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High Sierra ready for prime time?
- Thread starter fbx1989
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That is a subjective determination as it depends on what you do on your Mac. The current beta is good for me. A previous release was OK for my laptop but not my desktop.
There are bugs in every release. If none of the bugs affect you then it is ready. If one prevents you from doing your work then it is not.
Apple maintains a list of known bugs and makes a release decision based on what they think is acceptable.
There are bugs in every release. If none of the bugs affect you then it is ready. If one prevents you from doing your work then it is not.
Apple maintains a list of known bugs and makes a release decision based on what they think is acceptable.
I agree this is a personal call. High Sierra is going to be a great OS.
In my personal opinion, it is not ready for usage on production machines. With that said, I'm of the opinion that most new OS' are not ready for production machines until they have been out for at least several months and had several major updates. I feel Sierra was a clear illustration of that with the graphical and battery issues that some Users experienced (which were resolved - but it took a little time to do so.)
As High Sierra brings in the infant filesystem APFS, and its use is now mandatory with flash storage, IMO this is a release to wait longer on than normal. APFS will be awesome, but it will not be perfect overnight, and even beta testing can't account for everything. There's also no DiskWarrior to fall back on. Those upgrading on day one have hopefully made an informed decision, do not depend 100% on that sole system for their livelihood, and hopefully have made bootable images that they can use to restore should something major not go right!
In my personal opinion, it is not ready for usage on production machines. With that said, I'm of the opinion that most new OS' are not ready for production machines until they have been out for at least several months and had several major updates. I feel Sierra was a clear illustration of that with the graphical and battery issues that some Users experienced (which were resolved - but it took a little time to do so.)
As High Sierra brings in the infant filesystem APFS, and its use is now mandatory with flash storage, IMO this is a release to wait longer on than normal. APFS will be awesome, but it will not be perfect overnight, and even beta testing can't account for everything. There's also no DiskWarrior to fall back on. Those upgrading on day one have hopefully made an informed decision, do not depend 100% on that sole system for their livelihood, and hopefully have made bootable images that they can use to restore should something major not go right!
I agree with this. For an end user, with mainstream usage, I think the latest High Sierra beta is ready... but only as ready as previous macOS / OS X releases have been at the GM release. That is to say I wouldn't want to jump in so soon if I were say an IT manager or something, but that's true of any .0 release.
However, there is one additional caveat:
The caveat to my endorsement of the current High Sierra beta is that I'm doing my testing on HFS+. I have not extensively tested APFS. The part that worries me is Apple forcing users to switch to APFS if their Macs have built-in SSDs.
For my usage, it's pretty stable EXCEPT:
- APFS (Encrypted) with FileVault: Nothing but trouble. Disk Utility locks up (even after 2 hours), Software Update sometimes fails requiring a clean install (happened even on the most recent beta), and causes VMWare Fusion disk image to become corrupted frequently. Regular APFS seems okay.
- Photos app: My volume is on an external disk and it just doesn't work quite right. It frequently decides, seemingly out of the blue, to resync my iCloud Photo Library for no good reason, which takes a long time since my library is 1 TB. And whatever background processing it's doing takes forever.
Given that APFS is a mandatory (Apple removed the option to skip the conversion recently) new filesystem I am not in hurry to upgrade to High Sierra in any time soon. While it has clear improvements compared to HFS+ I had too many problems with an external SSD to trust it at this point.
That said High Sierra has potential assuming Apple fixes APFS and other bugs.
I usually wait 3 or 4 updates before I consider installing new OS on my main Mac. This time its likely I will wait longer and give APFS time to mature.
That said High Sierra has potential assuming Apple fixes APFS and other bugs.
I usually wait 3 or 4 updates before I consider installing new OS on my main Mac. This time its likely I will wait longer and give APFS time to mature.
I will update my main iMac (and my MacBook) very early this time around because my iOS 11 iPhone camera's pictures and movies are completely unreadable on Sierra.
Good point. A strong clue that iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra will ship simultaneously (unless Sierra gains HEIF and HEVC support as well).
It's too bad APFS Encrypted volume is so buggy. I think many folks will report serious problem.
When I got my new MBP (2016) I did not use encryption on the SSD. If I decide to update I hope I don't see APFS issues.
I usually don't encrypt, but in the case of High Sierra I am definitely not even considering encryption, given the various negative reports.
I guess the good news is non-encrypted APFS volumes have reportedly generally been OK, and also, Apple at least does have the experience of having millions of iOS devices on APFS.
I'd say it's ready, although I had issues with the install (I only moved from Sierra to HS a few days ago, so skipped most of the betas). I'd recommend turning off Filevault (if you use it) and enabling it again after (if you want to use it - I do recommend it).
Having said that, there's an option in iOS11 under Settings/Photos to transfer photos with automatic conversion so there should be no problem in Sierra getting Photos from your iPhone, plus there really isn't much difference (that I've noticed) between Sierra and High Sierra anyway. Safari has some nice new features (such as blocking autoplay videos) but you can get Safari 11 as a beta for Sierra anyway, so that didn't change for me when I upgraded the O/S.
Due to the issue I had (probably just being impatient and rebooting at a bad time) during the upgrade while I had Filevault on I got to try out a full restore from Time Machine for the first time ever. Worked perfectly. Phew.
Having said that, there's an option in iOS11 under Settings/Photos to transfer photos with automatic conversion so there should be no problem in Sierra getting Photos from your iPhone, plus there really isn't much difference (that I've noticed) between Sierra and High Sierra anyway. Safari has some nice new features (such as blocking autoplay videos) but you can get Safari 11 as a beta for Sierra anyway, so that didn't change for me when I upgraded the O/S.
Due to the issue I had (probably just being impatient and rebooting at a bad time) during the upgrade while I had Filevault on I got to try out a full restore from Time Machine for the first time ever. Worked perfectly. Phew.
That totally defeats the point of the new file formats. Also, it degrades quality.
I don't think folder/file level encryption is a user facing feature. At least, I couldn't figure out a way to encrypt a file or folder.
Where? This is what I see:
In any case, the changes to file formats in iOS 11 pretty much guarantee that High Sierra will be out around the same time, as in within two weeks from today. I summarized that in this thread:Apple said:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-be-released-when-ios-11-is-released.2065305/
I had not noticed the release date before, but the way things are moving that seem's a little unrealistic.
![High Sierra Apple Notes.jpg]( "High Sierra Apple Notes.jpg")
At the bottom of this page:
https://www.apple.com/ca/macos/high-sierra-preview/
At the bottom of this page:
https://www.apple.com/ca/macos/high-sierra-preview/
That's for the eGPU.
Virtual reality for Mac.
It’s a whole new world.
macOS High Sierra lets developers create interactive virtual reality experiences on Mac for the first time, using the new iMac with Retina 5K display, the new iMac Pro coming in late 2017, or any supported Mac paired with an external GPU.3
aaaahhhhh......I thought that was just a general summation and did not pay attention to the point numbers....Thanks
Not that I believed that date.
Not that I believed that date.
Thank you for posting that.
My apologies for not including it.
Hard to believe it'd be spring '18 at the rate the betas are being released....
So, back to the original question…..is this ready for prime time.
For me, that would be a very solid YES.
But……..
As so many people have already indicated this seem’s to be very subjective. I can only report what I have experienced so far and that everything for me has been totally solid. I have not had any issues of any type and even though many people reported issues with encrypted volumes using APFS, I have not seen any problem in that regard either.
The way things are looking for me right now I will be upgrading my existing Mavericks installation without any hesitation.
From a personal standpoint I have been quite thrilled with this release. I tried both Yosemite and El Cap on my MBP and they were horrendous (for me). I went back to my Mavs installation and never even paid any attention to Sierra. However, I have been concerned about “being left behind” from a security point of view and now it seems that I can finally catch up.