Comment by negura

The nagging notifications are only a small part. Apple has far more effective ways of forcing updates on you. On iPhones, for instance, the Unicode tables ship with the OS version, so unless you update, you cannot render newly added emoji codepoints. Given how central emojis have become to pop culture - and how determined the Unicode Consortium seems to keep adding more of them - the whole situation almost looks like a conspiracy, if you squint. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

In the App Store, Apple won't let you filter for apps compatible with your iOS version. So sooner or later, you have to manually try installing every search result just to see whether it errors out. There's no explanation for not adding such a trivial filter other than to annoy users on purpose. Without jailbreaking, you also can't install earlier (compatible) versions of a given app. And by the way, updating iOS eventually just turns into buying a new iPhone, once the latest iOS no longer supports your device at all.

But the worst part is how critical software components are bundled with the OS too. On iPhone, that means WebKit. So very soon your Internet browsing experience starts to rot, because the only way to get a version supporting the latest Web standards is to update the whole of iOS. Likewise, on Macs, your runtimes/frameworks are bundled as well, so you can't update them individually. Eventually, the only way to install even non-native apps is to update the whole macOS.

This is what you sign up for when you buy an Apple product. Apple has mastered the art of tempting you without letting you realize what's really going on until it's too late. Apple was, is, and always will be evil. The clue is in their logo.