This is not about EOL - the article is about Apple not patching security issues in two-year old supported OS versions (Catalina from 2019).
Microsoft certainly does patch all two years old versions of windows.
Microsoft certainly does patch all two years old versions of windows.
Second, as already pointed out by another poster in this thread, Apple provide free upgrades to newer OS versions for supported hardware (and the hardware support goes back a decent number of years[1]).
For the vast majority of people on Catalina, all they need to do is to upgrade to Big Sur, it is almost certain they are using compatible hardware[1].
If Apple properly supported Catalina, that would be great; if Apple explicitly said that Catalina is out of support / EOL and people need to upgrade to Big Sur, that could be reasonable; but if they keep the two-year-old release in some limbo that's kind of supported but poorly, that's simply poor support.
Apple needs to make a clear choice and publish a specific date for each of their releases up until which they commit to backporting security updates, so that people can know what is the expectation for e.g. Catalina, whether it is considered supported or not right now.
Apple is giving you the update: Install it and now it’s up to date. They don’t have to support multiple versions of the same thing indefinitely.
The situations (devices) where the update isn’t possible (i.e. they’re outdated too early) can probably be counted on one hand.
The fact that Big Sur was released does not automatically mean anything about the support for Catalina, because there are all kinds of reasons not to make a major version upgrade even if the hardware is still compatible with the new version; the major upgrades do break certain aspects of software and implement changes to functionality and UI, not just fixes for security bugs.
The core issue is that simple questions like "Is Catalina being supported as of 14th November 2021 or not" and "Which is the date when Big Sur support ends and you are expected to migrate to Monterey or later for security updates" deserve a clear answer from Apple, and it seems that they are refusing to answering that with any official, published policy.
>iOS may now offer a choice between two software update versions in the Settings app. You can update to the latest version of iOS 15 as soon as it’s released for the latest features and most complete set of security updates. Or continue on iOS 14 and still get important security updates.
>https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-15/features/
Apple is not even meeting it's own guarantees.