“It just works” has become “It just sells.” That can be upsetting to those with expectations of before but they are in the rapidly diminishing minority.
As
@crococarbs mentions, ******tification is a real thing, a real trend, and Apple is not exempt
What's sort of crazy is that Apple does not sell operating systems. They (directly) charge nothing now for the upgrades. Back when you had to pay $129 in ~Y2K dollars, the stores and everybody else in the chain were making money. The disc and the packaging didn't cost much more than a dollar or two. Shipping was much less expensive compared to now as well.
So, why push out half-baked new OS versions every year? It has to be a marketing plan thing. Apple wants people to buy new hardware, because they make money from that (and services now) not from software, pretty much. They want to obsolete what you own so that you'll buy anew. At least they want to plant seeds of FOMO in your head so that you buy a new whatever. If that's really the case, they have to emphasize features that are highly visible to the potential customers to get them excited. Why every year? To keep your attention. Look at hundreds of other threads in this very website where people are frothing at the mouth over *needing* new emojis and other features. I'm not knocking that desire, much anyway, but you'd think that having really solid functionality would be more important. It's probably much easier to appeal to the irrational side of people's brains than to the rational. So, that's what Apple does.
I'd wager that the vast majority of customers aren't really affected by the boosts in processor performance these days. Browsing the web isn't limited by any of the Apple silicon processors. Nor are any of the other activities people use their devices for. There are exceptions, of course, but that's mostly for the kinds of people who read threads like this one and have serious desktop uses. That is, unless, Apple decides to offer up a new feature that is processing intensive, like Apple Intelligence. Then you need a faster device just to stay even with last year's device. What a coincidence.
Personally, I'm sticking with Sequoia until some compelling new reason comes along to make me want to upgrade. Apple Intelligence isn't it - it's turned off on all our Apple devices here. A new translucent UI that's harder to read (IMO) isn't it. At some point, Apple will drop support and I'll have to relook. At some point, new versions of macOS won't support this two year old Studio. I'll have to relook then, too. But, here's the thing. I'm not sure malicious hackers devote much time to finding exploits for old OS X running computers. Or, Windows 95 and even DOS 3.1 computers. There's just not a good "business case" for doing so. In some ways, the latest OS versions are the most vulnerable because they are the most commonly used. So, maybe a little obsolete isn't so bad after all. Perhaps having a separate watchdog type device attached to your home network is the way to go. Just update the information for that to prevent unwanted junk into your devices from the get go.
