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.
I owned the tiniest sliver of a fraction of a percent of Apple, but I sold my shares due to a lack of technical leadership.
Lack of technical leadership?! I guess I must be missing something, because from the outside, they've got best CPU, the best battery life, the best VR system, the best privacy, and they seem to have gotten Intel's WiFi chips to work (which Intel couldn't). Probably the watch has some top-notch features, but I am not at all familiar with it. They also have a bunch of features that are unmatched by competitors due to their vertical integration (e.g. handoff, iOS apps on macOS, etc.). Maybe leadership are just a bunch of putzes who are only being saved by great engineers, but it seems unlikely.
Note how most of the things you listed are hardware. No one disputes that Apples hardware team is insanely good.
Their software side however is riddled with issues, delayed or cancelled projects, meandering focus, unclear priorities. They are increasingly overpromising and underdelivering.
Their product side is neither here nor there. Vision Pro is a technically marvelous bust. iPhones rely on gimmicks because there's really nothing to differentiate them anymore. Peripherals (Homepod, AppleTV) are stagnant. iPad suddenly saw signs of life this year with good functionality updates after a decade of "we have no idea what to do with it, here are meaningless and confusing hardware updates". Macbooks have been completed as a product years ago (not that it's a bad thing), so, again, they are just randomly slapping non-sensical names on upgrades and chase thinness.
Oh. Thinness. That is literally the only feature that Apple is obsessed with. You can't build a product strategy on thinness alone.
Stock value has no meaning at all. What matters is revenue and profit. If Apple doesn't release new devices every year, then they will still sell last year's model. What are customers supposed to purchase instead? A PC? Nobody is going to turn down a new Mac just because the model is 1,2, 3 or 5 years old.
you might want to look into how executives get compensated. it's equity (aka stock).
Good point!
Stock market is responding to Apple behavior. Stock market was perfectly okay with Apple not doing yearly releases before the iPhone. The stock market was perfectly okay with Apple not doing yearly releases of MacOS during the iPhone era. The stock market was totally okay with Apple not doing yearly (or predictable) hardware upgrades on anything but iPhone.
The stock market can easily be taught anything. And Jobs didn't even care about stock market, or stock holders (Apple famously didn't even pay dividends for a very long time), or investors (regularly ignoring any and all calls and advice from the largest investors).
You need political will and taste to say a thousand nos to every yes. None of the senior citizens in charge of Apple have that.
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.
Now what they did with iPhone is Tick-tock-tock-tock-tock-tock
> 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. ;)
New releases do not drive increased sales as much as people think. Especially if the new releases are lacking in quality.
Not many consumers go out to buy an Apple device because the new one has been released. They go out to buy a new phone or new computer because their old one gave out and will just take the Apple device that is for sale.
The yearly cadence ensures that there's always a "this year's model" to upgrade corporations+institutions to in volume through the Apple Business Leasing program.
That's also why Apple bothers to do the silent little spec-bump releases: it gives Business Leasing corporate buyers a new SKU to use to justify staying on the upgrade treadmill for their 10k devices for another cycle (rather than holding off for even a single cycle because "it's the same SKU.")
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!