Comment by FredPret
3 months ago
Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!).
Instead, they should have stayed on the Straigth and Narrow of Quality - where they were for many years - where you move up to computing paradise by having fewer features but more time spent perfecting them.
If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing". IMO they trapped themselves into this yearly release cycle with the OS naming, and this puts pressure on them to deliver something big and new every time. Quality? Ain't nobody got time for that!
> If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing".
That's the bed they made themselves and lay in it willingly.
No one is forcing them to do huge yearly releases. No one is forcing them to do yearly releases. No one is forcing them to tie new features which are all software anyway to yearly releases (and in recent years actual features are shipping later and later after the announcement, so they are not really tied to releases either anymore).
I would argue the stock market is forcing them to do all that. Line must go up, but it's not sustainable. Like you said, they ship later and later after the announcement. At some point they're going to have to disappoint or move the goalposts.
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I would be totally fine with bi-yearly releases.
They could do a kind of tick-tock, with one feature release being followed by a polish and refinement one. Kind of like they did with the regular and S iPhone models. I would welcome that; I don’t know about the marketing department.
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> If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing".
And then what? Mac users would buy some janky Acer with Windows 11 and bunch of preinstalled malware instead?
Zero percent of consumers care what the tech press writes, and Apple makes their money by selling their devices to consumers.
They could easily wait longer between releasing devices. An M1 Macbook is still in 2025 a massive upgrade for anybody switching from PC - five years after release.
If Apple included fully fledged apps for photo editing and video editing, and maybe small business tools like invoicing, there would be no reason for any consumer in any segment to purchase anything other than a Mac.
> They could easily wait longer between releasing devices.
They could, but then they wouldn't be a trillion dollar company. They'd be a mere $800bn company, at best. ;)
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Nobody really cares if they add a lot of OS features as long as they don't make grandiose statements.
I generally see complaints about advancement aimed at the hardware. Some are unreasonable standards, some are backlash to the idea of continuing to buy a new iphone every year or two as the differences shrink, but either way software feature spam is a bad response.
This is the entirety of the explanation, really. Apple has always started small and then iterated toward greatness. They've made two mistakes recently:
1. They've stopped starting small and instead started unrealistically large. Apple Intelligence is a great recent example.
2. They've stopped iterating with small improvements and features, and instead decided that "iterating" just means "pile on more features and change things".
Some of these issues are excusable by saying they "added too many features too fast" (especially the inconsistencies which the article begins with), but lots of the issues are just caused by Liquid Glass becoming a thing and some "less important" apps didn't get a proper UX test after switching to Liquid Glass design (the whole latter half of the article)...
And that's not excusable - every feature should have its maintainer who should know that a large framework update like Liquid Glass can break basically anything and should re-test the app under every scenario they could think of (and as "the maintainer" they should know all the scenarios) and push to fix any found bugs...
Also a company as big as Apple should eat its own dogfood and force their employees to use the beta versions to find as many bugs as they could... If every Apple employee used the beta version on their own personal computer before release I can't realistically imagine how the "Electron app slowing down Tahoe" issue wouldn't be discovered before global release...
naw dude we gotta get these quarters numbers up by degrading quality on windows/chromecast. It just reeks of incompetence and insincerity
The only path to staying on the SaNoQ is having a CEO who prioritizes quality, to the extent that they'll spend time dogfooding product and gripe at developers / engineers / designers / leaders who fall short.
Either everyone is worried about the consequences of failing to produce high quality work (including at the VP level, given they can allocate additional time/resources for feature baking) or optimizing whatever OKR/KPI the CEO is on about this quarter becomes a more reliable career move.
And once that happens (spiced with scale), the company is lost in the Forest of Trying to Design Effective OKRs.
>Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!).
yep. The attention to details is still there, it is just changed from polishing and curating details to creating a lot of small unpolished and uncalled for and thus very annoying details. From MBA POV there isn't much difference, and the latter even produces better KPIs.
They strayed from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAEPqUtra6E
Not entirely, though; there is joy and playfulness at the core of Liquid Glass. But delight is not that common, and refinement and focus are definitely lacking. They could have used more nos and fewer yeses.
"Straigth and Narrow of Quality"
We see what you did there!
I should've typed fewer but better words!