Got to be honest I rarely get any issues with macOS for a couple of years now. The only notable one I remember was the date selection in reminders on 12.6 stopped working and that was fixed in 12.6.1. Workaround was to manually key it in. You do have to keep within the 2-3 year update cycle though. Quite frankly it pays for itself though in less eye poking than windows.
Yeah, I can't recall any real bugs at all — the main problems for me are various accessibility flaws and ui issue that Apple will probably never choose to fix anyway. I take issue with your "2-3 year update cycle", though — my 8-year old MacBook Pro is still fine as the daily driver and I know plenty of others with Macs around the same age.
Sort of agrees with my own opinion, that your use of Macs and iPhones and your stay in the ecosystem is only secure as long as you keep paying up. More specifically, you're good for a year after you do a major upgrade. After that you may or may not see critical issues addressed, and after two years all bets are off. I'm not sure how long Apple supports their overly expensive things these days, but I will not be surpr…
The iPhone 5s from 2013 just got a security update in July of this year.
But if you care about how long the vendor supports your phone, you really should get an Android phone. I’m sure you will be delighted about how long they support their phones.
There is no excuse for the most profitable company in the world to drop support for working hardware. It's entirely within their capability to support even PowerPC macs. And that's besides fact that Apple has an incredibly small portfolio of hardware to support; so much so that they could trivially exhaustively test every update on every possible piece of hardware.
I was just rereading the ppc history for Apple as they're doing it again for ARM and it seems quite reasonable to be honest. They pulled something off I think would be difficult for many others and have shown they're not married to a single architecture. Still RIP my favorite machine the last ppc Mac tower
> They pulled something off I think would be difficult for many others and have shown they're not married to a single architecture.
You mean like how MS Windows ran on the DEC Alpha as well as X86? Or how Linux runs on X86 and ARM CPU's?
Running an OS on multiple CPU types goes back a very long time.
My low-end test Mac is an old (2012) 11" Air, running Catalina (it can't run anything newer). It's been getting updates, until recently. I don't know for sure, if they are done.
Oh it can run newer... https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
> "New versions of macOS are full of bugs" This is why I never liked Apple's annual upgrade schedule. Ostensibly to stay ahead of security issues, annual upgrade isn't working and is causing more issues than it is worth. Leopard to Mountain Lion were the glory days of OS X stability, with Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and High Sierra standing out as focusing on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new b…
> I wish Apple had development and stable branches for macOS, such that stable was plain and had very limited features, stayed compatible with decade-old hw The reason they don't have that is the same we don't have this for phones. No profit driven venture on the planet would go through that trouble just to hurt their own sales. Which is why free (as in speech) alternatives are so important.
It wouldn't hurt their sales. Users running old hardware aren't doing it to save money but instead because they can't afford new hardware, which isn't the same thing. Apple isn't getting those sales anyway. Mac sales are driven by new users and users that can afford to upgrade hardware every two years. These consumers aren't going anywhere, and if Apple remained committed to a minimal amount of support for older hardware, it would only make their brand more attractive and increase sales.
Got to be honest I rarely get any issues with macOS for a couple of years now. The only notable one I remember was the date selection in reminders on 12.6 stopped working and that was fixed in 12.6.1. Workaround was to manually key it in. You do have to keep within the 2-3 year update cycle though. Quite frankly it pays for itself though in less eye poking than windows.
Yeah, I can't recall any real bugs at all — the main problems for me are various accessibility flaws and ui issue that Apple will probably never choose to fix anyway. I take issue with your "2-3 year update cycle", though — my 8-year old MacBook Pro is still fine as the daily driver and I know plenty of others with Macs around the same age.
> I take issue with your "2-3 year update cycle"
I think the OP meant the software update cycle not hardware.
Even as a full time mac user, both at work and privately I have a hard time remembering which release, say Sierra was and which one Mojave was and which one came first and if any release was in between.
Even as a full time mac user, both at work and privately I have a hard time remembering which release, say Sierra was and which one Mojave was and which one came first and if any release was in between.
Got to be honest I rarely get any issues with macOS for a couple of years now. The only notable one I remember was the date selection in reminders on 12.6 stopped working and that was fixed in 12.6.1. Workaround was to manually key it in. You do have to keep within the 2-3 year update cycle though. Quite frankly it pays for itself though in less eye poking than windows.
Most notable bug I've experienced recently is PDF highlighting would make you jump to the previous highlight. It was so painful for so long. But 13.0 seems to have fixed it.
My low-end test Mac is an old (2012) 11" Air, running Catalina (it can't run anything newer). It's been getting updates, until recently. I don't know for sure, if they are done.
See my post below. Often this is an artificial limit and as the other guy posted, opencore legacy can bypass this "lock" and allow you to upgrade beyond Catalina.