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Comment by _-david-_ | Hacker News Reader

Apple is able to patch the newest version without regressions but not the older versions?

Every product team I've been on that kept multiple versions of a product going would fix the newest first, then the next newest and so on down the line until the oldest version got fixed. This is nothing new.

This is a very plausible problem.

Backporting to older releases means finding potentially new solutions to the same problems depending on where the bugs sit in the codebase. This could also mean backporting more than just the fix itself, depending on how the codebase has evolved.

Is it not entirely normal for a version currently or recently under active development to be easier to confidently work with than something you have to pull out of mothballed status? I know good practices improve that situation (the "natural" default for which seems to be "lol good luck, you may as well re-write from scratch" absent any forward-looking effort beforehand), but surely there's still some friction that comes with that even in places that handle it very well.

Monterey came out late October. You only aren’t on it if you decided not to be.

Just checked, I'm not on Monterey, and I can't say I've decided either way.

I just checked and I'm on Big Sur.

It's the reboot, for me. It's just inconvenient enough that I put off upgrades for a long time, usually. I usually apply iOS updates promptly, because it's much easier to say "yes" to those since it's not going to lose much useful state on re-boot. Plus they seem to complete a lot faster.

Yeah I'm on Big Sur on my work computer, so I bet it's frozen by policy, but I bet it's the same on my personal, for the same reason.

Python 2.7 being removed has probably made corporate upgrades very slow.

Or you have a Mac from 6+ years ago that doesn't support it. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212551

Apple doesn't support old hardware as long as Microsoft/Linux.

Big Sur should see at least another 18 months of support. Admittedly, that's just guessing based on past behavior, not a guarantee, which does kinda suck, but in fact it will probably see that much more support. Will likely remain safe to use for some amount of time past that, though who knows how long. Realistically, and accounting for 18 months being a bit pessimistic, one might reasonably expect another 24-30 months of use with a machine that can't upgrade past Big Sur, before having to make some kind of choice (install Linux, install Windows, or buy a new machine, I guess)

Windows 11 is dropping very recent hardware.

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