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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I think that by now, everyone should have learned the lesson to not buy anything the instant it comes out. It seems like every first batch of hardware has issues, and every major software revision requires bug fixes.

The very simple solution is to wait. I always wait for the first major patch to OS X before upgrading, and a couple of months before new hardware. While I don't have the latest shiny gadget, my life is a lot simpler.

I shudder whenever I see someone upgrading the development machine their professional life depends upon to the new version of OS X on release day.

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I think another simple "solution" is to realize that these issues are probably way rarer than the press seems to indicate. I got my iPhone 5 on release day, and haven't had any of these problems. Same with my iPhone 4 and "antennagate." Maybe I'm just fortunate to avoid these issues, but I've seen no reason to not upgrade immediately.

Exactly. I've been running iOS 6 since the first developer seed without a problem. The media treats each bug as an independent news story, regardless of userbase impact.

You know, I thought it wasn't that common either, but then I kept running into lots of people, especially with iPhone 4s phones and WPA2 AES APs, who did have these kind of problems. Something really is off here.

> I shudder whenever I see someone upgrading the development machine their professional life depends upon to the new version of OS X on release day.

The Arch Linux demographic.

That's because those guys are the ones that fix all the regression bugs and "features" introduced by the new version, and release their fixes so the rest of us don't have to.

Why is this the arch linux demographic?

I have a working arch install. I don't touch it unless I have to reboot for some reason and then I read for known issues, do the upgrade and then reboot. Otherwise, no touchy.

Doesn't Arch use rolling release? Kind of the opposite I think.

I use Fedora these days out of laziness, but rolling releases was one of the things I really enjoyed about Gentoo. Far less upgrade induced stress.

Rolling release is favorable in that sense. I prefer dealing with a single problem every other month or so as opposed to many things breaking all at once.

Exactly. It's also much easier to rollback one change with a regression with a rolling release system than it is when that single change with a regression came packaged with hundreds of other functional changes.

Kernel regression in Gentoo? No worries, boot the old one.

Kernel regression in Fedora? No worries, boot the old one... unless this was across an upgrade boundary. Then you get to have fun.

While this may be easy to say if you're keeping abreast of the latest technology news and newest gadgets, to the general consumer it makes no sense at all. Once a product hits retail shelves (or is available as an over-the-air upgrade in the case of iOS 6) people will buy/download it and there's a general expectation that it will work as expected.

I've gotten used to never upgrading my idevices before doing a search for potential problems. I usually just stick with the last iteration of ios designed for that generation of hardware.

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