First, Big Sur was the first macOS to support ARM. Given recent developments at Apple, its no surprise their primary development focus is on OS Releases that have ARM support.
Second, as already pointed out by another poster in this thread, Apple provide free upgrades to newer OS versions for supported hardware (and the hardware support goes back a decent number of years[1]).
For the vast majority of people on Catalina, all they need to do is to upgrade to Big Sur, it is almost certain they are using compatible hardware[1].
The key point for this IMHO is, as mentioned in the article "But it's also time for better communication on this subject. Apple should spell out its update policies for older versions of macOS, as Microsoft does, rather than relying on its current hand-wavy release timing".
If Apple properly supported Catalina, that would be great; if Apple explicitly said that Catalina is out of support / EOL and people need to upgrade to Big Sur, that could be reasonable; but if they keep the two-year-old release in some limbo that's kind of supported but poorly, that's simply poor support.
Apple needs to make a clear choice and publish a specific date for each of their releases up until which they commit to backporting security updates, so that people can know what is the expectation for e.g. Catalina, whether it is considered supported or not right now.
I really don’t get this. Apple does provide free updates for all. If you skip major versions, you’re shooting yourself in the foot and blaming Apple for allowing it.
Apple is giving you the update: Install it and now it’s up to date. They don’t have to support multiple versions of the same thing indefinitely.
The situations (devices) where the update isn’t possible (i.e. they’re outdated too early) can probably be counted on one hand.
I agree that they don’t have to support multiple versions of the same thing indefinitely, however they do have to say what they are supporting and for how long they're going to support what.
The fact that Big Sur was released does not automatically mean anything about the support for Catalina, because there are all kinds of reasons not to make a major version upgrade even if the hardware is still compatible with the new version; the major upgrades do break certain aspects of software and implement changes to functionality and UI, not just fixes for security bugs.
The core issue is that simple questions like "Is Catalina being supported as of 14th November 2021 or not" and "Which is the date when Big Sur support ends and you are expected to migrate to Monterey or later for security updates" deserve a clear answer from Apple, and it seems that they are refusing to answering that with any official, published policy.
Only when using a release that is EOL is it shooting yourself in the foot in regards to security. It doesn't matter if the new release is free or not (Linux and BSD are), not everyone wants to track the latest release for whatever reason they like and there's no problem with that if it still receives timely security updates, which is a standard practice on every other OS. If Apple doesn't want to do this, it should be clearly stated. Otherwise as this behavior is outside of the norm, Apple should be rightly critised for it.
For iOS14, Apple provided users a prompt to optionally upgrade to 15 while guaranteeing security updates to ios14. This is the relevant text on the Apple website:
>iOS may now offer a choice between two software update versions in the Settings app. You can update to the latest version of iOS 15 as soon as it’s released for the latest features and most complete set of security updates. Or continue on iOS 14 and still get important security updates.
Microsoft certainly does patch all two years old versions of windows.