3 ms·

I’ve had less and less incentive to upgrade every year for over a decade. I wonder when I’ll reach a tipping point.

by tambourine_man 2y ago

amatecha 2y ago
I reached it so long ago. My most "up-to-date" Mac runs OS X 10.10. No intention to ever run anything newer.
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  At some point Photoshop and Chrome stop working, then I’m mostly hamstrung.
- therealmarv 2y ago
  Which makes you miss all sort of security updates (under the hood unlike the one mentioned in the article).
  - amatecha 2y ago
    I don't use it for any online stuff, so that's not really a concern. It's rarely even on the LAN at all, let alone connecting to the net. Further, I have many way, way older computers. :)
ilikepi 2y ago
One of the most annoying things about not upgrading macOS are the recurring Notifications that try to get you to upgrade. There's no way in recent versions to disable them AFAIK. They are especially grating if the machine has multiple user accounts, as switching to a different account tends to trigger one.
- realityfactchex 2y ago
  > There's no way in recent versions to disable them AFAIK. For a special case, it used to be possible to disable all notifications during set periods of time. Something like: Settings > Focus Mode > Set a Schedule > 4am to 3:59am Every Day. (So, during 1 minute of the day in the wee hours of the morning a notification could theoretically pop up, but in practice it never did.) Of course, this blanket approach only worked if one didn't actually want any notifications at all from any app (including OS upgrade nags, or anything else). But I used to compute that way. And it worked to prevent showing update notifications. No idea if it works on the latest macOS versions, but it did not not too many years ago. Of course, I do rely on notifications now, though...
- hiddendoom45 2y ago
  There's also the risk of accidentally hitting the upgrade button and at best losing a few hours to the upgrade or at worst several days as you deal with recovery. Had a recent bad experience when I accidentally pressed upgrade on an old macbook air running Catalina. I ultimately had to restore from a time machine backup to get it working again. The internet recovery failed most of the time and needed multiple attempts to boot through. Attempts to try and let the upgrade go through would always result in the estimated time remaining disappearing after a while, and nothing happening. Attempting to re-install Catalina from the recovery menu also failed with an infinite loading spinner after a while and nothing clickable. Additionally there is no indicator that the wifi disconnects and you need to re-connect when attempting to re-install. I only found that out when I accidentally triggered an accessibility setting(I think VoiceOver) that showed the top bar again with the wifi icon. Even then there was another workaround needed to actually connect since I believe it wasn't possible to type in the password as you couldn't select the password dialog box. I wasn't completely without fault, I'd stopped the upgrade early to since the upgrade was taking too long, I also lost the recovery partition the first time I tried and failed to reinstall which meant that internet recovery was the only way to boot the mac without it immediately trying to upgrade or re-install. The cli is accessible from the recovery mode which did allow me to take an additional backup of the laptop's contents with more up to date things. In general it seems that the upgrade and recovery process is not supported at all after a couple of years which makes these upgrade notifications a constant risk if you ever click to install one of them. It also reminded me the importance of keeping backups, especially of the filevault key.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anal_reactor 2y ago
I don't see myself moving onto Windows 11 and when Windows 10 becomes impossible to use, I'll genuinely give Linux a try
- blooalien 2y ago
  Linux is great as long as you aren't expecting it to be "Free Windows" (as so many folks do; It's not by a long-shot; It's an entirely different animal altogether). Embrace the idea that it's gonna be somewhat different, as a fair few of those differences are actually significant improvements over the way Windows often does things. I ditched Windows back in the Win7 days, and haven't regretted it one little bit. Microsoft doesn't own my computer. I do. ;)
dgellow 2y ago
You don’t have to upgrade. The popup reminding you of the new version is a bit annoying, but that’s it

I’ve had less and less incentive to upgrade every year for over a decade. I wonder when I’ll reach a tipping point.

amatecha 2y ago

I reached it so long ago. My most "up-to-date" Mac runs OS X 10.10. No intention to ever run anything newer.

tambourine_man 2y ago
At some point Photoshop and Chrome stop working, then I’m mostly hamstrung.
therealmarv 2y ago
Which makes you miss all sort of security updates (under the hood unlike the one mentioned in the article).
- amatecha 2y ago
  I don't use it for any online stuff, so that's not really a concern. It's rarely even on the LAN at all, let alone connecting to the net. Further, I have many way, way older computers. :)

ilikepi 2y ago

One of the most annoying things about not upgrading macOS are the recurring Notifications that try to get you to upgrade. There's no way in recent versions to disable them AFAIK. They are especially grating if the machine has multiple user accounts, as switching to a different account tends to trigger one.

realityfactchex 2y ago
> There's no way in recent versions to disable them AFAIK. For a special case, it used to be possible to disable all notifications during set periods of time. Something like: Settings > Focus Mode > Set a Schedule > 4am to 3:59am Every Day. (So, during 1 minute of the day in the wee hours of the morning a notification could theoretically pop up, but in practice it never did.) Of course, this blanket approach only worked if one didn't actually want any notifications at all from any app (including OS upgrade nags, or anything else). But I used to compute that way. And it worked to prevent showing update notifications. No idea if it works on the latest macOS versions, but it did not not too many years ago. Of course, I do rely on notifications now, though...
hiddendoom45 2y ago
There's also the risk of accidentally hitting the upgrade button and at best losing a few hours to the upgrade or at worst several days as you deal with recovery. Had a recent bad experience when I accidentally pressed upgrade on an old macbook air running Catalina. I ultimately had to restore from a time machine backup to get it working again. The internet recovery failed most of the time and needed multiple attempts to boot through. Attempts to try and let the upgrade go through would always result in the estimated time remaining disappearing after a while, and nothing happening. Attempting to re-install Catalina from the recovery menu also failed with an infinite loading spinner after a while and nothing clickable. Additionally there is no indicator that the wifi disconnects and you need to re-connect when attempting to re-install. I only found that out when I accidentally triggered an accessibility setting(I think VoiceOver) that showed the top bar again with the wifi icon. Even then there was another workaround needed to actually connect since I believe it wasn't possible to type in the password as you couldn't select the password dialog box. I wasn't completely without fault, I'd stopped the upgrade early to since the upgrade was taking too long, I also lost the recovery partition the first time I tried and failed to reinstall which meant that internet recovery was the only way to boot the mac without it immediately trying to upgrade or re-install. The cli is accessible from the recovery mode which did allow me to take an additional backup of the laptop's contents with more up to date things. In general it seems that the upgrade and recovery process is not supported at all after a couple of years which makes these upgrade notifications a constant risk if you ever click to install one of them. It also reminded me the importance of keeping backups, especially of the filevault key.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

anal_reactor 2y ago

I don't see myself moving onto Windows 11 and when Windows 10 becomes impossible to use, I'll genuinely give Linux a try

blooalien 2y ago
Linux is great as long as you aren't expecting it to be "Free Windows" (as so many folks do; It's not by a long-shot; It's an entirely different animal altogether). Embrace the idea that it's gonna be somewhat different, as a fair few of those differences are actually significant improvements over the way Windows often does things. I ditched Windows back in the Win7 days, and haven't regretted it one little bit. Microsoft doesn't own my computer. I do. ;)

dgellow 2y ago

You don’t have to upgrade. The popup reminding you of the new version is a bit annoying, but that’s it