Apple executes massive feature releases on a yearly waterfall-like schedule across hundreds of teams. It requires honesty, transparency, strong leadership (ruthless prioritization), strong cross-team goodwill, strong cross-team collaboration as well as a solid body of experienced top-tier engineers. Other than that there's no magic. While there are teams within apple that does scrum/agile, none of the core OS/frameworks teams does it AFAIK, and I do think it's incompatible with shipping on a hardware-aligned schedule.
Have you noticed their declining OS release quality in recent years? I have, and I now wait 6 months to upgrade.
The triangle is real[1]. Something's gotta give when a deadline can't move, and as we know from Brooks, software development speed doesn't increase linearly with more people. So it's primarily quality or scope that must suffer to hit a software deadline.
I'm using MacOs/OsX since Lion, and I can say that it was very stable (even on my Hackintosh) and I observed stability issues increasing with all the following versions (on real Apple HW) and I'm on the same ship as GP never upgrading to newer versions until at least 6 months pass.
Yeah, first few OS X releases were famously buggy as they were figuring this UNIX stuff and the OS 9 compatibility, but they stabilized about 10.4 Tiger.
Honestly the OS X itself (uhhh macOS now) is still fine, even with Big Sur and its weird iOS controls, however the other software is sometimes weird; but - let's say Numbers was never good and iWeb was always downright bad. And iTunes was bad in Jobs era and is still bad (as Music).
I however still kind of miss when native Cocoa apps were sort of good and not just ported iOS app via Catalyst or something. But whatever. I'm old I guess
When OS X came out 20 years ago, it was the star of the show. Nowadays it's just an annoyance that Apple has to keep around. The quality has demonstrably fallen, and the internal struggles it's had within Apple have already been documented.
Honestly, Apple's decline traces back to losing Steve Jobs. The strategic changes were immediate, (and aimed at shorter term gains, things that people besides Jobs thought were being left on the table) the effects just took a long time to really add up to something meaningful. IMO, they never really recovered, they just are massive and have a HELL of a lot of momentum. It takes time to undermine that all even if you do everything wrong. They definitely are still doing some things right, but IMO, the type of thing you are complaining about is a leadership issue.
Adobe executes (executed) massive releases on a well-defined cadence (1.5 yr per "creative suite"). Sure, I won't say they don't have collaboration, or top-tier engineers etc. But in the end, the success of this well defined cadence boiled down to the simple strategy of "we release what is ready". Everybody knew the deadlines well in advance, and everybody strives to 'make it' - but, (not so) occasionally, some teams didn't and you could see entire features get ruthlessly cut out. Simply no other way of synchronizing across the entire company... you cut scope to make it in time, and if you can't make it, that's it, your feature gets cut. With enough teams working, you still get features to showcase at each release.
That's pretty much how Linux kernel releases work. Just having a regularly scheduled release train that always runs on time – that you can catch (or not) is great.
alot of companies though, are "business driven" which means releases and schedules are set beforehand, which makes this hard... (but if you can do it, its great!)
> Apple executes massive feature releases on a yearly waterfall-like schedule across hundreds of teams. It requires [...]
And no doubt a great deal of crunch time, their fair share of delays, some major messes and the occasional outright cancellation. And if I'm not wrong their roadmap is not public information.
I personally find it hard to believe that a large company can exhibit all those adjectives you list. Everyone finds this hard.
When you have hundreds of teams you can cut a bunch of features and it still looks like you are massively productive each release :) Not everyone has that luxury unfortunately. Some of us are a single team of a handful of developers.
How do you know they are thoroughly waterfall? How do you know they don’t use agile, time-boxing, etc.? Apple is so secretive, it feels like we know of little other than what they are confident about releasing. The things that weren’t done on a schedule compatible with a hardware release, how often are they simply postponed? And for those postponements that they do admit, how many are waved away with a creative explanation? I think you need a good deal more information to back up your point about Apple’s work management.
How do you know it's waterfall-like? If you ship working software every 2 weeks and every 26th one you release, hooray, you have yearly software that's super likely to work well.
Apple produces a new build of iOS or MacOS every 24 hours. For the many years that I had to suffer through that, about 40% of those builds were dogshit and unusable. The public gets the 360th release, and hopefully by then the PMs have driven enough burnout in the engineers that it is mostly acceptable to users.
Do they tell you at the beginning of that cycle what features to expect? Or do they constantly work on features, and then at presentation time do a freeze?
