I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches.
In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it.
Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.
I've been using fundamentally the same Linux setup for over ten years now. I think the biggest change it went through was migrating the audio system to Pipewire, which took about an hour to figure out and hasn't need attention since.
I have no solutions to offer for smartphones sadly.
100%. I'm not OP but have had similar experience. My basic UX hasn't changed beyond trivialities in pretty well over 10 years. Contrast that with SaaS and many modern mobile apps that get completely redesigned every couple of years whether you want them to or not, and you have zero control on even the timing of the update. I've found a lot of refuge in open source as complete redesigns just for the hell of it (or to justify a full-time job) are nearly unheard of, but there are definitely tradeoffs. Usually (though not always!) the UX isn't great, but it will be functional. As a person who prefers function over form (though does harbor an intense appreciate for the latter), this is often a good trade.
Exactly. Fedora on the desktop is wonderful, and on laptop is really good assuming reasonably supported hardware. I have a framework 16 and 13 and both run fedora really well.
My archlinux has moved from a bunch of scripts to just a window manager with Chrome. At the end of the day, you realize you don't really need all these gadgets and notifications but just a terminal and a browser.
SailfishOS is pretty decent on mobile, as in a simple system that moves slowly. You can get support for Android apps with an emulation layer. Even banking apps tend to work well. Sadly, to get a license from the US you'd need a EU IP address.
I have this conversation with my partner quite often. We'd like to use operating systems, software that stays "still" and doesn't break usage workflow every release with changes just for the sake of change. We both think that major commercial operating systems/software is largely feature complete. And everything done nowadays is just for keeping up the "freshness" appearance with all sort of meaningless GUI overhauls or features of doubtful usefulness that marketing branch everywhere pushes.
It really feels like the quality was replaced by... lipstick on a pig. And honestly, I am fed up with all this pandering of the changes as a breakthru, live changing technology.
This has to be related to the curse of "can it scale?" that our industry is in love with. I think it is safe to say that MS Access and related programs were probably already covering a large majority of use cases back when they existed. On modern machines, they could probably cover larger companies better than folks want to admit.
Will they work for the largest companies out there? Of course not. This despite the fact that they probably did help get those companies off the ground.
A side effect of employing tens of thousands of full time people that do product development is that matter how good your product currently is, there is an entire organizational hierarchy that has to justify its existence. The result is that every great product keeps picking up parasitic features and functionality. Intended to add value, but paradoxically removing overall value.
There is a fine line between staying ahead of the competition and enshittification and most companies don't find it.
The most recent examples that come to mind are Spotify and Slack. Products that were, at one time, a pleasure to use, but have since been significantly degraded by a continual assault of minor features and re-working of UI.
Reworked UI's (and also renamed products) are the bane of my tech existence. I think I'm going to learn Emacs, build up the musculature of my C-C and C-X pressing fingers, and live out my days in the terminal.
There's other economics to it at play which you hint at.
The "pay a premium for no new features" tends to imply a "I paid $99.99 for this once, all future updates for bug and security patches are free".
This in turn means that there's no money incoming (especially as the software goes further and further from feature parity with competition) to pay those developers who are doing the bug and security fixes.
While new features can be (often are) buggy, the new features and upgrades that are coupled with the software (and hardware) that have people buy ${new thing} in turn subsidizes the effort to fix ${still supported thing}.
That, and the effects of allowing "new feature demos" at WWDC. The various groups MUST come up with something that demos well. "See how easily I can...", and now the slightest breath does something dramatic, and usually wrong.
One doesn't get credit at a tech company for fixing a bug, but for introducing a Process that would prevent all such bugs forever. Or at least until the promotion goes through.
That's what I think too. I prefer the same UI for 30 years. I don't care about any "UI new age" stuffs.
TBH I don't even care about security anymore, like our data has been sold left and right already. As long as I don't get phished, I avoid 80% of the bad actors out there.
I already removed some update software from Ubuntu, those update notifications are very frustrating.
iOS doesn't even need more features, it needs way less. Sadly that isn't how the world work.
For my one use case I noticed that the newest iOS release doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3. The "Press home to unlock" and "X new notification" texts are now laid on top of each other on the lock screen. You're looking right at it when picking up your phone, so you can't miss it, yet Apple QA did.
Reminds me of the old days working at Motorola. Your feature branches were merged into a biweekly dev branch, which needed to be “sanity tested” before it could get merged into the branch that the QA folks validated. Every software engineer was on a lab rotation: when it was your turn, you and a couple others that made up your team went to a different building and descended into the hardware lab where you didn’t come out until you had created a working mobile phone network from scratch and tested it with a wide variety of phones -basically anything that could work. They had shelves with bins of everything: early unreleased smartphones (this was way before the iPhone), junky flip phones, RAZRs, StarTacs, bag phones, etc.
It was honestly a lot of fun to see the hardware side of what you were working on, and to ensure that documentation and checklists were always sufficient.
Apple is probably way too secretive to do anything like that :(
Ah, I wish I could get a job like that -- both hardware and software. I need to take out the STM32 dev board I purchased a few years ago and started writing software for it.
Yeah that is very frustrating. I recently went to Ubuntu and picked the minimum installation. I then installed a bunch of development tools such as `build-essentials` and `git`. Other than Youtube crashing on Firefox, the whole experience, at least for the programmer part of me, is very satisfying.
BTW debugging still takes a lot of effort to setup in VSCode / or have to write init scripts for GDB which I suck at. I think Visual Studio debugger beats everything on Linux for that purpose.
for a long time, iDevices could not copy&paste. locking to one of those versions with no new features would be horrendous. not all new features are bad or trivial.
It is technically incorrect to say that iOS could not copy paste at any point, as the copy paste feature was present in the first version of the software called "iOS".
To use a version of iPhone OS that can't copy or paste, you'd have to use the original iPhone or the 3G (not 3GS!)
I think the pressure to keep adding new features on a yearly basis is more likely to please the investors/shareholders rather than the users. As an user, I know what I expected to get when I purchase the device, and just want it continue provide the same functionality. Occasionally adding new features without impacting existing functionality is nice, but I’m completely happy with the device just keep doing what it does.
On the other hand, the investors/shareholders are the ones who would expect the company to regularly come up with new products, new features, with the hope of driving business growth. With Apple’s stellar track record of growth (especially under Tim Cook), the pressure will only get more severe.
Ironically, this is EXACTLY what Google Keep (their notes app) is. Just a simple, cloud based sticky notes app that has barenones to no formatting features except for a basic checklist. It's perfect for me and has been that way for at least a decade. Knock on wood tho
Yea im also getting tired of the constant updates and featuritis.
I still have a 16” Intel Macbook pro and looking for my next machine and am seriously considering a Linux notebook for the first time. Im mostly coding and doing docker stuff.
No excel and photoshop is a bit of an issue though.
My complaint isn't about new shiny, but new safe. Sandboxing apps on Linux is getting better but it still has a ways to go to catch up to macOS.
I'm talking about things like how a weather app shouldn't have access to the filesystem, or camera, or microphone, etc... A calculator shouldn't be able to see my location or even what networks I'm connected to.
Initially it was building out the basic feature set. Now it seems every time they add a new swipe or icon it breaks my mental model of how my phone works without adding something that I needed.
Apple is caught by their own success: the iPhone is mammoth hit but they've reached the end of its growth. So they've got a whole organization built around making it more compelling to grow the sales, but they should really switch gears: put the iPhone into maintenance mode and invent something completely new. Easy to say, hard to do, trillions on the table if they pull it off.
In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it.
Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.