Apple Seeds First Beta of macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 to Developers

[C DM]

they are holding .5 because a new mac will be announced on 4th

It's out: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/06/01/apple-releases-macos-high-sierra-10-13-5/

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

I think they are holding it because a new mac is coming on 4th, and there is something in 10.13.5 about new Mac that they dont want us to know yet

Look at that, 10.3.5 has been released. Seems they weren't trying to hide a forthcoming machine. As I'd said, Apple doesn't do that.

 

[294307]

... i agree with you however, realistically, its becoming less and less of an option as features become glued within the OS release ... its not like i have the option of leveraging AP2 on sierra without updating to HS

If you're referring to APFS, yes but this is not essential if stability is your primary concern. No matter how long or short Apple's release cycles are, you won't ever get new features like APFS or Metal 2 without going through a major upgrade cycle because of the scale of what these new features do. It would be inappropriate for Apple to introduce these kind of new features as a simple update. They require an enormous amount of testing, and professional customers would much rather forego new features if it presents a stability risk. And introducing a new window server most definitely falls under that.

You say you want Apple to have longer release cycles to maintain software stability but you also acknowledge that it is not possible to take advantage of new features in older macOS releases. As you know, stability comes from software maturity, which means sacrificing new features for a longer period of time. There will always be a higher risk of bugs in newer software no matter how smart the engineers are. Apple balances this by supporting older versions of macOS for up to three years for those of us that can't tolerate the higher risk of bugs impacting our daily workflow.

 

[itsamacthing]

You can always wait before upgrading. Apple typically continues to support older releases for at least two years after it's general availability. OS X Yosemite (released in October 2014) received its last security update in July 2017. OS X El Capitan (released in September 2015) last received a security update in March 2018 and might be the last update we'll see for this release. In both cases, that's around two and a half years of support.

Edit: macOS Sierra and OS X El Capitan just received another security update (2018-003) on June 1, 2018.

One can until they run into a technical problem and Apple says to update to the latest version

I think that option was easier many years ago...today, if you want your ipad, iPhone, home pod, etc to all work well together you need to stay current

 

[Chris The Bipolarbear]

Clean Install. If anyone dose a clean install this beta will not install over the current released version macOS 10.13.5