> They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it
This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c...
Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS X 10.5.8. There were some really bad bugs in those early Snow Leopard releases.
The Snow Leopard that everyone remembers and loves was not version 10.6.0 but rather version 10.6.8 v1.1, which was released almost two years after 10.6.0.
Major OS updates invariably introduce more bugs than they fix. That's an iron law of software development. What Apple used to do, which they no longer do, is spend a long amount of time just fixing bugs in minor updates to the operating system. Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule. Worse, Apple doesn't just fix bugs between those yearly updates; instead they keep introducing new features even in the "minor" updates. So we never get a "stable" version. It's constant change for the sake of change.
This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c...
Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS X 10.5.8. There were some really bad bugs in those early Snow Leopard releases.
The Snow Leopard that everyone remembers and loves was not version 10.6.0 but rather version 10.6.8 v1.1, which was released almost two years after 10.6.0.
Major OS updates invariably introduce more bugs than they fix. That's an iron law of software development. What Apple used to do, which they no longer do, is spend a long amount of time just fixing bugs in minor updates to the operating system. Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule. Worse, Apple doesn't just fix bugs between those yearly updates; instead they keep introducing new features even in the "minor" updates. So we never get a "stable" version. It's constant change for the sake of change.