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Comment by StreamBright | Hacker News Reader

Late adopter here. I never update to any new operating system from Apple on any of my devices what I need to use for production up front. I usually wait until I absolutely have to upgrade otherwise something does not work, or if I have evidence that the new OS runs well on the device I am going to install it on. This saved me a lot of headaches in the last 5-10 years. Given Apple's no downgrade once you upgraded attitude with MacOS I would say it is extremely risk to update to any new operating system version. For those who are not familiar, it is not supported to downgrade MacOS by Apple, they upgrade the firmwares many of the devices in your Mac during an upgrade and there is no official downgrade for those. It is possible with hacking, I know, but I would not risk warranty with such a method.

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There's risk both ways... By updating you risk breakage. By not upgrading you risk security issues and increase technical debt (which is a risk amplifier).

I'd argue that missing out on security fixes is far more risky than any technical issues you may encounter after an update but I'm a security engineer.

Apple does supply security updates for older versions of OS X though. Once that stops it really is time to move on.

Security patches are available for the previous version, the trend is that the previous 2 versions of OS X receive security updates. Would you mind giving me an example of technical debt? I am not sure what you mean by that. Just to confirm, I am not missing out on security fixes at all, I am updated all the way to the latest version with security patches with the previous version of MacOS.

There are a ton of security fixes for macOS sierra. These fixes have not been published for older releases of OS X yet. Apple wants people to upgrade.

But is Apple stupid/naive/childish enough to hold security fixes to ransom?

I'd guess not "ransom", but not enough resources allocated to backport fixes, along with a lack of incentive since they fixed them already in the gold standard New Version.

> not enough resources allocated to backport fixes

Which is just silly for someone like Apple

> a lack of incentive since they fixed them already in the gold standard New Version

That is not how security works. Again, it is just silly for someone like Apple to believe only the latest release needs security fixes.

Oh, I completely agree. I've ranted about this before; I like to use old versions and be a late adopter after all the kinks get worked out. I'm just saying maybe it's more due to a (possibly negligent) misplacement of priorities than to outright malevolence for non- or slow-upgraders.

"We're Apple... everyone always uses the latest versions of our stuff..."

Running Mavericks here without incident. I avoided the WIFI debacle with Yosemite. Unfortunately cannot upgrade Xcode or Safari past version 9 - a fair trade for an OS that works I suppose. I'll switch to Chrome and not use Xcode. Swift? I hardly knew ye.

Also a fan of the late adoption on OS X / macOS new versions.

While that works well, you can install the newer version in another partition or disk. That's what I did with macOS Sierra and then I went back to an older version as it doesn't seem very stable to me.

FWIW on a macOS Sierra test box I just had compress hang on zipping up 2 small log files. Not sure if that's Sierra or if the machine has problems, but it sure was weird.

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