A Bloomberg report suggests that next year could be a Snow Leopard-style update for each of Apple’s operating systems. In other words, the company will prioritize working on bug fixes and reliability over new features.
The timing of this claim seems dubious to me: as Gurman himself acknowledges, Apple absolutely has to introduce a lot of AI improvements next year, so I don’t see how it can possibly qualify as a bug-fix year. Timing aside, however, this is something I would love to see …
How Snow Leopard became shorthand for quality
Given that each year’s new operating system releases across Apple products are generally noted for introducing exciting new features, the company did something rather surprising in 2008. It announced that OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, would focus more on bug fixes and stability than on new features.
Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation.
The passage of time saw that grow into something of a myth: that there were no new features in Snow Leopard, only bug fixes. That isn’t what Apple said at the time, nor what it delivered.
All the same, the company choosing to focus primarily on reliability, coupled to the fact that many considered Snow Leopard to be one of the best versions of what became macOS, means that it is still remembered fondly. Effectively, what Apple did was to rewrite a lot of things but with the aim of creating a solid foundation for future changes rather than adding lots of new features at the time.
Today that operating system name has become a synonym for a release which focuses on delivering the best possible user experience over shiny new toys.
The Bloomberg report
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggests that all of next year’s operating systems will take this approach.
Engineering teams are now combing through Apple’s operating systems, hunting for bloat to cut, bugs to eliminate, and any opportunity to meaningfully boost performance and overall quality. Like Snow Leopard set the groundwork for future overhauls and new types of Macs, iOS 27 will lay the foundation for foldable iPhones and other new hardware.
However, he essentially contradicts this Snow Leopard analogy with what he says next.
On the AI side, more dramatic changes are brewing, including the long-awaited upgrade of the Siri voice assistant in iOS 26.4 and the weaving of artificial intelligence into additional apps in iOS 27. That includes a health-focused AI agent (tied to a Health+ subscription) next fall and an expansion of the AI-powered web search meant to rival both ChatGPT and Perplexity.
While some of this is expected in iOS 26 et al, much of it will be launched as part of next year’s major updates. For this reason, I don’t think we can really say that 2026 is going to be a Snow Leopard year.
But I’d love to see a tick-tock pattern
For a while, Apple used to take what has been described as a tick-tock release pattern with iPhones: one year, a redesign with significant new features, the next year an iteration on that in the form of the S models. I would love to see the company take this approach with its major software releases.
Sure, I love to see exciting new features as much as the next person, but when it comes to the day-to-day experience of using Apple products, I’d argue that reliability has a far greater impact than new tools. It bugs me no end (sorry!) that there are software glitches that have existed for literally years without a fix by Apple.
Way back in 2019, I gave some examples of bugs that had persisted for years, and the first two of them still exist six years after that! I suggested at that time that Apple might devote as little as one week a year to fixing small but annoying bugs, and the overwhelming majority of you agreed with me.
Perhaps a short amount of time focused on bug fixes isn’t enough and the company should instead take a tick-tock pattern to new software releases: one year, shiny new features, the next making everything absolutely rock solid.
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