Thanks, guys. Collectively, you solved this problem (and raised and maybe answered another, lesser, one).
I wasn’t scrolling down far enough in the right pages. Once you steered me to the choices between Tahoe, Safari 26, and Sequoia 15.7.3, I was able and sufficiently informed to UNCHECK Tahoe and Safari 26 and CHECK 15.7.3 with surety that I wouldn’t accidentally and irrevocably upgrade to anything I don’t want. A generic UPGRADE button does not guarantee that.
The lesser question you guys hinted at concerns upgrading to Safari 26. I’d love to tap into its (supposedly) advanced AI-assisted research capabilities, but not at the expense of functionality and a gee-whizz learning curve. Sequoia’s AI search function is quite useful and benign, and “new” does not guarantee “improved”.
RANT ALERT: Feel free to stop here. The rest of this in a diatribe against snake oil purveyors of unnecessary window dressing and buggy products.
I batch programmed mainframes in the ‘60s and have owned desktops since 1985. I’m an engineer, but have never had one iota of interest in modifying computers' guts beyond one canned line of Terminal code maybe 15 years ago in desperation. I infinitely prefer to operate at GUI level and stay out of their risky weeds lest I get snake bit. “A little knowledge …”, and all that.
NOTHING I see in the description of Tahoe interests me. It looks like window dressing, and as Shania sang, “That don’t impress me much.” I use computers primarily for medical and health literature research and summaries that I can shove down the throats of oncologists and other doctors who don’t read research papers, can’t spell nutrition, and are blind to anything but their own specialty, if that. (Heads up: trust them at your and your kids’ peril. I’m alive and still athletic only because I know more than many of them do, according to three of them.)
I don’t need no steenkin’ ostentatious graphics developed for their own sake. The necessity of forums like this (and the hundreds of man-hours it took AND STILL TAKES me to de-bug my conversion from Spectrum to Dish) prove that marketeers from TV-land, computer-land, automobile-land, cell-land, etc. are pushing envelopes just because they can and usually before they work, whether they improve our lives or not.
“If it ain’t broke …”, and all that. Apple even admits that Tahoe is for a subset of their users, and that even if converts want to go back, they can’t. “Forewarned is …”, and all that.
Whew! Anybody who read this far maybe DOES have time to wrap their GUI in yet another layer of superficial bling. As I very seriously told 5 neurologists who thought I might die within days in 1996, several oncologists who expected my demise by 2010, and then many oncologists who later prescribed treatments that would guarantee my demise by 2019, “I’d rather go windsurfing.” (Don’t feel uncomfortable; I’m still enjoying the **** out of life as long as I don’t let marketeers and scammers overload it.)
