Comment by phantasmish a day ago
There were a couple Apple OS releases in the ‘10s where they were like “hey, not many new features and no big redesign, we mostly increased performance and squashed bugs”
It feels like we’re waaaay over due for one or two of those.
Actually, I think it's you who's out of touch here.
There's two awful colliding factors here.
1) People absolutely buy features.
I am in the Apple ecosystem, why? Because iMessage on my laptop, seamless copy/paste and the fact that it supports every bit of software I want to run.
2) MBA thinkers value features, for the previous reason. They can show that features move the needle of units sold. It's easier to quantify.
What you and I implicitly understand is that Apple has a captive audience, people will continue to buy MacOS (by virtue of Apple Hardware) for the coming few years at least.
The higher quality the software, the more performant and less buggy: the more likely we stay in the ecosystem longer. This will sell units in the 4-7 year timeframe for sure.
The more Apple focus on this, the larger their moat.
MBA's barely understand how to build a moat, other than monopolising a market by M&A.
> Because iMessage on my laptop, seamless copy/paste and the fact that it supports every bit of software I want to run.
This is a good example of a feature that is actually useful. But it is also one that has been around for a long time. Can you think of something more recent?
- Transparent text selection in images a few years back was the kind of magical thing I didn’t know I need, but now that I have it any platform without it feels broken.
- I haven’t had a chance to use it yet but Preview was just about the only thing keeping me on macOS for my personal computing, rather than going all iPad/phone. Now it’s on iOS, as of the (otherwise terrible, maybe my least-favorite iOS release yet and I hated 7) version. Provided it’s close on features, that’s one of the only things I’d have missed going iOS-only, gone.
But I can’t think of anything between those two.
What’s really out of touch is how they don’t seem to think users would be excited for that. Literally nobody is enthusiastic for more complexity. Literally everyone hates the buggy, flaky mess on iOS, iPadOS, macOS. Maybe a working magical Siri would make an impact but Apple has prove definitively that they can’t build that ever. So, rather than ruining all the OSs further, just fire all the PMs and designers and let the engineers fix the bugs for a couple of years.