> Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than 10.5.8
Somebody who worked on Snow Leopard has already disagreed with you here about those things:
> As the person who personally ran 10.6 v1.1 at Apple (and 10.5.8), you are wrong(ish).
> Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval. In feature releases it was bottom up "here is what we are planning to ship" and in Snow Leopard it was top down "can we ship this?".
> During that time period my team and I triaged every single Mac OS X bug coming into the company every morning. Trust me, SL was of higher quality than Leopard.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431675#43439348
> Apple's strict yearly schedule makes "another Snow Leopard" impossible. At this point, Apple has accumulated so much technical debt that they'd need much more than 2 years of minor bug fix updates.
I don’t think the schedule matters. They just over-commit every time. I said elsewhere:
> [Apple] were never building and have never built software at a sustainable pace, even before the yearly cadence. They race ahead with tech debt then never pay it off, so the problem gets progressively worse.
> A while back, that merely manifested as more and more defects over time.
> More recently, they began failing to ship on time and started pre-announcing features that would ship later.
> And now they’ve progressed to failing to ship on time, pre-announcing features that would ship later, and then failing to ship those features later.
> This is not the yearly cadence. This is consistently committing to more than they are capable of, which results in linear growth of tech debt, which results in rising defects and lower productivity over time. It would happen with any cadence.
