High Sierra Future

[jasnw]

I finally gave in and upgraded from El Cap to High Sierra a couple of months ago to get ready for Mojave. Now I find that my computer (2011 iMac) is too old and decrepit (according to Apple) to run Mojave, and I’m now effectively stranded on High Sierra unless I buy new hardware. I would be OK with this (well, less not OK) if I felt HS will get all necessary future upgrades and patches to keep the core OS current, particularly the APFS part. Are there discussions about High Sierra’s future anywhere that might address this? If HS is going to stall out I’m probably going to fall back to El Capitan to get rid of a number of annoying little problems that came with the upgrade.

 

[flowrider]

Hmm, so you skipped Sierra and went to HS and are now worried about Mojave? If you really want Mojave on your Air, see this thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-10-14-mojave-on-unsupported-macs-thread.2121473/

HS will be supported for at least another three years.

Lou

 

[jasnw]

My concern is my iMac12,2 with an AMD Radeon HD 6770M graphics card. The thread you point to says this combination pretty much can't run Mojave. With the major change in the filesystem design I'm more concerned than usual about what "supported" means for the previous version of macOS. I've already run into two issues with HS apps (Mail and Preview) that are "to be fixed in Mojave" and I'm now wondering if the Mojave fix to these will trickle back down to HS.

 

[flowrider]

^^^^HS should only receive security updates in the future, not feature updates. What kind of issues are you experiencing?

I don't use the Mail app. I use the Preview app in very limited use and find no issues with it. Why do you use Preview?

And for mail, I use Gmail.

Lou

 

[jasnw]

Lots of fiddly little things in Mail aren't working on HS as they did on El Cap (and before). In Preview, it's all the problems that people have complained about for years plus the problem with blurry fonts that came with HS. I use Preview because inertia. I've switched to PDF Pro which is OK, but there's a certain simplicity to Preview that made it nice to use even with all its warts. It's like so many little problems with macOS and its apps - they would be just fine if Apple would spend a little time to clean them up and, maybe, listen to the complaints from their customers and do something about them? Every bug report I've filed has been answered by a Magic 8-Ball sort of response, a "Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later" sort of answer like "we know about this, it will be fixed in a future release, we're deleting your bug because it's a repeat of Bug #1,004,200,224". Of course, I can't SEE that bug report so I don't know if it exists or is really the same bug.

OK, flame/venting over. Lets just say I'm not a happy user of HS and will probably fall back to El Cap. I'll move on to Mojave when I have to (when my wonderful old iMac dies).

 

[Fishrrman]

If the MacBook runs happily on El Cap, keep using it.

If you reach a point where the MacBook begins to stumble, try LOW Sierra (I'm using it now on a 2012 Mini). Runs fine.

Fishrrman's advice:
Use WHAT WORKS for you.
IGNORE the stuff that doesn't work.

 

[bluecoast]

Unless you really really want to use dark mode and the new App Store, I think that HS is going to work great for you on your hardware.

After a week of using Mojave, I think that much of it is transitional and is starting to prepare the Mac for Marzipan and greater integration with the iOS tech stack and UX (meaning that the Mac's UX will start to more closely align with iOS on iPad).

So I wouldn't be worried that you're stuck on HS - you're really not missing too much.