Time:

Once upon a time, products that were labeled as betas were indeed undergoing beta testing. They were works in progress, and nobody dreamed of sharing them with the general public. The Internet changed that by making it easy to distribute pre-releases to millions of people. And then Google rendered the “beta” moniker largely meaningless by applying it indefinitely to massively popular services such as Gmail. (The company has since largely backed away from beta gimmickry — among other reasons, it discovered that big corporate customers aren’t so excited by products that claim to be unfinished.)

Making products “just work” has been the secret to Apple’s success over the last decade.