With Apple there's a pathological need to release new devices and OSes on a yearly cadence. Landing a new feature rewards middle management and the top quintile of ICs with cash/stock bonuses and reflects on their end of year review. Fixing bugs does not get those rewards so there's little incentive to fix old bugs that 1) don't prevent a new feature's implementation or 2) aren't called out in a security release.
> ...Maybe this sort of scaling problem is a "$T+ market cap" thing that we've just never had to figure out before?
I don't know in all honesty. I'm sure part of it has something to do with the fact these companies have billions of customers. It's a mind numbing number of users. Even a single percentile change in the number of customers or revenue per customer makes for huge revenue differences. So given a finite amount of developer effort, a new feature which is likely to increase revenue is incentivized over a stupid AirPlay bug that isn't likely to increase revenue.
> ...Maybe this sort of scaling problem is a "$T+ market cap" thing that we've just never had to figure out before?
I don't know in all honesty. I'm sure part of it has something to do with the fact these companies have billions of customers. It's a mind numbing number of users. Even a single percentile change in the number of customers or revenue per customer makes for huge revenue differences. So given a finite amount of developer effort, a new feature which is likely to increase revenue is incentivized over a stupid AirPlay bug that isn't likely to increase revenue.