Compare OS X 10.0 to the current version - there's a whole lot that has changed, and the user experience is massively superior. And they managed to get there through a series of 7 incremental releases where the single most jarring change was swapping the semantics of the "scroll" gesture. Stuff has come, stuff has gone, but they never once did it in a way that left existing users at a loss for how to interact with the new version.
Heck, skip the tiny increments. I'd go so far as to suggest that if a Mac user were to time-travel forward from 1984, they would be less confused by the current version of OS X than Windows 7 users seem to be by Windows 8.
Your time-traveling Mac user would probably be pretty surprised that it took until 2001 to get real multi-tasking and memory protection, and that the only way to do that was to switch to the Dread UNIX :)
Compare OS X 10.0 to the current version - there's a whole lot that has changed, and the user experience is massively superior. And they managed to get there through a series of 7 incremental releases where the single most jarring change was swapping the semantics of the "scroll" gesture. Stuff has come, stuff has gone, but they never once did it in a way that left existing users at a loss for how to interact with the new version.
Heck, skip the tiny increments. I'd go so far as to suggest that if a Mac user were to time-travel forward from 1984, they would be less confused by the current version of OS X than Windows 7 users seem to be by Windows 8.