Conjectures about why Apple can’t get its software act together abound. The most common is that the company has become so trapped in its cycle of annual hardware upgrades — a new iPhone had better appear every September, or else — that it’s simply incapable of keeping its software maintained. Programmer Marco Arment, in a widely-read comment last year, speculated that “the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. … They’re doing too much, with unrealistic deadlines.”