Well, no one moved to a new OSX release on their main machines until .1 at least. That applied to Snow Leopard as well. And so SL wasn’t penalized for that.
The difference was that the non annual release cycle meant that the .0 version was a significantly smaller proportion of Snow Leopards life cycle, than is the case for recent annual releases of OSX.
Let’s assume Apple takes 3 months to stabilize an OS right after release. If you’re always up to date, an annual release cycle means that for 25% of your time, you’re using an unstable version of the OS. A 2 year cycle would mean that you’re using an unstable version for only 12.5% of your time. That’s a very significant change.
And in practice I think it’s worse because with the non annual release cycles, most OSX devs would use the time right after release to stabilize the OS. Whereas with the annual release cycle, it’s apparent that most devs’ priorities shift to next years OS instead.
> The difference was that the non annual release cycle meant that the .0 version was a significantly smaller proportion of Snow Leopards life cycle, than is the case for recent annual releases of OSX.
The difference was that the non annual release cycle meant that the .0 version was a significantly smaller proportion of Snow Leopards life cycle, than is the case for recent annual releases of OSX.
Let’s assume Apple takes 3 months to stabilize an OS right after release. If you’re always up to date, an annual release cycle means that for 25% of your time, you’re using an unstable version of the OS. A 2 year cycle would mean that you’re using an unstable version for only 12.5% of your time. That’s a very significant change.
And in practice I think it’s worse because with the non annual release cycles, most OSX devs would use the time right after release to stabilize the OS. Whereas with the annual release cycle, it’s apparent that most devs’ priorities shift to next years OS instead.