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 bugs).
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, and continued to receive security updates, and upgrading to development was effectively a large patch for stable that included all the new features.
> Moreover, the most dangerous software on your computer is not the operating system per se, it's the web browser.
Agreed.
> You can also use another browser such as Firefox or Google Chrome, which ironically support older macOS versions than Apple supports, and the latest versions of those apps are identical and fully patched on every macOS version they support.
If one must have browser connectivity on a mac, then do this, even when still supported and fully patched. I wouldn't mail or surf on any unsupported OS.
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.
Many of those users that "can't afford new hardware" are still forced to update after some point due to the lack of updates ("cannot afford" and "absolutely cannot afford" being two different things, and most are in the former category, they can e.g. put it on their credit card, or save some more, or sacrifice something else they'd be spending on, even if they're tight).
Plus, there are many more who can afford it, but doesn't really care much for having a new machine, they just do it because the old ones don't run their software or get updates anymore.
Both of those categories would update less frequently if they had regular updates and support for their old machines.
This is a common misconception. Major OS updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. Bertrand Serlet put up a "No New Features" keynote slide for Snow Leopard, but that was highly misleading, because Snow Leopard had many big under the hood changes, and the early versions of Snow Leopard had some nasty bugs. You can go back and look at the old Mac OS X release notes to see the descriptions of the bug fixes. What was different about Snow Leopard than today is that it received a full 2 years of nothing but bug fixes. The Snow Leopard people remember fondly was 10.6.8 v1.1 not 10.6.0, which was much buggier than its predecessor 10.5.8.
The current yearly major OS update schedule is death for quality, because there's never enough time to fix the bugs. The engineers always have to turn around and start working on the next big thing, never fix the current big then. There's no solution except more time between major updates.
The other difference between now and the past is that now Apple is immediately pushing everyone to update, whereas new major Mac OS X versions used to be paid rather than free, so there was a lot more lag, you had to go to the store and purchase new discs in order to upgrade, and a lot more users were sticking with the older versions.
This is vague.
> Major OS updates always introduce more bugs than they fix.
This was my major point.
> Bertrand Serlet put up a "No New Features" keynote slide for Snow Leopard, but that was highly misleading, because Snow Leopard had many big under the hood changes,
But no new features. The major goals of Snow Leopard were to improve performance and reduce its memory footprint (by removing a lot of PPC code). What was nice about it, and what my point was, Apple had 2 years for bug fixes.
> and the early versions of Snow Leopard had some nasty bugs. You can go back and look at the old Mac OS X release notes to see the descriptions of the bug fixes. What was different about Snow Leopard than today is that it received a full 2 years of nothing but bug fixes.
Yes, thank you, this is the entire point of my criticism of annual upgrades in that a year is not enough time to fix bugs before introducing instability and new bugs in a major release.
> The Snow Leopard people remember fondly was 10.6.8 v1.1 not 10.6.0, which was much buggier than its predecessor 10.5.8.
Thank you for the straw man, but, in fact, this was my entire argument against major annual releases. I'm not sure who expects point zero software to be bug free. I would actually prefer that major releases stop entirely unless there are fundamental changes, such as a new platform.
> The current yearly major OS update schedule is death for quality, because there's never enough time to fix the bugs. The engineers always have to turn around and start working on the next big thing, never fix the current big then. There's no solution except more time between major updates.
>< This is like Scooby Doo. Thank you for making me into Thelma, Fred.
> The other difference between now and the past is that now Apple is immediately pushing everyone to update, whereas new major Mac OS X versions used to be paid rather than free, so there was a lot more lag, you had to go to the store and purchase new discs in order to upgrade, and a lot more users were sticking with the older versions.
This is a fair point, except for the part about Apple pushing upgrades. Unrestrained users push themselves with no regard to what they're using continuing to work. Though software updates can be configured automatically by the user, and security updates are pushed, Apple isn't pushing upgrades, and I don't think the OS can be configured to upgrade automatically, only update.
> This was my major point.
I don't think your words said what you thought you might have meant: "with Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and High Sierra standing out as focusing on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs)"
Major updates never focus on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs). Otherwise they wouldn't need major updates at all, they'd just keep releasing minor bug fix updates. There's nothing really special about 10.6.0 (Snow Leopard), 10.8.0 (Mountain Lion), or 10.13 (High Sierra) compared to other major releases. These were all much buggier than the previous stable release.
> Yes, thank you, this is the entire point of my criticism of annual upgrades in that a year is not enough time to fix bugs before introducing instability and new bugs in a major release.
Except the annual release cycle actually started with Mountain Lion, which was 1 year after Lion, and High Sierra was also 1 year after Sierra, but you put them in the "the glory days of OS X stability".
> Apple isn't pushing upgrades, and I don't think the OS can be configured to upgrade automatically, only update.
I wasn't talking about automatic upgrades, I was talking about how macOS annoyingly advertises new major updates, for example in Software Update, and even permanently badging your System Preferences Dock icon until you upgrade. This didn't occur in the days when major updates were on physical discs.
> Except the annual release cycle actually started with Mountain Lion, which was 1 year after Lion, and High Sierra was also 1 year after Sierra, but you put them in the "the glory days of OS X stability".
They mean what I said, but I'm certain now that instead, you did this, but let's see if this helps
>>>> Leopard to Mountain Lion were the glory days of OS X stability,
COMMA (NEXT STATEMENT AND NEW THOUGHT)-->
>>>> with Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and High Sierra standing out as focusing on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs).
> I was talking about how macOS annoyingly advertises new major updates, for example in Software Update, and even permanently badging your System Preferences Dock icon until you upgrade.
I don't think your words said what you meant and/or I made a poor assumption by your use of "pushing" in the context of "updates" or upgrades. Apple did start to push out security patches for supported OS versions, but you meant notices, or nags, of available OS upgrades. These can be avoided by disabling push notifications via the gui[1] or more permanently using the Terminal and launchd to disable push notifications:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist
sudo launchctl unload -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.softwareupdate*
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate AutomaticDownload -boolean FALSE
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-turn-off-...
[2] http://tech.masterofsql.com/os-x/unload-disable-unwanted-age...
[3] https://gist.github.com/mvanbaak/e98b7b622ea2c8ab626d51cb88e...
[4] https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/main/.macos
But there were major features, but they were not user facing. Snow Leopard introduced Grand Central Dispatch, improvements to Objective-C, things like that are major changes, more significant than simply changing the way the UI looks.
High Sierra introduced APFS, a major major change. Sierra was probably a better release as far as no new features, they fixed the USB stack they broke in El Capitan.
Mountain Lion introduced iCloud related stuff like notifications I think.
The releases that you believe are stable because of no new features, actually have major new features, but the guys writing the low level code are more talented than the guys writing the UI code, that's why those releases are more stable.
I use third party software to bring back some old behaviors but it’s an uphill battle, especially with things like the notification center.
Ergo you are most likely to be attacked using exploits that are both known and fixed because you are running old unpatched software compared to new bugs in recently released software.
In addition recently released browsers are great but your browser also relies on security features from your OS. I don't agree that its sufficient to run the most recently released browser on your old OS. Your up to date OS complete with new bugs is by far the best choice.
This is what I settled on years ago. The only exception was using Monterey on the new Apple Silicon macs. I upgraded to that earlier than normal.
Personally, my security bet has just been to stay at the absolute bleeding edge and install betas on day one. You'll get security patches first and, for the most part, many exploits are brittle enough that they tend not to work perfectly on newer, unseen versions of the OS and so you do have a slight advantage there.
Also I keep asking this and keep getting 0 or bad answers. When people say web browsers, and specifically JavaScript, are to blame for almost all security issues -- What specifically are you referring to?
In almost every case I've looked into, what happens is somebody downloads some sort of file that is actually an .exe. Like TaylorSwiftGreatestHits.mp3.exe for example. It's almost always on a very old Windows version that has literally never done any updates.
Sometimes some JavaScript initiates the download of this file. When this then makes the news and is finally reported, the entire fault is explained as "JavaScript" or "Internet Browser" fully automated bug that requires 0 user input.
In reality, the user downloads the .exe and is prompted by Windows security to not run this file. They say run it anyway. Windows says the file was still not run for some security reasons. So the user disables the entire security system. Then the file says it must be run with administrator rights. They then run it once again with admin rights. Finally, X bug happens or is initiated.
This is constantly the ONLY actual event I come across where there is some crazy vulnerability. I have literally never seen something that's not this situation.
Back to my original question, if this is NOT actually the case, and there is verifiable information from any reasonably competent computer person, let me know so I can finally learn more.
Actually, Apple sometimes patches actively exploited vulnerabilities in "unsupported" older versions of both macOS and iOS. The vulnerabilities that don't get quickly patched are the ones that aren't actively exploited.
In any case, security researchers talk about known vulnerabilities that have or haven't been patched, but as the author says, "New versions of macOS are full of bugs". This includes security vulnerabilities! Every new major OS version has brand new, unknown (to Apple) vulnerabilities that did not exist in the previous version. So just because the latest version is "fully patched", that doesn't mean it's "safer". I've seen it happen many times in the past where a new security vulnerabilities in a new OS isn't discovered by the public until many months later.
As far as stability and safety is concerned, I personally consider macOS N-1 to have the best tradeoffs.
Moreover, the most dangerous software on your computer is not the operating system per se, it's the web browser. The browser is where you're mostly likely to encounter "malicious crafted code" (i.e., JavaScript). Apple supports Safari for macOS N-2, and Safari on macOS N-2 is more similar to Safari on macOS N than macOS N-2 itself is to macOS N. In other words, Safari is likely to be fully patched even if macOS isn't.
You can also use another browser such as Firefox or Google Chrome, which ironically support older macOS versions than Apple supports, and the latest versions of those apps are identical and fully patched on every macOS version they support.