[jlokier]

If they can't afford another machine, then not until the current one stops working. Ironically!

But for a lot of developers, their work literally can only be done on on Apple devices. You can't develop iOS and Mac apps on anything else.

There are a lot of people for whom that is their job, including freelancers.

They could switch to a new domain of business, but that's a large change with many disadvantages. It's not like picking a different laptop just because you fancy a change. E.g. for an iOS developer to switch to being an Android developer, it's not hard to start but there's a lot to learn to be good at it to the same level and bring in the same money.

[beagle3]

Thats a very weird example. Those developers should know better than update on the first week of a new OS on their only non-virtualized machine.

I would be surprised if my accountant updates to a new version of Excel within 3 days if it coming out, and would be very disappointed if as a result he wasn’t able to prepare my taxes. The situation you described is similar - someone who should know better throwing their old tools before they know for sure the shiny new one will work.

[jlokier]

The system notifies you about software updates from time to time, and you are trained to install them for security.

The Big Sur update is notified in the same way. It gives the appearance of being just another big software update.

Unlike Windows, Mac OS updates come out more often, about once a year for major version, and every couple of months for minor version. Despite the marketing fanfare, they are not as big a change as say jumping from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

Ok, maybe you still want to take care with a new OS. Like with Excel three days before filing taxes. (Though when do you expect the accountant to upgrade? They are always doing someone's taxes.)

Maybe you do try it in a VM first, and decide you like it, it works well for you. Some people try new OS versions in a separate partition. You can do that on a Mac, just like on a PC. It seems like it ought to be safe, because you've kept the old installation on as well. Just like on a PC, you can choose which to start up using the built-in boot menu.

Being sensible you take a full system backup first. Usually, with Apple, a backup is pretty good. You can reinstall from a backup provided the system can boot. Macs have a reinstaller built in. By analogy with a PC, it's more like "imaging" a Windows or Linux system, and as if the PC BIOS had built-in tools to restore from a backup image.

Following that analogy, the problem here is that Big Sur nuked the BIOS! It can't even reboot from external media, or the recovery partition. If a Window OS upgrade did that we'd not only be unhappy, we would also be rather surprised that we can't boot an external USB key to recover.

[Kwpolska]

> Unlike Windows, Mac OS updates come out more often, about once a year for major version, and every couple of months for minor version. Despite the marketing fanfare, they are not as big a change as say jumping from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

Windows 10 has new major releases every 6 months, changes might be more minor than a typical macOS major release. Windows also gets security patches and bug fixes every month, those are comparable to macOS minor versions.