Predictions that Apple would soon enough abandon the Mac were common. But this led to criticism that Apple only cared about iOS. Again: an almost leisurely pace by recent standards. So from April 2005 through June 2011, Apple released only three major updates to Mac OS X, one of which had “no new features”. It was then another two years before the release of 10.7 (Lion) in June 2011. It was exactly what Apple billed it as: a shoring up of the OS’s technical foundations. But it really was true that Snow Leopard didn’t introduce many new user-facing features. That’s not true, of course - Snow Leopard had plenty of new features, including significant new technologies like Grand Central Dispatch, Apple’s solution to parallel computing. It was then another two years before we got 10.6 (Snow Leopard), which Apple proudly marketed as having no new features. That was the time Apple issued a decidedly Jobsian “Hotnews” post acknowledging that Leopard - which even if it had shipped on time would have appeared more than two years after 10.4 - would be delayed an additional four months because Apple had pulled engineering resources to work on the original iPhone release. It’s fair to say, in hindsight, that 10.4 Tiger was the first good release of Mac OS X, the first one that truly delivered on the promise of a union between Mac OS and NeXTStep.Īnd then 10.5 (Leopard) didn’t ship until October 2007, after having been promised for June of that year. Those first few years were about making it more complete, consistent, and fast. Mac OS X was incomplete, inconsistent, and slow when it debuted. That schedule was close to annual, but in those years, Apple was just picking low-hanging fruit. 10.2 shipped in August 2002, 10.3 in October 2003, and 10.4 (Tiger) slowed things down by not shipping until April 2005. 10.1 followed just a few months later in September 2001. 1 10.0 was a glorified public alpha - more of a proof of concept than a usable OS. And as Guy English has keenly remarked numerous times, the annual schedule means that by now - that is, January - a lot of engineering talent in Cupertino is being directed to next year’s OS releases, leaving less talent on the task of tightening the remaining loose screws in last year’s.Īpple’s decade-ago development schedule for OS X now seems downright leisurely. If the pattern Apple has established the last two years holds, by the time the loose screws get tightened in iOS 8 and OS X 10.10, we’ll be getting developer betas of iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 at WWDC. (See also: Copland and Pink from Apple’s own history.)īut in avoiding the problems of stagnation and hubris, it feels like Apple has run into a different problem: nothing ever feels settled and stable. The annual schedule keeps OS X from stagnating, and keeps Apple from biting off way more than it can chew, leading to a years-long death march that never actually ships. I can’t help but wonder whether Apple’s recent focus on annual significant-but-not-hubristic (read: Longhorn) updates to Mac OS X is an attempt to do the opposite of what Microsoft did to lose its edge with Windows. The “fix”, Windows 7, didn’t ship until 2009. Microsoft didn’t have a major update to 2001’s Windows XP until 2006’s Windows Vista, which was rejected by its customers. WhenĪ company’s best users lose their spirit, it loses their leverage.Įvery company’s downfall is different. Microsoft, with users who do more complaining than praising. Eventually, though, it runs the risk of becoming another Apple may not think so - its financial statements wouldĪrgue that it’s in great shape - but it’s being buoyed by anĮxcellent run of hardware releases and a certain amount of I think a lot of us have lost our spirit, and that’s a problem forĪpple. Drang, in an excellent piece on l’affaire Functional High Ground: Apple and Eras of Flux Friday, 9 January 2015ĭr.
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