Upgrade or die: Apple's re-invention of the version ratchet
&gt;<i>This sounds like a positive development, but it&#x27;s actually an indication of something quite ominous that most people don&#x27;t realize: for several years now, Apple has been deploying a strategy straight out of Microsoft&#x27;s Big Book of Dirty Tricks which I am hereby dubbing the version ratchet.  A version ratchet is a software deployment strategy that forces you to upgrade even if you don&#x27;t want to.</i><p>Nothing dirty about it. If you &quot;don&#x27;t want to&quot; just use an OS vendor that doesn&#x27;t force you. Or you can continue using your old OS on your old Mac. It&#x27;s not like it will stop working altogether -- people use Amiga computers still with 1990-era OS&#x2F;WorkbenchS from what I hear.<p>The alternative to what Apple does is slower OS upgrade cycles and&#x2F;or devoting resources to 5 and 10 year old OSes. Which we had with MS -- 15+ years of XP (and a decade of IE6 dominance), holding IT back.