The New York Times Eats Out Of Steve Jobs's Hand
from the reality-distortion-field dept
The New York Times has an interview with Steve Jobs about Apple's plans for Mac OS X over the next decade, and it appears that Jobs had his famous Reality Distortion Field cranked up to full power. In the interview, Jobs says "I'm quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future," he said. "We've put out major releases on the average of one a year." The story then notes that Microsoft took "almost seven years" between XP and Vista, and notes that the next version of Windows is slated for 2010. The reporter states that "At Apple's current pace, it will have introduced two new versions of its operating system by then." Now maybe I'm bad at math, but I'm pretty sure that recent versions of Mac OS X haven't been released a year or even 18 months apart. The last version of Mac OS X was released two and a half years ago, and the one before that was released four years ago this week. So Apple has actually be averaging about 2 years per release, suggesting that "at Apple's current pace," they would release 10.6 (or whatever it's called) in October 2009, and 10.7 in October 2011. On the other hand, if you think the next version of Windows will be out before the end of the decade, I've got some real estate in Florida you might be interested in.
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Filed Under: os upgrades, steve jobs
Companies: apple, ny times
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6 releases since 2001 is an *average* of?
......carry the denominator
......oh heck I'll ruin it for you 6/6 = 1
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Re:
Even if we do look at the last 6 years, your math is wrong. What we care about is the number of releases since 10.0, so you can't count 10.0 itself. And 10.1 was a free bugfix, so it's not really fair to include it in the count (otherwise we might as well include XP service packs). So there have been 4 new releases in the last 79 months, for an average release time of just under 20 months. That's neither "12 to 18 months" nor "on the average of one a year."
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So what?
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How many months in a year-and-a-half?
More directly.
10.0: 3/24/2001
10.1: 9/25/2001 (6 months)
10.2: 8/23/2002 (11 months)
10.3: 10/24/2003 (14 months)
10.4: 4/29/2005 (18 months)
10.5: 10/26/2007 (30 months)
The comparison has other flaws. Vista is far more different from XP than 10.5 will be from 10.4; Apple's changes are far more incremental. However, that doesn't change the fact that you don't seem to know what an average is.
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Who gives a hoot?
OOOOH look at the pretty colors! OOOOH the Start button is GREEN!
Message to OS fanboys - get a life!
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Re: Who gives a hoot?
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I've also heard that Leopard actually has quite a few optimizations that might cause some speed increases in a few apps, so that's nice.
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Long live Apple.
Oh and what kind of person would Jobs be if he didn't lie a little? We all secretly want to be a rich theif like old Billy boy don't we?
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Law of Averages
10.0: 3/24/2001
10.1: 9/25/2001 (6 months)
10.2: 8/23/2002 (11 months)
10.3: 10/24/2003 (14 months)
10.4: 4/29/2005 (18 months)
10.5: 10/26/2007 (30 months)
Someone please tell me what "average" means in a situation like this. It appears that Apple is taking longer and longer to release a new version of its operating system.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Windows release schedule looked similar.
This is the opposite of Ray Kurtzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns" and goes back to the stone-age economics of the "Law of Diminishing Returns". Gee, remember that, kiddies?
Looks like the old economy is here to stay, again. In fact, if you look at that OS X release schedule, it looks close to a Fibonacci Sequence. So 10.6 will take between 3 and 4 years to develop. Some average. Note to Steve : start working on OS 11. (But this one goes to 11!)
For that matter, who updates their OS's besides ultra-geeks? I mean, unless there is something horribly wrong with the previous iteration, who's going to buy a new OS...Mac Fanbois? M$ Fanbois? Geeks with nothing but time and money on their hands?
I mean, if I can run mail, web, and IM, I'm set for life. Also, if I can write nasty little comments on techdirt, I don't care what OS I'm using.
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Re: Law of Averages
With vista we pretty much have to if we want a to buy a new computer in a retail store. This is one of the reasons that MAC sales have increase - ex-pc people who couldn't get a new computer with xp (I'm one of them...)
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Also, as someone who is forced to read white papers, I can tell those who dismiss OSes as irrelevant.. they are anything but. an OS is more than just 'a system on which programs run,' it's the forefront on computer security, as well as the forefront on, well, making your computer _do_ things. Regretfully most OSes, be they *nix or win32 based... sorta suck.
An OS revolution is in order.
Mac is hardly leaning. Leveraging the code of *nix and pretended they invented it is more than laughable, it's downright dishonest.
I use a Mac. "It just works" is about as bullshit as any claim made my a Windows or Linux evangelist.
They all have flaws, but pretending your company does something it doesn't (consistently release OSes in a short period of time), frankly isn't right...
Just because AOL is up to version 352 doesn't mean the current iteration is better than 2.5
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Closed-Source Dead End
As Mrrar points out, Ubuntu manages a new OS release about every 6 months. And that distro offers tens of thousands of packages, totalling hundreds of millions of lines of source code--bigger than Vista and OS X put together. How's that for greater productivity?
Yes, it does seem like Apple is taking longer and longer to bring out new releases. It looks like it's approaching the same brick wall that Microsoft has already hit with Vista--ultimately, your capacity to add more and more new features, while maintaining backward compatibility with a longer and longer trail of poorly-thought-out past decisions that you cannot change because of the need to maintain binary compatibility with obsolete closed-source apps that your customers might still be using, becomes impossible to maintain. Your ability to stave off the forces of entropy becomes exhausted, and a Vista-type product is the result.
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Re: Closed-Source Dead End
The underpinnings of Windows (e.g., the registry and other OS base technologies) is now at least 12 years old, counting from the release of Windows 95. The next release might therefore represent the end-of-life for the underlying technology, and we may see MS making a huge switch similar to the one Apple made from OS 9 to OS X.
With this history in mind, it would appear as if the technology underlying OS X still has ten years of life left.
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Bad Advertising
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I do count service packs
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Anyway, who gives a shit if two entirely different OS's get updated at different frequencies?
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#21
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We've seen this before
With one caveat: the journalist/stenographer believes that an unfounded statement is "news" only if it comes from the mouth of the wealthy and/or powerful.
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Changing the subject...
Yes, I'm interested in hearing about real estate in Florida. :)
Back in the late 1970's, my parents were approached about "buying real estate in Florida". They passed, thinking it was a scam to sell them swamp land.
That swamp land became the town of Punta Gorda, near Ft Myers (south of Tampa/ Sarasota), where developers built canals similar to Ft Lauderdale so every home has water access. The average price of a home is anywhere from $350,000 to $500,000 and up.
If my parents had bought the "swamp land" in the 1970's and held it until the late 1990's, they probably would have made a fortune.
So, where did this expression come from and why are we still using it? ;)
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Walt Mossberg too!
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Walt Mossberg too!
"And Apple has upgraded OS X far more rapidly than Microsoft Inc. has upgraded Windows, bringing out major new releases roughly every 18 months, while Microsoft struggled for more than five years to produce the latest Windows iteration, Vista, which came out in January."
More here: http://tinyurl.com/2re7nw
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