this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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The issue with having so many yearly releases is also just the explosion of OS versions you have to think about. I release an open source app and it's always kind of a pain that I have to think about all these different OS versions, each with its own quirks and minor bugs (some of which aren't directly visible to the end user), and it makes testing annoying.
Apple would probably just say "just update to the latest OS", but you can't just get all users to do that because each new macOS version stops support for some not-too-old hardware (7 years is not that old for a computer) and sometimes people don't want to upgrade to a new OS for random reasons (stability, or some software stops working in a new OS version, or they just prefer the older UI). I do agree that at at least switching to a 2-year cycle would probably help a bit. Right now there's just too much churn, and not enough concrete improvement in each macOS release to justify the churn.
Ten years ago, iOS 7 and Mac OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" were probably near the top of my head.
Now I have to look up what the current versions of iOS and macOS are.
If Apple moved to a 2-year cycle, would you prefer Apple update all their OSes in the same year or update different OSes on alternating years?
I feel like a 3 year cycle for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS is probably ideal at this time. Apple already uses the dot updates for nontrivial features anyway. visionOS and watchOS are newer so should get more frequent updates for now.