“There was a time when I was at the forefront of every new release from Apple. I would watch each WWDC event with eager anticipation for the next release of OSX and iOS, even getting in on public betas and even obtaining developer betas from dodgy sources just so I could be ahead of the crowd,” Simon Royal writes for Low End Mac. “So why am I sitting here with a 2012 11-inch Macbook Air that is more than capable of running Apple’s latest release macOS High Sierra and still running Sierra?”
“High Sierra seems to be one of those minor releases, an update offering speed fixes, improved stability and a few tweaks over its predecessor, which I would class as a major update. For me Sierra is perfectly fine, it does everything I need and High Sierra offers no new amazing features that I can’t live without. I don’t use Safari, I’m not interested in 4K streaming nor VR,” Royal writes. “The horror stories of upgrading to the new APFS drive format leaving some Macs useless is another reason that has put me off.”
“Perhaps I am again entered an era of low end, sporting a 5 year old Mac and last year’s OS,” Royal writes. “But until a time that my tiny Mac doesn’t do what I need I am staying firmly put.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If, like Simon, you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and upgrade to macOS High Sierra if your Mac and apps are supported. It’s better, faster, and, likely, safer, too.
Upgrading to High Sierra has been disastrous for me. I have to run disk doctor every time I start up, or no programs will run.
Same here. Too much of my software (all of which is up to date) that I use daily had issues. It’s a very solid update to the OS, but I literally couldn’t do my work on it. I would advise more professional users to double check their compatibility before upgrading. I could have saved myself some serious headaches if I had, thank goodness for backups. 😉
Well said I have checked and won’t be doing so except perhaps on an external at some stage.
That’s exactly why i havent upgraded.i wasnt eager to find out a bunch of my programs would suddenly become problematic. I can hold off for a while before i go kicking and screaming.
Like what?
Maybe the problem is Disk Doctor. Norton has always been pretty bad on Macs.
Norton Symantec is pretty bad on everything. We have that crap on our PCs at work and you have to wait about a half hour just to do anything after booting up. I would kill to use Macs for work.
If you mean Symantec’ Norton Disk Doctor, and not Apple’s Disk Utility, it’s not compatible with Apple’s APFS, at all. Do not use it.
The only file system repair utility compatible with APFS at this time is Apple’s Disk Utility. That’s a core reason I refuse to update to High Sierra. Blame Apple. APFS isn’t finished yet. Not one file utility developer is willing to touch it yet, and I’ve been in touch with most of them.
> APFS isn’t finished yet
Yes, that’s the other issue. Apple File System uses checksums to ensure data integrity for metadata, but not user data. http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/
For me data integrity of user data is important, especially on Fusion Drives. So I’ll better wait and see…
> APFS isn’t finished yet…
Yes, and at the moment it only uses checksums to ensure data integrity for metadata, but not user data.
http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/
But integrity of user data is important to me, especially on Fusion Drives. So I’ll better wait and see…
No issues for me – i upgraded 2 macs – but like others I don’t have Norton disk doctor – I just use the standard mac utilities. Norton is not needed…
unfortunately InDesign 3 & 4 don’t work with High Sierra on my 27” iMac 😩
Best regards from Denmark
If anyone has a solution I am very esger to hear?
You’re talking about software that’s roughly a decade old. It’s not surprising it won’t run… My suggestion is find an older Mac (with an older OS) to run that software
it runs perfectly on the 27” iMac with Sierra with a 27” Apple Display as second screen next to it… So, it is more easy for me to stay with Sierra PS: the iMac is “tuned” with a SSD! A very fast setup! No need to update…
A Mac user who doesn’t use Safari.
That’s the very definition of stupid.
… and he moved…
> … away from iOS to the Android platform
The main thing that’s holding me back is the removed iOS management functionality of iTunes.
Patrick, what world do you live in where a person’s intelligence can be questioned based on their choice to use a non-Apple browser????? Safari is far from the only good choice in browsers.
Word to the wise: the latest release of Firefox is seriously wicked good. All the extensibility with all the speed. Or you could be a lemming and just use what came pre installed. Isn’t that what religious zealots do?
Unfortunately, an attempt find out if my current Firefox add-ons and extensions were compatible with the current Firefox release (by installing the Firefox compatibility add-on to check current add-ons) resulted in Firefox updating itself to the current version… which isn’t compatible with the compatibility add-on.
I did find the one add-on I have for Firefox (for downloading YouTube videos and which is the only reason I use Firefox) isn’t compatible. And there’s no update for it, nor another add-on that works.
So I’m back to not using Firefox.
Can’t you just use the ESR version of Firefox?
Why not a solo app for that like ClipGrab?
https://clipgrab.org
The problem with non-Apple browsers, at least on laptops, is crippling power consumption.
Maybe he doesn’t use Safari because it doesn’t work with so many sites. I still use Safari for most stuff but I had to install Chrome to access some vital sites.
I’ve had great luck with putting High Sierra on older Macs with SSD..two Mac mini (not “latest”) and 1 second and 1 3rd gen Air. It was worth it, but we don’t run much in the way of complicated software on those. Citrix on the Airs and Parallels to serve vms on the minis.
I have upgraded my 5K 2014 SSD iMac at work with no ill effects. Seems very smooth.
I have also upgraded my 2009 HDD iMac at home. That one seems much faster it did on Sierra.
I’ve upgraded two Macs at home and eight Macs at my office. There was only one hitch — an upgrade that crashed during the night (power surge, perhaps) and problems with upgrading Microsoft Office on an external SSD with the internal hard drive is completely blank (Office 2016 won’t do that, for some reason).
All in all, it’s been pretty painless. Personally, it’s worth upgrading if only for the security features…
Count me in the, sorry I upgraded my MacBook Pro 13’ mid 2014.
Lost everything on it. I knew I was taking a risk and had to go to Apple store to get help restoring my machine.
My iMac has all my important stuff and will not be upgraded until I get a new machine with High Sierra, pre-installed.
There was a reason, I tried my MacBook Pro first.
APFS has be scared.
I really like the idea of high sierra, I really do. There are tons of things I want in it. But because of rentware, I’m stuck with Adobe CS6 and several other older apps. Not even sure I want to pay to update Parallels right now (which I absolutely need for my work).
Planning on getting an iMac Pro when they finally get out. Think I’ll leave my (original) retina Mac Book Pro on Sierra until the iMac Pro comes out and see how things go on the iMac before upgrading the MacBook Pro.
Only real issue I’ve had with High Sierra is a problem with sharing APFS volumes via NFS. I’m working around it for now by creating an HFS+ sparsebundle and sharing that, but I’ve heard reports that the problem is solved in the latest betas of 10.13.2.
TO those people who “lost everything” when they upgraded to High Sierra, that’s what backups are for!
My business has two mid 2011 13” MacBook Pros, an early 2015 12” Retina MacBook and a mid 2011 Mac Mini. The MB Pros and mini were all upgraded to a 500GB SSD with a clean install of High Sierra and the MacBook (already SSD) was upgraded. Not a single problem with the install or with apps.
APFS is amazing on an SSD and all machines seem like brand new. In fact, they have never been so fast and reliable.
If you read their posts, they mean they lost the local data. They are not implying that they could not recover from a separate backup.
The question I have is: why in this day do these issues persist? Apple offers no solid backup solution. If you want to protect your data properly, you are best advised to look at hardware, software, and services elsewhere. Consider this: for the simplest backup needs, there is no current Mac that allows the user to install a second drive and seamlessly backup his data real time. Offline even.
Doesn’t anyone at Apple consider this basic stuff?????
Right on realist, you got it.
Errm, in what way can’t you plug in a second hard drive to the USB and use time machine to backup? I’m baffled by your comment.
High Sierra is a problem for me. It won’t see the vast majority of my photos in iCloud. Same thing happened with iOS 11. iOS 11.1 fixed it on my iPhone but not High Sierra.
It is a known issue even with the .1 release of High Sierra.
Photoshop CS5.1, MS Office 2008, Dreamweaver CS3, Director. You can no longer buy any of them. I don’t want to rent from Adobe or Microsoft, and I have LOTS of old Director/Shockwave projects I need access to. Everything’s working fine now, so I’m not updating in the foreseeable future.
You can buy a standalone version of MS Office 2016 for the Mac. I think it’s only $100 or $130 US.
Office 2011 copies are now practically free and while no longer supported by MS, will work as well.
Still the best office suite by a long shot.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/15/09/22/subscription.free.versions.of.office.2016.suite.available.to.purchase.130515/
I’m not upgrading until I know I can run my older programs. Excel 2011 works fine on Sierra and I use it every day.
My copy of Acrobat Pro also works fine.
Both are expensive and I don’t want to upgrade now.
My old 2012 macbook-pro with ssd is working fine with high sierra.
Have no Problems with Safari 😀
I put a Crucial 1 TB SSD in my late 2012 27″ iMAC and it’s smokin’ fast….I also did the same to a late 2008 iMAC…though I can no longer update the OS due to Apple upgrade limits, it still way faster than it came with the HDD..
The loss of simple Bonjour messaging in a networked office environment has been a PIA. Without a built-in messaging protocol, we now need to go third party app with each workstation as we ‘upgrade’. Unforced error.
What alternative third party Bonjour messaging app have you found? I tried Adium, but file transfers do not work properly (files get through corrupted) and the software development seems to have stopped.
I would not recommend upgrading if you work with multipage pdf documents (such as created using TeXShop). There is a VERY annoying bug in PDFView related to displaying the current page (as determined using the mouse/scrollbar/etc).
If anyone from Apple is reading this, and knows someone who has oversight of PDFView, please fix this!!!!!!
I upgraded a 2011 MacBook Air 11″ it works perfectly.. I upgraded a 2012 MacBook pro.. it is perfect.. I upgraded a 2016 MacBook pro and it is also perfect. I suspect that people having problems have hacks installed that cause a vanilla install to fail.. please report if your mac has hacks or third party installs.. it is not apples fault if you hack your system and then it doesn’t install correctly !
High Sierra on an SSD Mid 2011 27″ iMac. It runs great.
I’ve owned Macs since ’89. I’ve had most of them at one time or another. Used to be you had to replace them every 2 years or they’d bog down with new OS’s. These days, they don’t seem to. All the speed I need for general work/entertainment.
Since I absolutely must use MS Office, I went and bought the 2016 version, not subscription mess (which I don’t like). But when I bought my mid 2014 MacBook Pro, I made mistake of getting 128 GB drive thinking I could easily and cheaply upgrade it later. I can easily, but not cheaply. Disk only has about 12gb open now, so I’m concerned about upgrading to High Sierra. I wonder if it uses less disk space than Sierra? All my programs are now 64 bit, so I should be able to run everything. I’ll probably go ahead and get 240GB SSD from OWC and use current 128GB as backup. I’m external drive poor (means I’ve bought a slew of them!) so have plenty for backups.
I have upgraded with no problems. But, I don’t use any specialized software just ones that are common and widely used. I do not use any add-on tools to check my disk, etc. I figure if I need to use several 3rd party utilities to ‘fix’ my disk, remove malware, etc. then I might as well be a Windows user. I rely on Apple to get things right.
I’ve been having some fun with upgrading my mid 2013 macbook pro. The hardware is supported by Apple.
– Tried installing on an external new disc via recovery mode. Would not recognize the disc. I had to format the disc first and then I could use disc utility to blank it and install HS.
– When installed, I want to copy over information from my old 12” dead powerbook G4 hd. So I mounted it via a usb and I can’t copy any of the data to the high sierra drive. Seems to be a permissions issue. Tried command line voodoo as well. I can see the data on the drive but not access it. I could have via Mountain Lion.
– Noticed all mounted drives are given perculiar names on desktop displays.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Apple don’t QA macOS on older hardware prior to release.
It’s a disgrace.
I upgraded a mid-2010 MBP with an i7 and 8gb RAM which had been running Sierra to High Sierra. The result was a total brick. I ended up doing a full install of Sierra from a USB flash drive just to get back to a working machine (which I left running Sierra). It’s a good thing everything was backed up – all I lost was an evening doing reinstall work and a lot of confidence in Apple’s usually painless upgrade process.
This is silly. Just back up your image, upgrade, and revert back if you have to. No concerns or issues to worry about. Move along, nothing to see here, but an inexperienced user who shouldn’t be writing about technical matters.
With the latest stupid “fail” where you can easily log into Root, I am glad I have not upgraded anyone in the office. And they were ticked at Scott Forstall over a Map error? Really? This is a HUGE security error that any idiot can perform, except the idiots that were supposed to lock it down. Apple needs to get it’s shit together. Steve Jobs is not there to kick ass and fire idiots.