>Yet many comments here are saying that people should just upgrade while it might solve the problem for some, there are ones who can't upgrade machines at will.
It's dumbfounding how people here are simply shrugging this off and posting "So what? Just upgrade. Simples" type comments. This isn't acceptable. I know many people in creative industries alone who can't just upgrade immediately any time something comes out as they've to wait for their products to support the newer version. Similarly there are many who are using Macs in work whose corporate policies won't let them simply update immediately.
Then there's many who don't immediately upgrade versions as a point while bugs/other issues in that new version are found and resolved.
I have 3 macs. One of them is an older iMac. I can't put enough RAM in it to run Mavericks (which is a memory hog). It is a perfectly good computer, there is no reason to upgrade from Lion.
The next one is a 3 year old Mac Mini. I upgraded to Yosemite and it performs TERRIBLY. It has 16G of RAM. I've tried everything. Yosemite just sucks. The machine is now much slower than the 6 or 7 year old iMac with only 4G or RAM. If it was practical to back out to Mavericks I would.
The last one is a 2 year old Macbook. I rely on it for my job. There is no way I'm going to risk the crappy Yosemite performance to upgrade. I'll live with the security flaw.
Here is what I now know about Apple: They will not support you for the lifetime of the product. They consistently release buggy code these days. Unless you are willing to shell out more money for new hardware every time they come out with something new, you will be stuck "as-is (with bugs)" until you get rid of it.
No more Apple anything for me. I'm thinking I'll switch the Mac Mini to Ubuntu if I can get it to work there. I'll use the iMac until it doesn't work any more, and when my Macbook is ready for an upgrade (in another year or two), I'll be trading in that still-Mavericks based system for a Linux laptop or maybe I'll go back to Windows.
"I can't put enough RAM in it to run Mavericks (which is a memory hog)."
I'd upgrade to Yosemite today with the latest updates. They just freed up 4 GB of ram for me. Sadly if I had known all of this beforehand I wouldn't have gone out of the way to buy some old Mac Pro where I could upgrade the memory to 32 GB or more, so I just wasted about $1500 for the whole setup.
Then again like you, I transitioned my work to an Ubuntu box, but even for my personal stuff my Mac was just really slow unless you get an SSD drive which is time consuming to install on an iMac.
>Apple's model customer is one who upgrades often. If you want solid support for old products, stick with Microsoft, and accept that their products can be clunkier because of deliberate choices to maintain backwards-compatibility.
This is nothing close to "So what? Just upgrade." He's saying that from apple's perspective the best customer is one who upgrades their machine on every upgrade cycle which explains why they don't care about previous generation OSes. And how can you say this comment is apple-apologetic when he goes on to say that Microsoft does a better job maintaining backwards-compatibility?
It's dumbfounding how people here are simply shrugging this off and posting "So what? Just upgrade. Simples" type comments. This isn't acceptable. I know many people in creative industries alone who can't just upgrade immediately any time something comes out as they've to wait for their products to support the newer version. Similarly there are many who are using Macs in work whose corporate policies won't let them simply update immediately.
Then there's many who don't immediately upgrade versions as a point while bugs/other issues in that new version are found and resolved.
It's not an acceptable answer whatsoever.