How do companies like Apple know their products will function properly when only a beta is ready upon announcement?
In: Technology
It’s complicated, but here is the short version. Before we announce a product, any product, it is usually mostly complete. We have versions of it in house, employees are using it on a daily basis, and a team of people is doing their best to find any issues. This will continue up until you get to a ‘golden’ point. This is when everyone involved agrees that what you’ve got is good to go and there will be no major problems. After this no changes are allowed to the product, but testing continues. Note that this may not be exactly like you showed the product initially. Features that proved to have lots of problems, or not work as expected may have been removed. Materials may have changed if they proved to be too expensive, things like that. All this said, products almost NEVER get out without some issues. This is why you very often see patches released sometimes days after the initial release.
They don’t always know.
AirPower was announced to the public with a delivery date and then was cancelled
Betas are used to gauge the problems under the tag “beta” so people know, hey we’ve got these ideas and here’s the current implementation; what’s wrong and what could be fixed. Often times issues are found and fixed and other times issues arise and get postponed or canceled
Experimental products (especially in the software world) usually go through extensive quality assurance (QA) testing internally before shipping to customers. This involves a specialized team of bug testers sifting through the product to ensure it will function properly on most/all devices. A public beta test is usually released to test the quality/stability of the product on a much wider scope, to gather feedback on the product from a more realistic userbase, and also sift out the more device-specific bugs, as well as any issues the QA team might have missed. In other words, the beta testing stage is (most of the time) only released to people once companies like apple are sure its reached a point of usability.
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