Apple

This is an excellent article. I will highlight two sections I thought were most relevant:

When people wistfully proclaim that they wish for the next major macOS version to be a "Snow Leopard update", they're wishing for the wrong thing. No major update will solve Apple's quality issues. Major updates are the cause of quality issues.

We need to go back to biennial (once every 2 years) releases, to give the engineering team time to reduce their technical debt and stabilize major releases.

If each new major update introduces new bugs, and some of those bugs remain unfixed before the next major update is released, then over the course of multiple major updates you have bugs continuing to pile on top of each other, forming an ugly garbage heap.

That is the tech debt I mentioned above. Even iOS doesn't need to have yearly releases because smartphones are mature products now.

Personally, I have not upgraded from 16.7.2 on my 14 PM because it is quite stable, battery life is excellent, and there is nothing I want from iOS 17's features. I will likely only upgrade when iOS 18 comes out with (apparently) major changes to AI-related features.

On the Mac side, since it's a mission critical device I only update when the latest Xcode stops supporting the version I'm running (Ventura 13.6.2).