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Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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..."

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

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