Go tell that to the schools I have to ship software to which can't upgrade past 10.13 because their Macs are too old but they don't get enough budget to buy new ones
I have to support an elementary school full of Macs, and Yosemite has been my ongoing nightmare. (Well, that and the bad joke known as OS X Server.) I won't update during the year for obvious reasons, but I'm still trying to decide whether or not I'm going to have to fragment my environment again (after just getting it all together with 10.9, finally). The incentive from Apple is very strong to install 10.10, but it just runs like utter garbage on all our older machines. And we can't run out and buy new ones whenever they feel like killing all hardware more than about 3 or 4 years old.
I'm still trying to convince people that our younger kids can learn just fine using the web browser on Windows and that we're overpaying money for these Macs (about double what we'd pay for a comparable Windows machine from our vendors) and wasting our tight budget. But there are a few people who just will not let them go. It's a real PITA running this mixed environment without another person to do sys/net admin stuff, or someone to handle more front-line support.
At this point, I'd take Apple just putting a stop to releasing these updates for iOS and OS X out at the beginning of the school year. It would be so much better if they'd do it about 4 months earlier.
> In order to use a recent version of Xcode, you also need to have a relatively recent version of macOS. Unfortunately, this also means your hardware need to be up to date.
Eh? No it doesn't.
> When you discover you can no longer develop on your 2012 machine
The cutoff would be either 2008 or 2009 depending on line.
Lots of Mac users wait before they upgrade. (Myself included)
I recently looked at stats for my app, and only around 60% of my users are on 10.13, 30% on 10.12, and 10% on older versions.
If you use your Mac professionally, there‘s no point in updating every year — it‘s always a hassle and a few weeks of upgrading 3rd party software and fixing random things that don‘t work any more.
This is called "planned obsolescence". It is almost certainly NOT because the computers "can't handle it". It is Apple's business model. Complaining about this is about as useful as complaining about the walled-garden approach to the App store. They release a new OS every year, and simultaneously phase out support for older Macs. There are positives (people aren't running thirteen-year-old computers, so developers can make reasonable assumptions about the power of the machine) and negatives (ridiculously wasteful), but it's their BUSINESS MODEL.
With that in mind, if you're going to argue that it's bad practice, please do so from a business standpoint, not from a technical standpoint. No one disagrees that your '07 Mac can handle 10.8 just fine.
You do realize, don't you, that if this is a relevant question I already have cause to complain? It's been the future for some time now, give us reliable upgrades already.
Yes, it’s the future, but as I mentioned, the Mac I’m running High Sierra on is nearly 10 years-old—it shipped with a version of Snow Leopard, MacOS x 10.6.
That was 7 major operating system releases ago—pretty sure nobody at Apple tested upgrading from an operating system that hasn’t been supported by Apple in many years, not to mention all of the permutations of hardware, kernel extensions, file systems, 3rd-party software installs, etc.
This is the double-edged sword: no matter what Apple does, they’re wrong. If they don’t support older machines with the latest operating system, then it’s a conspiracy to force its users to upgrade.
If they do support older machines and can’t guarantee perfect upgrades from every version operating system they’ve ever shipped, regardless of the condition of the user’s machine and how well (or not) the machine has been maintained, they’re also wrong.
We've got a old legacy multiplatform app that supported OS X for years. Looked at updating it for Catalina, was going to be a massive amount of work, since Apple also killed XWindows and updated OpenGL in some breaking way. Decided it wasn't worth spending months on it.
Still get a regular trickle of emails from schools complaining about it. I tell them to call Cupertino.
Especially when some software vendors drop support of previous versions of macOS. Recently Sketch axed support for macOS Mojave, which was released less than three years ago!
And it is a real problem because a lot of fine functioning computers can't be officially upgraded to newer versions of macOS, rendering them essentially useless.
That must be why Apple is still providing cheap OS upgrades for my four year old Mac. Or maybe they're smart enough to realize that I might not buy their products again if they were obsoleted as soon as possible?
I've been daily driving a 2013 MBP. After occasional memory upgrades, hard drive upgrades, and battery swaps this decade-young computer of Theseus runs great.
But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility:
1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription)
2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.)
Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.
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