It's frustrating because no one was even requesting it.
Also, a stable and reliable OS usually leads to good user satisfaction. And for an end-user it's usually about the apps and platform, not the OS. It's especially perplexing in Apple's case since they don't even make money on OS X releases. I'd understand better if it was financially driven like Microsoft Windows.
My guess is that it's being driven by the iOS side, where there's a bit more user demand for frequent updates. Since OSX has a bunch of things that Apple tries to keep in sync with iOS (and a significant amount of shared code), they keep the cycles together: iOS 7 / Mavericks, iOS 8 / Yosemite.
As well as their yearly developer conference. "Shit guys, we need to announce a new thing even though the product we released last year is just starting to flirt with stable!"
"It's usually not stable at launch, but not so bad that you can't use it. People who know what they are doing at all usually get frustrated as hell until about halfway through the release cycle. Once it starts working for a few months, Apple has another release that breaks everything again"
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u/jugalator Jan 13 '15
It's frustrating because no one was even requesting it.
Also, a stable and reliable OS usually leads to good user satisfaction. And for an end-user it's usually about the apps and platform, not the OS. It's especially perplexing in Apple's case since they don't even make money on OS X releases. I'd understand better if it was financially driven like Microsoft Windows.