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Save 20% on the award-winning Audio Hijack with coupon code 6C20AH!By Dan Moren for Macworld
It’s time for Apple to take a new approach to product releases
We’ll fix it in post.
It’s a longstanding joke in the podcast community–when somebody flubs a line or misspeaks during recording, we just kick the can down the road and repair it in editing. (For shows that actually do editing, anyway.)
But lately it’s started to seem like a more common occurrence across the tech industry, and even Apple’s jumped aboard the train. We’ve seen a number of places where Apple announced a particular feature shipping in a product–whether it be a new hardware device or a major software update–only to eventually release the product without said feature, promising it in a subsequent software update. The most recent example is the HomePod, which will lack support for multi-room audio, stereo pairing, and AirPlay 2 when it ships next month. But before that, we had iOS 11’s promised Messages in iCloud, Apple Pay Cash (which did ship in a later point release), and, again, AirPlay 2.
These sorts of things do happen, of course, and while you can chart examples back into earlier eras, the high number and profile of these situations recently has me looking back to what might be the root of the issue.