Not really. Consumer behavior is not what technical people expect it to be. The main reason people update their phone OS is for new emoji. People love this stuff.
To get people to upgrade! It's extraordinarily effective. They seem to always do it in the first major patch after a major release, to kinda ensure everyone gets a stable version of the OS.
A few years ago, people here were complaining that MacOS was too unstable from all the new features, and that they wish Apple would just do a few feature-less stability releases.
Apple advertises the things that 99% of the people buying their products care about. That doesn't mean that things aren't changing under the hood.
I do wish they had a developer-focused version of these announcements, though. A lot of very interesting stuff usually never gets mentioned officially at all.
It’s their job to get people to click the upgrade button, so developers can rely on the new advanced libraries, and if the impression they make is “basic maintainance update with some colorful snazz” it is more likely to happen.
I upgraded to the beta version and am having a bug with an app that relies on WebKit so for me I wish I’d waited for the .1.
macOS has felt “feature complete” to me for years now. There is nothing I really want from an OS. I only upgrade for the security benefits and so I can keep all my systems on the same release, since new systems can’t be downgraded.
I actually appreciate not doing relentless “innovation” just for the sake of doing it. Microsoft does this by slapping new UIs on top of old every damn release. They often don’t even remove the old stuff, they just mask it with “innovation.” macOS does this too, but not nearly as bad. In Windows there are like 7 different layers of UI. You can click a half dozen times in the settings in Windows 11 and basically time travel back to Windows 2000.
I think the reason I don’t hate this stuff on macOS as much is because most of the changes are iOS-ification, and I use iOS so I somewhat intuitively know how to navigate the changes.
One of the last macOS versions had - click the mouse in the lower right corner and notes pop up. That's a new OS feature, really? I mean, I haven't really thought about it, but what's left for desktop OSes these days that they need to produce new releases every year.
The new screen savers were bumped up the priority queue because Apple has a bunch of QD-OLED computers coming next year and they're worried about burn-in.
I look forward to them removing all this functionality in four or five years, and then reintroducing it as a stunning new innovation in another four or five years after that.
Adobe has been famous for this annoying behavior for over a decade.
Remove some cool features only to reintroduce them, sometimes years later, as a breakthrough. Annoying, but it didn't prevent them from quietly innovating.
