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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago I started dreading major updates from corporate providers. They push features they want, not features I want. It got so bad with Microsoft that I fled. Apple's updates have been aggressive in resetting my preferences and pushing things like iCloud and their login to the point that they are on the Microsoft path. I am forced to use mac for work but only because of work.

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Apple is most certainly not the company you want to purchase products from if you're afraid of major updates. They are far more aggressive and eager to break things than Microsoft.

Back in 1991, there was an uproar, an uproar I tells you, because System 7 required nearly a megabyte of memory instead of the 600K System 6 could run with. Sure, most users barely had more than a megabyte of memory, but it paints a pattern for sure.

Yes, but System 7 wasn't installed on your computer overnight without you realising it.

At my office it did. We used system when we networked the office. I kinda think it didn’t really come out until 92 but release windows lasted years.

Apple allows you to completely stop automatic updates. They're on by default, and they're not going to force you to restart. You can always postpone.

This.

Moving from Windows to Mac because you hate updates is like moving from Ubuntu to Red Hat. It's more of the stuff you hated except you don't realize it; ignorance is bliss?

I'm afraid of major updates and I'm using Apple. I usually wait around a year before updating and that works for me. They release security fixes for old versions.

I hope they will fix some bugs as well. The top one on my personal list would be fixing broken exfat support https://superuser.com/questions/321161/disable-automatic-fsc...

Or maybe Bluetooth automatically switching to "reduced audio quality" (I know, I know, it's a feature, not a bug...)

Or wait, the kernel panic I get every once in a while would be nice: panic(cpu 1 caller 0xfffffe00318c8a1c): DCP PANIC - ASSERT!AppleDCPDPTXPowerController.cpp:538 No device added after powering on the rails. HPD=0 - dcpav(27)

I haven't had a system that felt so unreliable since Windows 98. :D

> Or maybe Bluetooth automatically switching to "reduced audio quality" (I know, I know, it's a feature, not a bug...)

I don't think I've experienced a single system where Bluetooth is working well. Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS all have their share of Bluetooth issues. The Bluetooth spec must be beyond broken.

Totally agree. I wish my hearing aids had a proprietary USB-C dongle or something.

On Linux, my experience has been both better and worse. More random disconnects and the need to re-pair is more frequent. The nice thing is I can automate the workarounds on Linux but can only curse on MacOS :D

That kernel panic sounds like a hardware fault just from first blush. Sounds like it's turning on some device but the device isn't responding after being turned on

I always take a full disk snapshot before full upgrades like this (boot into recovery and this is straightforward with a usb disk, or use carbon copy cloner) but yep updates in the Apple eco system are (knock on wood) very painless.

Back in the day before things like homebrew it was far worse... the days of macports and mod_python to run your Django app are fortunately behind us.

MacPorts has a pretty slick migration feature now. Not sure about Django, but this is the smoothest migration I've experienced with MacPorts in over 15+ years.

Times have changed completely since... 2006-2007 when this was relevant. If you are still using mod_python in 2024 please seek a therapist specializing in trauma.

How well does it work? With Sequoia I've been thinking of going MacPorts a go over Homebrew, haven't used it in about a decade.

There seems to be some bugs related to Apple shipping broken command line tools (again). I've gotten most of my ports built, but I did install an instance of pkgsrc to get the remaining ones until MacPorts gets things sorted out. Clearly not as convenient as Homebrew, but I've always enjoyed being able to tweak compile-time options with MacPorts, so I'm sticking with it.

When I hear "updates" instead of "upgrades", it sounds like no guarantee of improvement is being made.

That is exactly why I used 'update' in my first comment. I stopped calling these things 'upgrades' at least 10 years ago.

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