Microsoft has spoiled us these many decades by providing patches for out-of-support operating systems.
Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS
41–50 of 132 posts
Re: Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS
#42Naive question: why is it that the newest version of macos doesn't run on older machines? (The solution is, of course, to install Linux on them.)
It will depend on which MacOS dropped them.
Mojave for example dropped all Macs with GPUs incompatible with their Metal API.
https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/09/macos-10-14-mojave-...
The arstechnica MacOS reviews are good for working out (sometimes resorting to speculation) what makes a Mac unsupported.
Re: Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
This caught out a family member. Until you said that I thought it was user error. Gone are the days of recommending apple because 'it just works'.
Which part of upgrading macos to a supported version is not working?
The bit where Apple's OS tries to connect to Apple's update servers, and can't authenticate because Apple switched to an incompatible root CA.
Re: Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS
#44Naive question: why is it that the newest version of macos doesn't run on older machines? (The solution is, of course, to install Linux on them.)
I think their main reason is that Apple is a hardware company. They think of new features, build hardware for them, and then tweak their software (OS and applications) to aggressively use that new hardware.
Supporting older hardware is extra work that doesn’t bring in extra money. Also, oftentimes, it isn’t possible to backport features in a performant way (a lot of the ML stuff would only crawl on 10 year old hardware, features such as Handoff and PowerNap require hardware features). End result would be a 20 year old machine that runs the OS, but doesn’t work with modern software.
That wouldn’t make customers happy, and would dilute the brand of their OS releases.
Re: Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS
#45Naive question: why is it that the newest version of macos doesn't run on older machines? (The solution is, of course, to install Linux on them.)
If Apple transitions to Apple silicon and is able to ditch a bunch of legacy code, will they be able to manage it the future better?
Re: Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS
#46They also never bothered to implement the 2 factor code popup on old systems but forcing user to use 2fa. So you now get to explain to grandma that she needs to enter her icloud password, get a password error, click on approve on her iPhone, then enter her password again with the 6 digit code shown on the iphone appended to the end of her password.
WHAT! How did I not know the append-the-code trick
Re: Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS
#47I'm still running Mojave. Never found the time to upgrade. Ridiculous, I know. Anyone else in the same boat?
I find fewer and fewer new features motivating an upgrade. These days it's integration or fluff like tracking the time you spend on each app. I'm on Catalina and have no incentive to upgrade, but have many incentives not to (e.g. breaking compatibility)
One aspect I find infuriating is UX changes. I like the way things were, change for change's sake is annoying.
Re: Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS
#48Microsoft has spoiled us these many decades by providing patches for out-of-support operating systems.
If I recall ms was forced to do so because of the atrocious security of windows
Re: Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lack of drivers, or the newer OS may require a specific instruction set or feature not present on older hardware.
But why don't they just keep the drivers etc. from the previous version? This doesn't seem to be a problem for Linux.
Linux would also require drivers to be recompiled for a new kernel. This is not an option for most proprietary drivers for products long abandoned by the manufacturer.
For the more common and popular hardware there is a good chance that open source drivers can be maintained by the community but if your laptop relies on a somewhat obscure chipset or microcontroller then your mileage will vary...a lot. Look up "Intel GMA500 Linux driver" if you need an example of the pain.
Sometimes the decision could be entirely commercial. Most notably, OSX dropped support for all nVidia GPUs from Mojave onwards despite nVidia going on record saying they are happy to continue providing drivers but Apple won't sign them.
Re: Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS
#50Yawn. More Apple bashing that is not backed up by any facts. Name me one widely deployed OS that promises its users patches ad-infinitum. Microsoft certainly doesn't patch all older versions of Windows. Neither do all the widely deployed Linux flavours, they all have clearly defined EOL policies. Nor do the BSDs, e.g. OpenBSD has a "current plus previous" policy. You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere in terms…
>Microsoft certainly doesn't patch all older versions of Windows.
This is not about EOL OS releases, this is about Catalina (macOS 10.15, released in 2019).
Apple advertises Catalina as still supported, last update was 15.15.7 on October 25 of this year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history#Releases).
>Neither do all the widely deployed Linux flavours, they all have clearly defined EOL policies.
The big difference here you forgot to point out is that you can almost always update to the next Debian (or whatever GNU/Linux distribution you use) Stable release with the hardware you ran on the last one.
You could also get new hardware from whatever vendor you want to since Debian (and any other GNU/Linux distribution) isn't vendor locked to a company that insists on selling you soldered RAM/SSDs and thermal throttling machines.
The Debian team also consistently honors their support cycles, unlike Apple.
>Nor do the BSDs, e.g. OpenBSD has a "current plus previous" policy.
Same thing as the GNU/Linux situation i mentioned above, the operating system is not vendor locked and you can almost always update to the next release with old (in the case of *BSD maybe even ancient) hardware, this is not true for macOS.
>You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere in terms of patching historical versions. Agreed, you have to draw the line somewhere.
The issue here is that Apple drew the line and then didn't even bother to honor it.