Get the latest tech news

Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

The same year Apple launched the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known as Leopard, sporting “300 New Features.” Two years later, it did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took away. Apple needs to make it snow again.

Nowadays, Apple includes the system upgrades in the upfront cost of its computers, so the incentive to constantly roll out ten or twenty or three hundred “new features” should be lower. That’d be an annoying step backward in the olden days, but it is worse in an era when an iPad can share the Mac’s mouse pointer and even double as a secondary display. Having squandered its lead going the wrong direction, Apple’s temptation could now be to ignore the infrastructure rot and simply keep trying to bolt on catchup features without fixing what’s already broken.

Get the Android app