leftj wrote:
Don't understand why you wouldn't upgrade to the latest OS.
In two words: BUGS and COMPATIBILITY of third party software and peripheral drivers.
> NO operating system's major release is without problems that could not be found during in-house beta testing and early field beta testing.
While that means problems are usually obscure, they just might affect your situation — your *particular* model and configuration of Mac, its firmware, and the software you choose to use with it. If there's a gaping hole in Internet security, that potentially affects ANY user, so hopefully, they find those holes before malevolent actors do.
> Third party application developers often don't react to a major operating system upgrade the way they should, whether by design or ignorance or incompetence. Ideally, they went to the Apple Developer's Conference (WWDC) back in June, asked their questions, went to work and made their changes, and released an update or upgrade if needed. But sometimes, it takes longer than anticipated to bring the code up to modern standards. Perhaps the coders no longer work for that company, and the new ones want to start fresh because the former ones left a mess.
Perhaps the company wants an ALL NEW version, but it isn't going to be ready for several months. In some cases, despite Apple's best efforts at communicating exactly what the new system will and won't do, and what developers can and cannot do that they once did, developers either don't pay attention, or don't react. Adobe got caught in that position once, with Photoshop 4. They dragged their feet with the transition to Apple Silicon in 2020, as well. It was months before some of their applications were optimized to run natively on Apple Silicon.
The point is, cautious users want to wait for these sorts of issues to be resolved, or at least we want to know the path forward.
Many corporations stay a full revision behind the current Windows release, just to avoid having to buy new computers, new peripherals, and new software, and having to deal with the inevitable fallout from that major sort of upgrade. My former employer ran Win XP SP3 until Win 7 was stable! They had the foresight to recognize that Windows Vista, the OS between XP and 7, was "a dumpster fire with a porta-potty in it," as our IT director described it. (I still have an HP laptop that has Vista on it, just for giggles. I need to pull the hard drive out of it, recycle the rest, and have my neighbor shoot the drive with his .45.)
One corollary of Murphy's Law says, "Any computer software that is ever perfected is immediately abandoned by its maker." THAT's why people use *nearly* abandoned systems until security updates are no longer available.
That reminds me, my wife needs a replacement for our ten year old iMac...