I think the pressure to keep adding new features on a yearly basis is more likely to please the investors/shareholders rather than the users. As an user, I know what I expected to get when I purchase the device, and just want it continue provide the same functionality. Occasionally adding new features without impacting existing functionality is nice, but I’m completely happy with the device just keep doing what it does. On the other hand, the investors/shareholders are the ones who would expect the company to regularly come up with new products, new features, with the hope of driving business growth. With Apple’s stellar track record of growth (especially under Tim Cook), the pressure will only get more severe.

For featuring in a podcast episode, I guess.

I also immediately think of this book. Also the main character of the jumping spider species in the book is called Portia, likely refer to the same species in the article.

Yep, origin of the name.

Accounting work is in many ways similar to a garbage collector in program runtimes (e.g. JVM). Their primary goal is to manage available resources: keeping track of current usage, anticipate future availability and prevent misuse. In that sense, there can be a lot of creativity in the optimization of that process just as software people have from tweaking a piece of code to work better.