iOS 27 “Rave” Update to Clean Up Code
Apple’s iOS 27 update will prioritize cleaning up the operating system’s internals, with engineers making changes that could result in better battery life, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
The effort is said to be similar to what Apple did with its Snow Leopard Mac update years ago, and will involve removing old code, rewriting existing features, and subtly upgrading apps to improve performance.
Note that it does not say they are focusing on fixing bugs. We’ve heard stuff like this before, and it did not produce anything like a Snow Leopard. Who can say whether a particular feature needs to be rewritten without seeing the code, but I don’t think there’s any reason to presume that a rewrite will improve reliability. At best, there’s now lots of new code that has not been tested at scale. At worst, Apple has a history of rewrites making things worse and even eventually being scrapped. These days, hearing that a feature or app that you depend on is receiving attention in an OS update may provoke more fear than excitement.
Thus, it’s indisputable that iPhone had a significant effect on Leopard. Strangely, nobody appears to acknowledge that iPhone may have had a significant effect on Snow Leopard too. Apple (in)famously promoted Snow Leopard as having “0 New Features.” Although this was clearly a joking exaggeration, the joke had a grain of truth, reflecting the limited scope of Snow Leopard compared to its predecessors such as Leopard and Tiger. No joke was Snow Leopard’s price discount: $29 compared to $129 for Leopard or Tiger. Many people assume that Snow Leopard had 0 new features because Apple was working instead on countless bug fixes, as if features vs. bug fixes were the only possible tradeoff. But Apple’s PR mentions a different tradeoff. What if Snow Leopard had 0 new features because Apple was working instead on iPhone—and iPad! After Apple released iPhone, the company did not simply rest on its laurels. It pushed ahead, not only on iPhone, which was becoming a huge hit, ultimately to overshadow the Mac, but also on a new product, iPad, released in April 2010. Does anyone believe that the key software engineering and QA resources “borrowed” from the Mac OS X team were all promptly returned, like a library book?
[…]
Sadly, I see no reason to believe that Apple has suddenly started to care again about software quality. The new year-based operating system numbering scheme is an overt sign and painful reminder to me that Apple has no intention to end the self-enforced yearly major OS update release schedule that is a primary cause of Apple’s software quality problems. What I liked about the Snow Leopard era, and what I think everyone liked about it, was the unusually long period after major releases when we received mostly minor bug fix releases, slowly improving the quality of the operating system, avoiding big disruptions. In that sense, we will never have another Snow Leopard, because the future is annual major updates.
I liked Snow Leopard’s focus on OS internals and developer features like GCD. But what was really special about it was the time between major releases, and that obviously can’t be replicated on an annual schedule.
Previously:
- Contacts in Tahoe
- Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia
- Snow Leopard at 15
- The Myth and Reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard
- How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs
- Disk Utility in El Capitan
- Mac OS X 10.10.4 Replaces discoveryd With mDNSResponder
Update (2026-02-19): Nick Lockwood:
ah yes, the team that hasn’t managed to ship a stable software update in 15 years is going to rewrite the only parts of the OS that actually still work properly. What could go wrong?
Update (2026-03-17): Joe Rossignol:
In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reiterated that iOS 27 will be similar to 2009's Mac OS X Snow Leopard, in the sense that one of Apple’s biggest priorities is bug fixes for improved performance and stability.
Update (2026-03-20): Steve Troughton-Smith:
Everybody’s going to be so happy when it turns out that ‘a Snow Leopard year’ for macOS actually means rewriting a bunch of legacy apps in SwiftUI and ‘modern’ design, using Claude. So happy.
10 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I had the same reaction when I read this rumor. "We've heard this before." I assume it's something that gets leaked to the press to lower expectations when they know there won't be resources to devote to new features.
The timeline Jeff lays out also shows that the annual release schedule only started post-Jobs. And the announcement of the delay is written in a Jobsian style.
Can't imagine them going back to that way while Cook is still in charge. They clearly decided to align the software schedule around the iPhone hardware release schedule, quality be damned.
Sorry for double post but the other thing it makes extremely clear is that there isn't really a macOS anymore in their mind. It's just desktop iPad with dedicated keyboard and usually landscape orientation.
I can't think of a time in recent memory, probably since the annual release cycle, that they released something just for macOS. For many years the so-called macOS releases have just been there to bring most but not all of the iPhone "features" and "design" to the Mac. Thoughtlessly and by rote in most cases.
Totally agree with Jeff here. There's no reason to believe that Apple will actually make a genuine effort to fix bugs. The continued annual release schedule is an obvious reason why, but at this point there's clearly major institutional dysfunction within Apple and until we see some sign of that changing then we can expect more bugs, more restrictions and more UI degradation like we've been seeing for the last ten years.
You need a Leopard to have a Snow Leopard, and OS 26 is no Leopard.
I have no faith that they’ll get this right but I hope I’m wrong.
What made Snow Leopard was the Lion delay, IMO. While an os was out, bugs were continually getting fixed. Now the problem is not just the yearly cadence, it’s the policy of no bug fixes in the current version starting a couple of months after release. You could imagine a yearly release cycle where bugs get fixed and you can just stay a year behind to have a stable system. They just don’t value stability. And how could they? Allegedly most of the company just daily drives their development snapshots, they probably don’t even remember a working OS.
Technically, Tiger was around longer than Snow Leopard. Even with the Intel transition, it matured into a VERY FINE release of Mac OS X (that I actually skipped, I went from 10.3 to 10.5), and is still buttery smooth and reliable (on appropriate hardware - like the 24" iMac/Late 2006 machine that's sitting next to me right now).
10.6: August 2009 -> July 2011
10.4: April 2005 -> October 2007
I love me some Snow Leopard, but credit where credit is due - Tiger was an excellent release, too.
The other thing thats really different in this era compared to 2009 is that apple has so many platforms and technologies to support. When they drop even a minor features something like Siri/iCloud they might need to be rolled out and tested across macOS, iOS, iPadOS (which is like iOS but has some forked features), Apple TV, WatchOS, HomePod, AirPod firmwares, etc etc
The surface area for bugs, especially for continuity/mirroring/handoff/syncing/networking features are extremely large across their portfolio
There was very similar talk with iOS 9 (also by Gurman) which didn't amount to shit — it was even slower than iOS 8 on the same devices. https://9to5mac.com/2015/02/09/apples-ios-9-to-have-huge-stability-and-optimization-focus-after-years-of-feature-additions/
On the other hand, iOS 10 brought optimization with little fanfare.
