Poll

Should I update my MacOS?

Only registered users are allowed to vote for this poll.
19 votes were received.

No, stay on Monterey	4		21%
Get Sonoma now, wait on Sequoia	9		47%
Wait til Sequoia is released, then update	4		21%
I am MAVIC	2		11%

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Currently running Monterey on my Studio. I figure if I want Sonoma, I need to do it soon, before Sequoia comes out. Is Sonoma worth it?

As Monty won't be supported in October, I'd update now as Sonoma has the advantage of 11 months of updates and fixes. It should be working well for everyone by now.

If you have a test machine, I would try Sonoma. The bugs are largely worked out, and who knows what Sequoia has in store due to Apple Intelligence.

My two latest machines are at Monterey and Sonoma.

I will avoid taking Monty to Sonoma; if I update it, it will be to Ventura, unless Ventu is one to be avoiced.

I do not like:



at all.

It makes sense on a 'Phone, blows chunks on a Mac.

My main Mac currently is my 2012 mini on Sierra, so I can hang with Monty for awhile.

I doubt Apple will have seen the error of their ways with System Settings and righted it in Sequoia, but I doubt it.

So Monty it is.

My machine with Sonoma came that way so I'm stuck.

---

I am that Masked Man.

All you can do, is all you can do.

There’s trouble — it's time to play the sound of my people.

Your boos mean nothing to me, I've seen what you cheer for.

Insisting on your rights without acknowledging your responsibilities isn’t freedom, it’s adolescence.

I've been to the edge of the map, and there be monsters.

We are a government of laws, not men.

Everybody counts or nobody counts.

When a good man is hurt,
all who would be called good
must suffer with him.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

There is no safety for honest men except
by believing all possible evil of evil men.

We don’t do focus groups. They just ensure that you don’t offend anyone, and produce bland inoffensive products. —Sir Jonathan Ive

An armed society is a polite society.
And hope is a lousy defense.

You make me pull, I'll put you down.

I *love* SIGs. It's Glocks I hate.

What Lew Zealand said.

Sonoma is fine.

iOS-ification is a thing and very unlikely to change.

fwiw, I have found a few things in Monty that are improved in Sonoma, eg, Disk Utility. (Still frustrating that it works so intermittently, but I am beginning to believe that is APFS...)

On Ventura on my M1Pro.

Downloaded Sonoma but did not install.

---

San Antonio, TX (in the old city)


"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." - Eli Weisel

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

"I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it." - Billy Graham 1981

"Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise" - Barry Goldwater

I am not MAVIC.

Both my Macs are from 2015, and Monterey is the most recent OS they will run.

So I have no advice for the OP.

---

"Hillbilly at Harvard"
Honky-tonk Country and Bluegrass
Founded in 1948 by Pappy Ben Minnich
Saturdays 9am - 11am Eastern
WHRB-FM, Cambridge, MA
Streaming at [www.WHRB.org]
Be there!
The HAH weblog: [hillbillyatharvard.wordpress.com]

Topical weblog: [walkingcreekworld.wordpress.com]

On the river in Saxonville.

don't not upgrade the OS ONLY if you have a reason to not upgrade - like it will break important software. Not upgrading 'just because' is a risk you don't need to take.

Quote
hal
don't not upgrade the OS ONLY if you have a reason to not upgrade - like it will break important software. Not upgrading 'just because' is a risk you don't need to take.

I agree except that I do not think it's a requirement to upgrade if you are running an OS that is still getting Apple security updates.

Been running the Sequoia beta for about a week. Works fine. The current iteration of AI is unimpressive.

Quote
hal
don't not upgrade the OS ONLY if you have a reason to not upgrade - like it will break important software. Not upgrading 'just because' is a risk you don't need to take.

That’s fine if you need to run something special, but normies sound update without pause. If you have something that needs a particular OS, you should figure out if you can run it in a virtualized environment.

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On a tangent to the actual subject here--and it requires liberal use of the "old fogey" emoji --but I just realized I can't figure out why there are so many MacOS updates. Why not just fix the bugs in a point update and not make us upgrade to an entirely new OS which may or may not be compatible with our software?

And don't get me started on Catalina and above dropping support for 32-bit apps plus totally changing the internals of code development, in effect forcing developers to make their apps incompatible with pre-Catalina OSs.

What have we actually gained from newer OSs like Sonoma and above vs Mojave or High Sierra (if they would have modern security updates)?

Quote
AllGold
--but I just realized I can't figure out why there are so many MacOS updates. Why not just fix the bugs in a point update and not make us upgrade to an entirely new OS which may or may not be compatible with our software?

What have we actually gained from newer OSs like Sonoma and above vs Mojave or High Sierra (if they would have modern security updates)?

They've been calling Upgrades 'point updates' since 10.x....now they're using whole numbers!

And I'm still sore over losing Rosetta from 10.6 to 10.7 (which should have been called 11!)

---

San Antonio, TX (in the old city)


"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." - Eli Weisel

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

"I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it." - Billy Graham 1981

"Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise" - Barry Goldwater

Quote
AllGold
And don't get me started on Catalina and above dropping support for 32-bit apps plus totally changing the internals of code development, in effect forcing developers to make their apps incompatible with pre-Catalina OSs.

I somewhat agree, but it does get increasingly difficult to support old apis under improved security systems.

Quote
jonny
The current iteration of AI is unimpressive.

Apple announced the iPhone requirements for AI 3 weeks after we bought base iPhone 15's. It caused me a moment of angst but then if figured it will take a while before AI is really an impressive thing. Maybe when we trade the 15's for 18's it will be in full fruition.

The advice about running older systems if you need to is sound. I still have some Monterey in the mix. I know of a NASA sponsored lab that recently had to be dragged out of Mojave. (And again, note that Monterey will get security fixes until Sequoia is released per Apple policy. But probably no more updates.)

But, fwiw, there have been ENORMOUS changes in macOS since 10.15...mostly under the hood. From things like sealed system volumes to the deprecation of third party kernel extensions, Sonoma is a completely different animal from Catalina. And Sequoia is the next step. The changes are so significant that they amount to a new architecture in most ways.

Is all the security necessary? Is Apple building in ways hobbyists hate? Are we still mad about soldered RAM? (Yes!) (But we would have gotten to SoC and Arm by now anyway.)

Personally, I wish marketing was not in command at Apple and that they could pull a 'Snow Leopard' with just bug fixes. But whatever.

Here is Howard Oakley on just the move away from extensions (that he wrote given the issues with extensions in the Crowdstrike catastrophe.) He shows the pros and cons of Apple's choices, but it shows just how deep the changes run in macOS.

Quote
RAMd®d
I will avoid taking Monty to Sonoma...I do not like:



at all.

It makes sense on a 'Phone, blows chunks on a Mac.

...

I doubt Apple will have seen the error of their ways with System Settings and righted it in Sequoia, but I doubt it.

So Monty it is.

What he said.

---

It is what it is.

I'm reluctant to move from Monty on my '18 mintel.
mostly because of that stupid sys prefs layout.
but my podcast client has a couple of M1nis running Venty.
Little by little I've started to get accustomed to it.
The search feature works very well.
My high-end friend out at SkyWalker says their M1s are all on Venty at least. Obviously, they are way more mission-critical than I am.

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!#$@@$#!

Nolite manducare flavo.

mostly because of that stupid sys prefs layout.

This.


Little by little I've started to get accustomed to it. [Ventura]

I may make the move to Ventura, but I'll have to look into it so see what I might have to get accustomed to, little by little.

---

I am that Masked Man.

All you can do, is all you can do.

There’s trouble — it's time to play the sound of my people.

Your boos mean nothing to me, I've seen what you cheer for.

Insisting on your rights without acknowledging your responsibilities isn’t freedom, it’s adolescence.

I've been to the edge of the map, and there be monsters.

We are a government of laws, not men.

Everybody counts or nobody counts.

When a good man is hurt,
all who would be called good
must suffer with him.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

There is no safety for honest men except
by believing all possible evil of evil men.

We don’t do focus groups. They just ensure that you don’t offend anyone, and produce bland inoffensive products. —Sir Jonathan Ive

An armed society is a polite society.
And hope is a lousy defense.

You make me pull, I'll put you down.

I *love* SIGs. It's Glocks I hate.

I'm running Monterey on my 2020 M1 MacBook Pro I think I'm going to Sonoma this week.

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Grateful11