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Comment by rorykoehler | Hacker News Reader

I never upgrade immediately. Still on Sierra. I need my machine for work. I can't justify being an Apple beta testing guinea-pig. Once i know it's stable and /or all the major problems that could affect me are at least known if not fixed then i will upgrade. Anything else is reckless. Nothing wrong with applying security patches on the old os as needed.

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One problem is that Apple did NOT release a security update for older systems along with 10.12.0 and 10.13.0. Only when 10.12.1 and 10.13.1 came out did they publish patches for earlier revisions. That gives everyone a choice between using a .0 release (ouch) and running an unpatched OS for about a month.

So you would recommend staying no more than one annual release behind?

See my answer to the sibling post. I'm not sure what to recommend. When 10.14 comes out, we'll probably have to read the KB article to evaluate whether the security fixes are so important that we should install 10.14.0 immediately (no matter how buggy it may be).

I'm never that far behind with my strategy. After a while you get diminishing returns by not upgrading.

Sorry, I think my post was not very clear.

macOS High Sierra 10.13.0 was released on 2017-09-25. Sierra (10.12 and El Capitan (10.11) were not patched on that day. So if you didn't upgrade to 10.13.0 _on the first day of its availability_, you were missing out on these security fixes: https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT208144

Apple only released patches for 10.12 and 10.11 along with 10.13.1, more than a month later (2017-10-31): https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT208221

The same pattern happened when 10.12.0 was released - older systems only started receiving security fixes on the day 10.12.1 was released.

So it is generally true that Apple keeps the three most recent versions of macOS secure, but there's always this awkward gap around September where they don't.

This doesn't apply to iOS. If new iOS version come out, you should update immediately so you can test if it fit your comfort. If not, you have very limited window to come back to previous major (and hopefully still secure) version of iOS.

If you miss this window, you have two options - stay on older version waiting till new version get fixed all annoying bugs (hello iOS 11), or if you already on newer version, you're screwed - no coming back.

For this reasons I stared upgrading to newer iOS versions as soon as they are available.

I'm always up to date on ios. I rarely use my ipad for programming related tasks

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