Newsletter Issue #709: The Mavericks Report: 200 New Features?
July 1st, 2013Apple is great about setting expectations. So recent OS X releases have each had over 200 new features. Why not 150? Why not 300? Well, evidently 200 sends the appropriate marketing message, although the numbers might be fudged just a little bit.
Certainly, if you look at the full feature sets of Lion and Mountain Lion, they do exceed 200, sometimes by a decent margin. But there are features and there are features, such as adding something to the menu bar, or an extra command that may or may not be useful. So in Mountain Lion, for example, Apple added the awkward Command-Shift-Option-S keyboard shortcut for Save As. Some might have preferred that Apple return to Command-Shift-S. In addition, the Share button and Share sheets, although they are merely variations on a theme, count as separate features.
However, there are also 15 features specifically designed for Mac users in China. So does that mean that rest of the world only got 185 new features? No, because there were a couple of dozen extra features in the list that gave Apple plenty of breathing room. So the phrase “more than” was quite correct, even if some of the ones included were, at best, minor enhancements. Apple doesn’t rate the worth of each new feature.
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