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Comment by wintorez | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat unrelated to the article, but one thing I learned about all Apple products is this: Never upgrade their OS. Doing minor updates is fine, but any major version upgrade will doom the device.

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My iPhone has been through three major OS releases. My MacBook has been through two, and the previous one survived three. However you came to your current beliefs, I don't think there is good data to support them. Apple is quite good about OS upgrades in general.

I don't think my iPhone was ever damaged by an update - I always migrated to a newer one before the newer OSes caused strain. I was one of those who held off on the initial releases of iOS 7 ..

But my god Yosemite in 2015 (again waited for it to "stabilise") on my 2014 MBP was an unholy shitshow.

My current OS actually stems back from the Public Beta that I ran on my G3. I've cloned the data from HDD to HDD/Computer to Computer and upgraded the OS every time, and it's currently on El Capitan (because my Mac Pro is no longer supported). I've never run into issues during an upgrade.

You surely must have done the "transfer my settings and apps" on the PPC->Intel transition. I can't imagine the HDD clone method working through the architecture change. Still, I'm impressed that settings haven't borked anything since then. There have to be a lot of stale plist values that aren't used any more, I'd guess.

Oh, I'm sure. I've used the migration tool when going from one mac to another (Specifically from G4 to Intel iMac in 2006) which might clean some things out. Looking at the plists in my ~/Libray, I have some dated as far back as 2001. I also still have my MacOS 9 installed on my main hard disk :-P

By doom I meant getting so slow it becomes unusable after a while.

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