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by tambourine_man
2321 days ago
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Memory is a curious thing. Snow Leopard had a very problematic release but got better during the dot updates. Its “no new features” slogan was commendable and resonated well, but it meant under the hood changes that broke things. Perhaps they should reconsider the yearly release schedule. Either go back to a more conservative one, letting things settle after many point updates and enjoying the achieved stability for longer, or adopt a continuous evergreen model, like Chrome and Firefox. |
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The difference was that the non annual release cycle meant that the .0 version was a significantly smaller proportion of Snow Leopards life cycle, than is the case for recent annual releases of OSX.
Let’s assume Apple takes 3 months to stabilize an OS right after release. If you’re always up to date, an annual release cycle means that for 25% of your time, you’re using an unstable version of the OS. A 2 year cycle would mean that you’re using an unstable version for only 12.5% of your time. That’s a very significant change.
And in practice I think it’s worse because with the non annual release cycles, most OSX devs would use the time right after release to stabilize the OS. Whereas with the annual release cycle, it’s apparent that most devs’ priorities shift to next years OS instead.