Pushed into 2019 are a number of features including a refresh of the home screen and in-car user interfaces, improvements to core apps like mail and updates to the picture-taking, photo editing and sharing experiences.
This isn’t a new strategy for Apple—they have used this strategy in macOS for a number of years and it’s worked great. With all of the new features in iOS over the past several years, the time had to come when Apple took a step back and focused on reliability and performance.
“and it’s worked great”
I personally don’t have a Mac, but I have only heard negative things about the latest macOS release(s)…
The last macOS release was, and still is, the worst OS Apple have released in many years.
That’s good news. I hope they do the same for macOS this year because it’s buggy as hell
I love the complaints about High Sierra… which I’ve had since day 1 and which has been fine.
On iOS (and macOS for that matter), though, this kind of a release is an admission of failure to keep quality high or they wouldn’t need to spend a cycle focusing on reliability and performance. Really they should consider moving to 24 month release cycles.
Dedicating a release to engineering efforts rather than feature sets is absolutely not an admission of failure. Nittin Ganatra (former Mac/iOS engineering mgr) said they would often request upper management to consider opportunites to pay some “technical debt,” to pave the way for future feature releases. I don’t remember 100%, but I think the example he used was their attempting to unify iPad and iPhone system apps like Calendar. The iPad shipped initially with a separate build of iOS with special system apps like Calendar built by the OSX team.
iPad and iPhone releases didn’t become unified until iOS 4.2. A key thing most people conveniently forget when they talk about the quality of Apples software teams lately. They forget that the iPad shipped with essentially a hacked version of iPhone OS that had separate apps and other things. When iOS 4 launched with multitaking, the iPad DIDN’T get that until 4.2 when everything became unified.
People forget these warts from Apples past. They only care to remember the bright spots, or the high-profile missteps like MobileMe.
Apple software has never been perfect, and never will be. Thats just the nature of system architecture development.
‘Failure’ might be a strong word but my point is that it’s a failure of scheduling, not so much engineering. With a 24 month cycle they could both add features and pay off some technical debt. With a 12 month cycle, it’s more likely that they have to focus on the features unless they explicitly do a cleanup release. It’s also a failure in the sense that a release focused on quality is an admission that they were shipping things that weren’t as high quality as they could have been (even given that there will always be issues discovered).
Basically, it’s this – I think it’s time to move from the 12 month cycle. We’re no longer getting huge, year to year feature improvements for the most part and I’d rather that each release be as polished as they can make it vs getting a new shiny every year.
It seems to me that a lot of this started when they (supposedly) merged the iOS and MacOS groups together. The Mac has been getting short shrift for many years but the merging of these two groups, if it happened, seems like it has led to problems.
For me and at least a few folks I know who are long time Mac users, High Sierra has been extremely unreliable.
what issues are you seeing? because… I’ve never seen anything big. It doesnt seem worse that Sierra, etc to me.
Aside from the itty bitty issue of being able to log in as root with no password
Lots of issues in the Finder: disk eject issues, copying files issues (which should be faster under new file system), mouse tracking erratic, etc. iTunes is a disaster, both design-wise and in stability, printing has issues although they’ve been around long before High Sierra but they’re still around.
I did a regular install of High Sierra over Sierra (which was very stable) and the problems started there. I did a clean install, then another and I’ve continued to have problems. AppleCare did a number of data-sucks out of my computer and have not, as of yet, figured out what’s going on.
I live with it, but it’s less than ideal and I’ve been around long enough in the Mac world to know this is not normal.
Let me tell you a positive, then. Even with all the bugs you’ve heard about, there are on net fewer bugs than in previous releases.
I don’t know how that would work with iOS devices unless we’re going to have split versions every other release. New hardware’s gonna need major new parts, and it’s also gonna need new parts that demonstrate those new parts in cool ways.
Yeah….. good point. Probably more viable for macOS.
How weird. I don’t see the files/disk issue or the mouse issue. Fusion drive? Spinning rust? SSD? (I have an SSD… 2016 MBP). ITunes… well, yes. But I don’t count that as an OS thing.
Sure but that doesn’t count as ‘buggy as hell’ in my book. When I see comments about something being buggy as hell I think of things like degraded stability, features not working/working well, etc. User facing issues.
I think Apple just needs to move to shipping new features when they’re ready, and not promising things in advance. Then the yearly schedule becomes an asset.
iOS 12’s announcement at WWDC should include the new frameworks expected to be introduced in 12.0 and 12.x and little else.
To be fair, copies between drives aren’t really supposed to be faster under APFS at this point. That’s not what APFS was about.
(I also wouldn’t be surprised if copying bundles on the same drive is slower now, but I haven’t tested this.)
Nah. A bug or two doesn’t constitute buggy as hell, no mater how bad. Buggy as hell implies bugs everywhere, which is just not High Sierra. If anything, it has fewer bugs… they just included some really big ones.
I’d rather have a handful of giant bugs than hundreds of little issues.
That said, there are definitely still some nasty bugs in High Sierra like it waking and still displaying the old contents of your desktop for a moment before the password prompt comes up.
same drive is alleged to be faster. But my point it that I’m not seeing disk/file operation issues so I wonder if the reason for the discrepancy in experience is me on SSD vs him on, say, Fusion and there are bugs that affect the latter only
6 core Mac Pro with 32gb ram and 1tb ssd. Formatted with APFS.
Said machine was stable and fantastic with Sierra. When Sierra got high things went south.
The new Disk utility, by the way, is an abomination.
Agreed on Disk Utility. How odd the you see stuff I don’t. Hate that.
works fine on all my machines. Zero issues.
The techie echo chamber is not the same thing as reality.
So did one of the bugs actually harm you? Which one?
I read about the obscure HomeKit bug, the Settings root username bug, but they are far enough from normal use that I never came across them and don’t know anyone who did.
In fact, I still find macOS a delight to use. No idea what I’m doing wrong — but then again I said the same last year when people lost their minds over the wifi bugs and decried IT the worst release evar. Hmm…
Waiting 24 months per release is not realistic. It’s too infrequent. I prefer releasing more frequent and just spread the features out of the time frame, it needn’t all come at the same time.
Techies whining on rumor sites aren’t the same as normal use. It’s a mistake to equate the very vocal techie echo chamber with all of most users.
I have a few machines, one being a 2011 iMac with SSD and 20gb ram, don’t have any of the issues you’ve mentioned. They certainly aren’t universal.
I’m not claiming they’re universal but I’m quite sure I’m not alone in having had lots of issues with High Sierra.
I think Apple’s software teams would LOVE more time to spend on releases. Hell, they’d probably spend an infinite amount of time polishing, as they are renown for being perfectionists. They want to get every detail right, deep in the system where most of us don’t even consider.
However, the reality of being in a highly competitive market means they have to let go at times and just get things out the door. As I said, the iPad shipped with a completely hacked together OS. It worked well enough, but it was architected and developed sloppily and Nitin said they would have loved to spend more time nailing every detail and getting everything the way they envisioned. But reality slapped them in the face (aka Steve Jobs) and said ship something, make it work well for now, polish things later.
Also, a refinement release does not mean Apple admits their previous release was a mess. Snow Leopard came after Leopard, one of the most beloved releases of OSX ever. They simply said, we love what we have with Leopard, and we instead want to make it better with key foundational re-architecting.
Let’s all not forget that Apple managed to change the entire file system last year…FLAWLESSLY. They basically did open heart surgery without a single user noticing.
Apple doesn’t get credit for achievements like that, but gets slammed for silly little bugs. I don’t get it ?
You’re too focused on the word ‘failing’. Also, I should point out that I’ve worked on software teams in highly competitive markets. I know the pressures quite well, thanks.
None of that mandates yearly releases for macOS. Nor does pointing out that things could be better mean that Apple’s not doing generally quite well.