We’re now seeing reports of Apple trying to slow things down in future software releases to avoid the bugs and multiple patches we’ve been getting with iOS 13 and macOS Catalina. This signals a pendulum shift we’ve seen many times before between conservative and aggressive software releases. We need go back only a few years to see that the very stable, but relatively conservative iOS 12 release followed on the more aggressive (and buggy) iOS 11 release the year before. In terms of new features, this year was awesome. I argued earlier that it was just the right amount of awesome but given the number of patches we’ve had, maybe it turns out it was a little too much awesome.

Either way, I expect things will be dialed back a bit next year so they don’t have so many patches. I continue to believe that Apple should be pushing the envelope. As things stand, particularly with iPad, the software has not matched the hardware and there still is plenty of catching up to do.