I am in the process of updating everything R-related: R, RStudio, packages.

I noticed that Bioconductor will not update beyond version 3.17 unless I explicitly state the desired version (see below).
Is there a reason for this? Perhaps it is because a package I have installed is not yet compatible with Bioconductor 3.18?

I couldn't post my code due to the presence of ' for instance as it appears in R around version '3.17' ...

BiocManager::version()
[1] 3.17

BiocManager::install()
Bioconductor version 3.17 (BiocManager 1.30.22), R 4.3.2 (2023-10-31)

BiocManager::install(version = "3.18")
Upgrade 71 packages to Bioconductor version 3.18? [y/n]: 


> sessionInfo()
R version 4.3.2 (2023-10-31)
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Sonoma 14.3.1

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib 
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib;  LAPACK version 3.11.0

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

time zone: America/Chicago
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] BiocManager_1.30.22 compiler_4.3.2      tools_4.3.2

This is expected and documented on the site. To upgrade from one version to another of Bioconductor you must "force" it.
You don't show the output of BiocManager::version() after making the upgrade by answering yes to Upgrade 71 packages to Bioconductor version 3.18? [y/n]: y, but it should be 3.18