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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

> I would think this would hurt their overall adoption rates (especially long term) as people get sick of constantly upgrading their OS and dealing with any fallout that results.

If by constantly you mean one time during the last five years, then yea that would be pretty annoying. The vast majority of people have moved onto a new computer or done at least one upgrade. Updates used to be more of a pain, now you just hit purchase and wait for a little bit.

If you haven't upgraded your computer in five years, you should be able to live with a browser than won't be upgraded anymore either. Apple requires 10.7.4 for Safari so you were abandoned by the Mother Ship a long time ago.

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Well, the last time I used OSX for daily use, it was constantly pestering me to upgrade to various point releases. Those were usually massive downloads that required a reboot. Maybe things have changed?

Along that same vein, it seemed like every time I'd boot in to OSX - iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto et all would need 100+ MB updates to stay current.

I guess my experience on the upgrade treadmill (even staying on a major version of OSX) was very unpleasant.

Apple is pretty bad at pushing binary updates, the file sizes for updates are as you mention, gigantic. But the update process is smooth, reboots are not required unless it's the system (iPhoto 9.4 came out today and there was no reboot, ditto for the latest Xcode from earlier in the week).

Most of the point upgrades for the system are security fixes. Every OS has a lot of them. Java has gotten a few security related updates this year too.

Out of curiosity, what OS did you switch to that doesn't require regular, and often large, updates? I can't think of an OS I've ever used – various Linux distros, Windows, OS X, various BSDs, Solaris, and a smattering of random other unix variants – that didn't require some form of regular update that often required (or at least strongly suggested) a reboot. (Or the near equivalent of punting active users and relaunching a bunch of userland processes.)

Oh man, I remember my Gentoo days, where upgrading a single package would sometimes require new base libraries which in turn required a large chunk of the system to be rebuilt… definitely don't miss that process.

>Well, the last time I used OSX for daily use, it was constantly pestering me to upgrade to various point releases. Those were usually massive downloads that required a reboot. Maybe things have changed?

Constantly as in once every 3-4 months? Because that's the usual rate of point updates.

The alternative is what? Not having the latest stability and security fixes?

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