![]() Few are just a matter of making minor changes to a few lines of code which operate in complete isolation. We tend to have a naïve understanding of the complexity of bugs and vulnerabilities in macOS. What proportion of your engineers would you want to devote to products which are steadily vanishing? Investment in improving Monterey and developing its successors is aimed at growing numbers of users, while those using Mojave and earlier are only going to reduce in time. There’s also the problem of diminishing returns. This is particularly true at present, as work on Big Sur and later has to cater for both Intel and ARM architectures. The most critical areas – firmware, the kernel, extensions – demand engineers with skillsets which are developed over years. ![]() It’s easy to say that Apple has plenty of money, but throwing large sums of money at bugs and security issues doesn’t magically make them go away.Īpple can’t open a fresh crate of graduates, and give each of them a dozen bugs to fix in macOS 10.15. As we’ve seen from recent problems in open source software, serious vulnerabilities can remain undetected for some time, even years, and can prove extremely hard to address without breaking function. Supporting software is comparatively ill-defined, and its cost is potentially unlimited. This rewards manufacturers for quality, in that better products last longer before they might need repair, so it’s fundamentally the manufacturer’s decision how they mitigate the cost of hardware support. Supporting hardware, whether it’s computers or cars, is fairly well-defined, in that a manufacturer is obliged to repair or replace a defective item for a period normally specified by law, and to be able to repair it using spare parts for a further period before it’s declared obsolete. It’s important to remember, in this context, that Apple already has formal commitments to supporting its hardware products, for periods based on seven years, although those vary according to the jurisdiction and other local laws. What follows isn’t any defence of Apple’s position, but I hope goes some way to understanding why it won’t make a formal commitment unless it really has to. So why doesn’t a vast and enormously rich company like Apple want to commit itself more formally? Isn’t this just a way of saving costs, and forcing users to upgrade to the current version? macOS 10.14.x Mojave and earlier are unsupported.Īlthough this is generally accepted as Apple’s practice, I’ve been unable to find any official Apple document which states that, so there’s no formal commitment, even something as vague as that for iOS 14.macOS 11.x Big Sur and 10.15.x Catalina receive security updates only. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |