> That’s not sustainable when they can just tell everyone to upgrade to the latest build.

That is totally sustainable. It's effortful — and they can get away without doing it — "when they can just tell everyone to upgrade to the latest build". Just because they can do something doesn't mean its alternative is not "sustainable".

> Less required QA, less wasted engineering time.

For the vendor yes. More headaches for the user when features they liked are removed or features they didn't like or want are pushed on them. But that was already accepted as inevitable when buying into the Apple ecosystem, which brings me back to my original point: non-user-hostile software.

Why are you so obsessed with foisting costs onto the user? QA is important, engineering time is important, so put in the effort to make a good product. This pattern of updates would not be nearly so necessary if SWE's (and their managers) weren't so fucking afraid of a little elbow grease

.. but this breaks or downgrades some devices. It might be less cost for them but it's more cost for us.

Those are trivial things that any software team should be able to handle. How many security bugs are we talking about? Is iOS riddled with tends of thousands of bugs per-release-brach? No, it isn't.

In any case, I'm not sure why anyone should care about saving money for Apple. As a consumer I should look for the best deal for me, not ways to funnel more money into their pockets. They are very capable of taking care of that themselves.

You don't need to change the GUI features to patch the kernel and related programs unless those patches are actually related. It's not magic.