What's Next for Apple? A Deep Dive into iOS 18, macOS 15, and WatchOS 11's Progress

Considering iOS 17, Mac OS 14, et cetera

just launched in September, some people might think that their placements are still in the planning phases

No, Apple's well past that. Last month, the company completed the first version

of the next iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems, reported Bloomberg on Tuesday

that iteration known as M1, since it's the first major milestone. After reaching milestone one

Apple developers reportedly stopped adding new features to milestone two, because the code had too many bugs

As iOS 18, Mac OS 15, and watchOS 11 are still many months away, it's possible

this brief delay will have no effect on users. On the other hand, it

bump a microphone there. On the other hand, it might cause Apple executives to be less ambitious about how many additional features

can go into the next major versions when they launch in fall 2024

I just wanted to mention this, because my understanding of like, you know

how Apple works on these giant software projects broadly is that, you know, it's not like they ship iOS 17

and then they start thinking, oh, well, let's start working on iOS 18

I mean, internally, like they focus on these different teams like there's their Safari team, their photos team

And then, you know, within those specifically, they have different teams working on like specific features

you know, it could take like years in the making, I can't imagine how long like the team

that was working on iCloud shared photo library probably had to work on that

When I was at WWDC, I was talking to a guy who like said he was working on stage manager

and I was like, oh, how long did that take? And he was like, we've been working on this a long time

like many, many years. 12 years, like, and this is what you came up with

So like, at some point, all these teams working on these features, once they get close enough

they will then start to be like rebased into specific releases, like, okay

our team will be ready to go by the next major version, and so that'll be rolled into iOS 18 and all that

And I think that if anything, this story tells me that the next major software releases

are gonna be pretty big ones with a lot of features as opposed to what Ed was speculating here

If there are so many new features that like by milestone one, like the entire thing was like breaking catastrophically

so they had to like pump the brakes and say, hold on, we gotta work some of this stuff out

That could mean there's some big changes coming to the next major releases, in my opinion

Yeah, I'm always a fan of hardening, like if they're having major problems

and they wanna take a moment and actually address a lot of those issues

I'm always a fan of that. Like, I continually have issues with iOS and macOS

and there's little things that just don't work the way that they're supposed to work

and they're kind of buggy, and I'm like, dude, it just drives me crazy. So, but it seems like this pause is gonna be not very long

and to your earlier comment, maybe something that we don't even notice

I saw a story from German that said, even though that they're taking this pause to do bug fixing

they're still going to be adding a bunch of new major features to iOS 18. So

I would also like to know, like, how unusual is this? Like, do they, is this like the anonymous source

who slipped this information to Mark German, didn't add the context? Maybe it's somebody who's new at Apple

Like, he didn't specify, like, whether this is a regular part of the process or not

Like, it could just be like, you know, every few milestones, they stop adding new features

and they just work out bugs until the next one. And, you know, we don't really know that much

If you have any additional context to add, you can send me an anonymous email

feedback at dgriffinjones.com, let me know