The focus will once again be on performance and security

Jan 31, 2018 10:56 GMT  ·  By

Apple plans to delay some new iOS features to 2019 in order to focus more on performance and security, and according to a new report, macOS is very likely to be impacted as well.

This means a bunch of unnamed features for macOS devices and which were supposed to launch this year won’t see daylight until 2019 the earliest, Bloomberg reports.

Few specifics are available at this point, but it seems that as compared to iOS, the number of features that would be pushed back is substantially smaller. The cited source says the desktop operating system will be affected “to a lesser degree.”

On the other hand, Apple Watch and Apple TV won’t be impacted in any way, so the new features planned for this year will be released according to the original schedule.

The macOS fiasco

Apple’s software release schedule in 2017 has been a rollercoaster ride, with the company often criticized for shipping botched updates that substantially affected device performance and caused issues like crashes, lag, and freezes.

On macOS, in particular, Apple struggled to fix security problems that allowed attackers to gain full root access on vulnerable devices without even knowing the computer password. The patch that Cupertino released, however, introduced other problems that the company had to fix with further updates.

By pushing back new features, Apple wants to focus more on refining the operating system up to the point where such behavior would never happen again. On the other hand, not releasing new features could lead to more frustration in the community and users might start looking elsewhere for certain functionality.

A new update for macOS was expected to launch in the fall, with previews released in the summer, and there’s a good chance the same schedule is on the table for this year as well. It remains to be seen to what scale macOS would be impacted by this new strategy, with more information likely to be offered at WWDC.