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The thing is, we don't need a new OS every year, and most people I know don't want to update their devices either.
Where is the demand coming from?
I once saw a very nice chart about the number of users for a great, cool start-up everyone knows about. The CEO illustrated: "You see that inflexion point on the release day? That's what happens for every release. If we postpone it by 3 months, we not only lose 3 months of new customers (painting the 3-months area between lower and higher sales). We also miss on the offset." and he painted the unlimited area between the lower sales and higher sales. And he talked about the recurrence of the inflexion for each release, and he talked about the immobilized capital inventory.
Their hardware from 2008 is running El Capitan, so there isn’t much persuasion for existing customers to upgrade. It seems like if someone is going to switch to Mac, they would do it regardless of any features introduced in the last 3-4 OS X releases.
I don’t know, I’m not a sales guy. But it seems like the tradeoff of losing your customer base due to unreliable software isn’t worth it.
Because release cycles are so short, test cycles are shorter as well; and of course new hardware is tested first (and foremost), so updates to older hardware will see more bugs, and updates are always buggier anyway (because it's harder for developers to predict the state of your system pre-migration).
I certainly see the yearly release cycle for OSX as being a big factor for the perceived fall in quality. In addition, there is probably a glut of "peak Air", people who switched to Mac when the Air was unrivalled and have not bought anything since. Their hardware is less and less tested with each update, so they're feeling the pinch. Apple don't care, because they want new money from them.
Can't release new iOS features which involve the Mac without a corresponding OSX release.
The iPhone is definitely on a 1-year cycle, but it's not really something they put effort into maintaining on their computers. MacBook Air and iMac are probably the closest.
I blame iOS/Mac features tie-in like Continuity. OS X definitely gets the short end of the stick from that.
