Comment by zzrrt

To be fair, it would cost them more to fully test the iOS 18 patches on all devices, than what it cost them to test a few devices. So I wouldn't quite call it artificially holding the patches back. But yeah, it is probably mostly motivated by avoiding bad PR of letting slightly-older devices get hacked, and then forcing everyone else to be on the new release. (FWIW I'm running iOS 18 on an iPhone SE 2020, so probably going to have to embrace all the change and bugs in iOS 26.)