[lapcat]

I'm not sure. Perhaps Tim Cook just likes schedules, which fit naturally in his MBA brain. Or it could be that Apple previously set the expectation of annual releases and now can't stop, because getting off the update train would be a kind of indicator or admission to stockholders and the media that Apple is falling behind somehow. On the other hand, annual OS updates with updated system requirements would provide a convenient way to implement planned obsolescence of hardware.

In any case, Tim Cook clearly doesn't have the same standards as Steve Jobs did. Cook will never complain, "This is shit!" As Jobs reportedly lamented, Cook is a not a product person. So QA problems are not necessarily a problem for him. I suspect that Cook actually believes everything is mostly going well, and perhaps some "metrics" tell him so, though the metrics likely ignore the fact that developers have been disillusioned and alienated by Apple's hostile bug reporting system. If I thought Apple cared and would do something, I'd file literally thousands more bug reports.