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Finally moving to macOS14 from monterey?

L

ls1dreams

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 13, 2009
674
272
OK,

I'm getting older. I just want stuff to work, and generally find that older/original OS'es always run faster than newer things. I'm on a 16" M1 Max/32gb, currently running Monterey 12.7.6. I'm only looking to move now because in the last month I've run into 2 or 3 pieces of software that needed macOS 13 or 14+ to run.

I don't intend to jump to any beta or early versions of macOS 15 (usually wait until at least x.3 if I do).

How stable is Sonoma 14.6.1? I like that it's pretty far into the release cycle, but hate slowing down my machines with newer OS's.

Any known issues/bugs? Obviously the settings screen is a disaster.
 
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ls1dreams said:
How stable is Sonoma 14.6.1?
Click to expand...

As stable as any other Mac OS I've ever used.

Keep in mind that I'm running Sonoma Latest on a '23 Mac Studio, so I have a lot of headroom.

I also use a 2020 iPP, and it is as fluid as fluid can be.

My comparisons don't have a lot of contrast ;)
 
Latest Sonoma 14.6.1 on 2019 MBP i9 64GB and M2 MBA 24GB. Runs smooth as butter on both. Helps that your M1 MBP has 32GB memory.
 
ls1dreams said:
Any known issues/bugs? Obviously the settings screen is a disaster.
Click to expand...

All OSes have bugs. The question is whether they are significant for you. Sonoma is generally fine for me, although it is the first MacOS version I have used that has a continuing bug which does affect me. Accessing large directories (~10000 files) can sometimes take several minutes in Finder. Its annoying but not a game changer.

I love the new settings app. All settings are easily accessible from the View menu in alphabetical order.
 
Just made the leap will see how it feels.
Right out of the gate I feel like it's a little laggier.
 
ls1dreams said:
I just want stuff to work, and generally find that older/original OS'es always run faster than newer things.
Click to expand...
I suspect that's cognitive bias. We always remember the trains that were late, never the ones that were on time.

If every OS was slower than the previous one, then we'd have ground to a halt by now!
I can't remember an OS that noticeably affected performance, across all my Macs. As long as you keep all your software current, generally things should work fine.

ls1dreams said:
Right out of the gate I feel like it's a little laggier.
Click to expand...
It's going to be indexing spotlight, and filling caches initially.

If you really think that it's noticeably slower, then test a brand new user account. That will give you a clue whether something in your old user account is causing a problem -- like third-party LaunchAgents. Similarly, running in Safe Boot mode will test whether the problem might be caused by system extensions or other stuff you've installed.
 
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benwiggy said:
I suspect that's cognitive bias. We always remember the trains that were late, never the ones that were on time.
Click to expand...

Definitely and objectively quantifying "snappiness" makes it harder to test those potential biases.

benwiggy said:
If every OS was slower than the previous one, then we'd have ground to a halt by now!
Click to expand...

The newer OS have ground to a halt on older computers -- we need faster and faster computers to basically do the same things and many people have experienced older models becoming unusable before their hardware fails.

The easiest one to see is that each OS is bigger than the last -- not only more disk space but more processes and more RAM already gone after a clean login. Then within a fixed amount of RAM, old models on new OS often definitely feel slower (unless of course one "future proof" buys).

benwiggy said:
I can't remember an OS that noticeably affected performance, across all my Macs. As long as you keep all your software current, generally things should work fine.

It's going to be indexing spotlight, and filling caches initially.
Click to expand...

Agree and let's not get obsessed with boot times or things like that either. Unfortunately the actual steady-state experience -- which is what I think most people care about -- is hard to measure. My feeling is that that performance has gone down with each OS since Mojave (and arguably earlier but I have no access to those anymore) but I have no objective data to share on that.

# of processes and RAM usage definitely has gone up from Mojave -> Catalina -> Monterey.

benwiggy said:
If you really think that it's noticeably slower, then test a brand new user account. That will give you a clue whether something in your old user account is causing a problem -- like third-party LaunchAgents. Similarly, running in Safe Boot mode will test whether the problem might be caused by system extensions or other stuff you've installed.
Click to expand...

Agree those are good debugging steps people should go through to isolate performance issues. Though I don't really see many system extensions these days.
 
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It was obviously slow while indexing, but it still feels slower to me even after. I know it's hard to measure and people maybe have placebo effects here, but I also have a work machine side-by-side with it running an older OS and it feels faster.

Identical hardware.
 
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Newer software is always going to be slower, because it has got more features, it's tested mainly on newer hardware, it runs things in a more secure and less hacky way even if slower because now the hardware is fast enough.
Some things will actually be faster, but some will be slower.

But now that CPU speedup is getter smaller with every new generation, even new software get bloated slower. It won't make much difference to run macOS 12 or macOS 14.
 
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benwiggy said:
And is the software identical? (Other than the OS.)
Click to expand...

Yes, in fact the work machine has some stuff that should slow things down running like corporate scanning/antivirus. Examples include crowdstrike and netskope.

My personal machine has almost nothing running in the background to keep it lean.
 
Bigwaff said:
Latest Sonoma 14.6.1 on 2019 MBP i9 64GB and M2 MBA 24GB. Runs smooth as butter on both. Helps that your M1 MBP has 32GB memory.
Click to expand...
You don’t need 32 GB of RAM to run Sonoma OS. It will run fine with 8 GB of RAM.
 
If you have large external disks (even TB3 ones) you are likely to find yourself in Finder Hell, where trying to get at your files requires from 20 seconds to a minute. There are threads about this. No problems with Monterey, major issues with Sonoma. It's never been fixed. And I'm running a 2023 M2Max Studio -- which accessed the disks beautifully on Montery but not on Sonoma.

Otherwise, Sonoma has been fine for me and if I didn't have to regularly access my big disks I'd have no complaints.
 
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monokakata said:
If you have large external disks (even TB3 ones) you are likely to find yourself in Finder Hell, where trying to get at your files requires from 20 seconds to a minute. There are threads about this. No problems with Monterey, major issues with Sonoma. It's never been fixed. And I'm running a 2023 M2Max Studio -- which accessed the disks beautifully on Montery but not on Sonoma.

Otherwise, Sonoma has been fine for me and if I didn't have to regularly access my big disks I'd have no complaints.
Click to expand...

Thanks that may be an small but critical glitch for many people. I couldn't tell from the other thread -- how large do the external disks have to be before this becomes an issue? I saw some references to 8TB drives which I don't even consider that big these days. Are your external disks APFS or HFS+?
 
bzgnyc2 said:
Thanks that may be an small but critical glitch for many people. I couldn't tell from the other thread -- how large do the external disks have to be before this becomes an issue? I saw some references to 8TB drives which I don't even consider that big these days. Are your external disks APFS or HFS+?
Click to expand...
Sorry -- I didn't see this until just now. The externals are 8 TB spinners HFS+, connected via TB3. Each has thousands of files.
 
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