Why should it be that way? That's been answered repeatedly now. It's an extremely complex system written by humans that make mistakes. Just because they're Apple, or have a public beta, or have lots of money doesn't give them access to an exclusive pool of perfect humans who make no mistakes. Software development works the way it works and neither extra people or money can change that. It takes one woman 9 months to make a baby. How long would it take with 9 women? 9 months. Not every problem can be solved with added resources. It takes one guy 6 months to build a house. It takes a crew of ten just a month to build the same house. It takes a crew of 10,000 people many years to build the same house because there are just too many people. More people isn't always the answer. Apple being richer than pretty much every other company out there doesn't mean they get to skirt around these basic ideas.
Why have a beta at all? Why are you assuming having the beta doesn't help? Wouldn't it make more sense to assume Apple wouldn't spend the money putting it all together if they got nothing out of it? I presume that they get valuable feedback or they wouldn't waste their time. They love secrecy, so they're not doing it for fun. It seems more natural for them to do things that make sense rather than doing things that don't make sense. Companies generally don't become as successful as Apple by making bad decisions. Just my opinion of course.
What release updates that aren't fully ready? Business reasons. Also, bugs are inevitable. If they wait till it's bug free, we'd get updates every 10 years. Then 10 years worth of features would be added which would take 20 years to debug. So where do you set the bar? How many bugs are acceptable and still release the software? There are always tradeoffs. Do you keep the new feature from 99% of your users because it's broken for 1%? Things aren't black and white. Neither are they simple questions to answer when you get down in the trenches. We just did a major upgrade to our claim processing system this past weekend. It got put off several times because of bugs. But there were other deadlines pushing in the opposite direction which meant it absolutely had to go this past weekend, ready or not. It all went well in the end. But it's a lot more complex than: bugs = no release. It seems like a simple question, but it's far more complex when there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of things that need to all come together and pass before you're ready to release. We probably had a dozen or two departments involved in our upgrade. Each of them probably had their own go-live checklist of things that needed to be done. Some of those tasks may have taken multiple people to complete. The IS department had probably 15-20 different teams in the department doing the same. Getting 100% of the people to be 100% done with all their tasks doesn't always happen. Then the question needs asked: do we go live or not? There were probably over 200 people ultimately involved in one fashion or another to make things go smoothly. The sites my team launched will be used by thousands of people. Apples software will be used by hundreds of millions of people. I bet their releases are more complex than what we just went through.
Hope that helps you see things from the other side and helps answer your questions.
