I just upgraded my 2010 iMac from 10.8 to 10.11 (don't trust 10.12 yet). I have been resisting this for some time now as 10.8 was fine, didn't need to upgrade... But things were getting a bit slow, and have had to deal with too much software complaining 10.8 is no longer supported and os I don't get the latest and greatest (Chrome being pretty obnoxious in constantly reminding me...) So it was more the pressure of other software than OS X itself.

Jesus. It should have taken less than an hour, but I lost the entire NYE weekend to the upgrade process being totally whack job incompetent. It at first seemed like it had been successful, the Mac booted properly the first time as I'd expect... then trying to login took 20 minutes (never finished) and it obviously wasn't working. I then went down the rabbit hole of trying to recover, trying to boot into single user mode, trying to use the Recovery partition to re-install, trying to make a new user from scratch so I could login, and then ...

trying to fix the NAS drive because the machine couldn't see it anymore (neither could my other Mac Mini) £$%£$%!!! reset PRAM, reset SMC, spent too much time reading lots of forums (I now know all about MDNSResponder and how Bonjour is really buggy) then a reboot of the NAS cleared that problem up (WTF?)

so I finally gave up, booted off my Linux USB drive, and used Samba to connect to the drive so I could double-backup my Mac's file to the NAS (just to be safe) - I do not like Time Machine much and found some data Time Machine and NASes don't play well together sometimes. Then I wiped the Mac's hard disk and started from scratch, which I was not going to in the first place b/c that's a lot of manual labor to clean and reorganize files.

The fresh install of 10.11 was finished in 30 minutes or so and now it seems to be working perfectly. %^&$&£@£!!!! Rebuilding my file system and all the apps etc will take 2 days, but I at least have a chance to get rid of all the cruft. I think one problem might have been some kexts that were really old that I forgot about and somehow the upgrade process got wrapped around an axle and I couldn't get a command line prompt to figure things out. Apple seems to have not been paranoid enough...

My take is one of Apple's subgoals might be to get the average user to buy the latest hardware as best they can (that is how companies are). If I wasn't in IT, I would have been down to the Apple Store very quickly.

My other opinion is that the flat design of 10.11 is awful. I can deal with it, but I realized spending too much time on twiddly little things like UI tweaking (not improvements) is a way to not have to deal with more important things. A friend reminded me of the time Jobs, who had just sold NeXT to Apple but hadn't yet become CEO yet, was in an interview and he said (paraphrased) one of the death knells of a company is when the marketing department takes over and starts pumping out too many products and "features" and etc - i.e. he was explaining why Apple at that time had a zillion versions of the same basic computer and it was all too confusing for the consumer. He came back to Apple and things started going upwards again.

Apple seems to be starting to tread that same road again. I hope Jobs is in Heaven right now using his reality distortion field on God trying to get Ives sent to hell (that's how much I do not like this flat design and what I think of the iOS changes). Jobs was a marketer, but I have read stories about how people who worked with him relay that he really did give a damn about trying to make products that A) worked well (were designed properly) and only B) looked good (and really did). He had his faults, but he also knew what he was doing. Why he let iTunes be the POS it is I don't know... but I absolutely avoid it so I am biased.

If I ever do get new hardware, Linux is going on it. The UIs for Linux are not great, but I spend most of the time in Terminal anyhow...