OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

There is, of course, one potentially major downside to the yearly upgrade cycle: How stable are dot zero releases? Not very. There’s usually bugs galore, plus the fact that Apple have changed and added things, meaning that third-party developers have to make substantial updates to their applications in order for them to work properly with the new OS, a process that can take months depending on how lazy the developer is. This has been an issue with every major OS X upgrade. But usually by around the third or fourth update Apple have sorted out these bugs and developers have caught up. As a result, by the time the late dot releases arrive a year or so later everyone has forgotten about all the disruptions they experienced with the dot zero release and are now basking in the warm glow of an ultra-stable OS.

However, all of this is about go out the window as we now face not one major upgrade every two or three years, but one every 12 months. Apple probably isn’t even going to get to the ninth or tenth update of bug fixes in most cases before the next major dot release arrives. I mean, ML is due in about five or six months and there are many people who are still afraid to upgrade to Lion either because they don’t think it’s stable enough or because they are still waiting on developers to update their apps. Now the whole apple cart is going to get upset again with 10.8 and then 10.9 only 12 months later.

So the shift to a year upgrade cycle is a potentially very risky move for Apple and they are going to have to learn to tread more carefully with each dot zero release in order to ensure they don’t end up pissing off users and developers. The yearly thing works with iOS, but OS X is a much more complicated system and even the smallest change can cause a lot of problems. But perhaps the implementation of sandboxing on the Mac App Store will make this process smoother.

It should be added, however, that this is a problem that plagues Windows as well. I mean, how how often does MS release a new version of Windows? Every 3-4 years? And the take-up is very slow for precisely the same reason some people haven’t upgraded to Lion yet. People want to wait until all the bugs are sorted out and their programs will work. In fact, it’s not unusual to come across people still running XP all these years later. So the yearly upgrade cycle might just as easily turn out be a good thing as will mean more incremental improvements that won’t cause as much disruption as Lion or Leopard did. In fact, I think that’s exactly Apple’s thinking here, but whether it will work out that way we’ll have to wait and see. The biggest problem is with lazy developers who won’t update their apps.