Couldn't be farther from the truth. Apple's development process revolves around their bug tracker, to an extent that I haven't seen anywhere else. If it isn't in Radar, it didn't happen.
But do they care about bugs in previous versions? Or do they only address bugs in the current/beta version? I suspect the latter, which means there's a growing set of non-critical bugs which get re-reported in every version but never fixed (priority always lower than shipping new features). Otherwise, I don't know how to explain the seemingly increasing instability of the software: memory leaks, crashes, etc. I even bought a new MacBook Pro this year, and maxed out the RAM at 16gb, but Safari still crashes and has the same frustrating issues like the occasional won't-refresh-local-url-without-quitting-and-restarting. Such bugs don't get added with new features, they've been there for a while in previous versions.
In some circumstance, when you're healthy, you could comparison shop.
Except: you can't. Try to find out how much a major medical procedure will cost you -- if you can find anyone who gives you any numbers at all, you'll be lucky if that's what you actually get charged. (And then try to find out how much your insurance, if you have any, will pay for! And then try to complain when the final bill is different!)
Yes, but that's a flag that our library's users would have to figure out how to add to their project. And if they forget to, it would create crashes at runtime. That's not a can of worm we were willing to open.
This made me laugh. The words "Apple II" and "graphics chipset" don't belong in the same sentence! The Apple II graphics were a fantastic, and fantastically weird, low-hardware hack.
That does sound rather strange. But fascinating...
Stuff like that seems like it might explain some of the mutual disdain that Chuck Peddle and Woz seems to have ended up with after their early encounters (when Peddle was on his 6502 "sales tours"; though maybe interviews and books have exaggerated it).
I can totally see this being the type of hack that would excite someone like Woz to pull off but that would make Peddle's straight laced inner formal engineer rage... Combine Commodore / MOS engineerings early problems getting a decent color graphics chip together but cultural refusal to go for something more hacky (the did plenty hacky stuff but only when Tramiel put jobs on the line) to get out the door quicker, with plenty of blame being put allocated to Peddle on a regular basis, and I can see lots of ego getting caught up in it..
IIRC, things were even better. There were two (740 byte, IIRC) buffers from which samples were taken at every horizontal refresh.
The sound driver used one to get samples to send to the speaker; the disk driver used the other to control the rotation speed of the disk drive (using pulse-width modulation).
How soon people forget! OS X had a software-based compositor until 10.2 -- that's when "Quartz Extreme" was introduced. Pretty sure the OpenGL path was planned the whole time, but the GL drivers were not nearly stable enough to use for such a crucial piece of the system.
In practice, CGLayer is not some pixie dust that magically makes your drawing fast. It helps only in a specific instance: when you are drawing repeated instances of the same content, into the same context. Otherwise, it ends up being extra complication for no benefit.
(Note that CGLayer is not related to CALayer or CGTransparencyLayer -- they are absolutely separate things. CALayers are incredibly useful in practice; CGLayer was kind of a dead end.)
Couldn't be farther from the truth. Apple's development process revolves around their bug tracker, to an extent that I haven't seen anywhere else. If it isn't in Radar, it didn't happen.