Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica:

“The hassle of getting everything working has stagnated my updates throughout the years,” Nolan said. “After El Cap’s new Disk Utility and rootless feature temporarily breaking brew, I simply left the machine on 10.10.5. Besides security updates, I let it chug along and I have had little reason to consider upgrading it past that.”

Sometimes, perhaps as a side effect of software updates, things just stop working properly for obscure reasons. Sleep and audio were the two issues that I saw brought up repeatedly—one developer has never been able to get his front audio ports working properly, and a TV producer I talked to sometimes has to log out and back in to get the audio jacks to work. Graphics cards and USB can also be fiddly.

That’s one of the reasons I haven’t upgraded my Hackintosh since I built it — there’s nothing much worth upgrading to at the moment, although there is a small light in the tunnel in regard to NVMe. My current build is practically bulletproof in terms of updates — I only have to worry about Clover, while the rest works 99.9% of the time.

“I’m fine with spending hundreds, if not thousands of [dollars] having a top-of-the-line system to avoid any hiccups or slowdown on any of my applications,” he told Ars. “And here I ran into the problem—the lack of Apple hardware to be upgraded really began freaking me out. I wanted a system I could upgrade the parts at a reasonable cost, and without dealing [with] the opaqueness of Apple support.”

JC is one of several people who told me they would be happy to shell out for a new Mac Pro if it had a more traditional PC’s flexibility.

There is an issue with Apple desktop hardware which irritates me to no end — when anything in a Hackintosh (or PC) fails, I can just go out and buy a new SSD, HDD, GPU, CPU, fan, stick of RAM, or whatever else broke. I’ll be up and running in a few hours tops. If anything happens to an iMac or Mac Pro, I can expect to be without it for up to a week or two, depending on the severity of the issue and the queue at the Authorised Service Centre¹. This is unacceptable for most people.