[nonbirithm]

Perhaps there's a version of Moore's Law concerning the amount of innovation left at the OS level, and we're only starting to run out of it just now.

What legitimately useful features can we expect out of the release of iOS five major versions down the line? Will there be any new features that change the status quo, and that we'd be practically unable to live without? The significant features like the app store and multitasking have already been done long ago. As for macOS, it seems that the new security controls and notifications are significantly impacting some people's user experience, but they're still "improvements" from Apple's standpoint.

And yet Apple and Microsoft are still somehow compelled to keep releasing new versions of their operating systems on a fairly regular basis. It's hard to imagine there will be a "final" or even long-term-support version of iOS. But those companies aren't going to market their new OS versions as changing nothing, so something has to change.

I'm honestly very curious to see what will happen ten years from now when the vendors will struggle to meet their own arbitrary standards for innovation with each new OS version when, by nature, there are not many more significant breakthroughs left to be had.

[joquarky]

There are a lot of simple usability changes that could still be added to Windows.

Off the top of my head, I'd like to be able to drag or minimize a parent window when it has a modal dialog open. This is especially frustrating when using an application that uses nested modals and you need to reference the grandparent window to fill in some information on the current modal.

They should buy the code for the file search utility named "Everything" and build that into the OS.

Also, the Amiga had multi-character drive names and path mappings/assignments in 1985. It was nice to type DOCS: or GAMES: into a file dialog to go directly to where I organized those resources. Sure, I could do this with single-letter drives but that requires me to remember what each letter maps to.

[rocqua]

There is plenty of innovation to be done on security and performance. But very little that is a great 'sales pitch'.

Perhaps much better interface for multi desktop and other multitasking.

[thomastjeffery]

Just get feature parity with the average Linux distro, and I'll be happy.

Windows is so behind, and every step they take in the right direction is an authoritative foot-gun.

Most of its problems are, at their heart, symptoms of Microsoft's proprietary closed-source design style.

Apple made huge strides in the right direction by basing OS X on BSD, then proceeded to make every step from then on in the wrong one. Walled gardens are pretty, not functional.

[eloisius]

I get so sick of Apple reshuffling their interface around just to make it "new" and "modern" every major release that I can almost seriously see myself using Serenity OS as a daily driver one day. I have no idea what's going on over there, but it's like they adopted all the worst design trends from web (things changing on hover, hamburger menus hiding everything to look "clean") to pulled it into macOS.