alt Hacker NewsYeah, these are funny.
There's a strange logic (that I understand is not just at Apple) where if you ship a known bug, it becomes harder next release to fix it… because we already shipped the bug once (twice, etc.).
Apple engineers care though. If they were allowed to (given time, priority), they would love to knock out some of their oldest and most annoying bugs. And I understand that from time to time a bug-fix-only OS release is planned… but things always come up. New hardware, "AI"… who knows.
Maybe someday we'll get another Snow Leopard (bug-fix-only OS release).
It feels like Apple lacks the institutional vocabulary to even think about fixing old bugs. The way the releases are structured, there’s a “zero bugs” day where all bugs are ceremonially kicked out of the current release, and the level of quality is deemed to be “what we’re shipping with”. On that day, it’s not like the bugs are fixed, they’re just bulk-modified to target “future os release” and that’s that.
Then the planning is made for next years release and they plan for X features, which require Y time and Z engineers, and some mild hand-waving later a schedule is made, and gee would you look at that, there’s no time anywhere for fixing existing bugs. But that’s ok because big rewrite of subsystem is gonna ship next release and it’ll probably make all the bugs invalid, right? Right? Well, it certainly won’t have more bugs, right? Right? Oops…