Apple could still hold big press events to announce features that will be coming in the next 6 - 12 months, but they could be rolled out individually. This would make it easier for users to adapt to changes because so many things aren’t changing at once.
Interesting. On adoption rate. What are the reasons adoption rate matters? Hardware sales sort of, but are there more ?
Good adoption rates mean loyalty to the product, frequent or at least regular use, and trust in the brand. It also means people are more likely to download apps, buy apps and make in app purchases. It’s why so many people jumped into Apple Music from the start, and why Apple is so confident that its services business will become a revenue generator. Apple’s App Store totally KOs Google’s every quarter to date; it beat them by 30% for the first half of this year:
Since then, Spotify lowered some of its paid rates and initiated a revenue sharing arrangement with Hulu (buy Hulu and get Spotify free, which sounds like a better deal than pay for Apple Music and also pay for TV+). Their student plan continues to bundle Hulu and Showtime, and because it is $4.99 per month for the bundle even though it includes the music version with commercials, it qualifies as paid. Though the US number of Spotify subscribers has gone up, per subscriber revenue has gone down, and Spotify admits it will continue to drop:
Presuming Apple’s not doing anything shady like making the new software slow down old phones, having every old customer on the latest OS doesn’t appear to be a large driver for hardware sales. Yet, it’s the lead point to most keynotes.
People are not replacing Macs or PCs as frequently as they used to, but for Apple, it’s the software that sells the hardware. Unless PC buyers work in a field that requires heavy processing power, an Acer, Dell or Lenovo isn’t that different, and both home and business users tend to go for the best deal.
I have heard them say it enables them to innovate faster, but if we look at the last years don’t we see a steady decline in OS features introduced and a rise in application level features ( Mimoji). I’m not sure there’s something inherent in the OS that enabled them to build Mimoji app, is there ?
I think the profit motive led to Mimoji and Animoji. And Apple is a very creative company.
OK, let’s keep this focused on issues surrounding the operating systems and less on Apple’s financial situation. The two are related, but the bugginess of this year’s releases is new and Apple’s focus on revenue is not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.