Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Is High Sierra a safe upgrade?
- Thread starter viperGTS
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
"I need a newer OS for the newest versions of Xcode."
If you "need it"... well, that doesn't leave much of a choice, I'd say...
If you "need it"... well, that doesn't leave much of a choice, I'd say...
Safe?
Safe is subjective. I've not lost any data, I've had no freezes or crashes, I (in my anecdotal case) seem to feel a slight overhead increase with SOME disk access operations. I attribute this to APFS's access speed and/or code added to mitigate security vulnerabilities that have been discovered on ALL intel machines.
If APFS bothers you, update and operate with HFS+ filesystem until YOU feel safe...
Honestly, just install it on a different drive. Fly it while and form your own opinion. You should always keep a working backup of your current system anyway, so what have you got to lose?
Safe is subjective. I've not lost any data, I've had no freezes or crashes, I (in my anecdotal case) seem to feel a slight overhead increase with SOME disk access operations. I attribute this to APFS's access speed and/or code added to mitigate security vulnerabilities that have been discovered on ALL intel machines.
If APFS bothers you, update and operate with HFS+ filesystem until YOU feel safe...
Honestly, just install it on a different drive. Fly it while and form your own opinion. You should always keep a working backup of your current system anyway, so what have you got to lose?
Thanks for the fundamentally useless response.
My apologies. I think using "safe" was a bad choice here; I understand there are always risks when updating an OS. I was more concerned about performance drops or other serious issues.
I wish I had a different drive to install it on, but i don't. I already have a Windows partition that is taking up the rest of my free space.
Well, I'm not sure exactly what performance is particular to your needs, but I doubt you're concerned with how quickly an app loads/exits. I seriously doubt you would suffer any major issues but... Since a new point release is imminent and a whole new version around the corner, I'd just wait a few days for at least the point release.
Last edited:
From reading what people have said on this site, you're going to have better success with High Sierra if 1) you have a newer Mac and 2) if you don't have a lot of 3rd-party software.
I see more people have issues with computers around the 2012 timeframe and earlier, mainly in regards to the GPU. If you have 3rd-party software from smaller developers, particularly those that no longer update their software, that can be an issue or if you don't take the time to find out if updates are required for High Sierra.
I recently upgraded my 2014 Mini without major issues mainly because I too need to run the latest Xcode version. I won't be upgrading my other (mainly older) Macs. I had a couple of more unusual apps on the 2014 Mini and in one case it's a 32-bit app and there's a warning about that (the developer says a future version will be ready when the macOS which only supports 64-bit apps is available). For the other app, I don't know if an older version would have worked but the latest version on the Mini required an email to the developer's tech support and additional troubleshooting on my part since the developer had made major infrastructure changes. So those are the types of things that happen with an OS upgrade. Also, I notice that 9.3 (9.4 just recently came out, after I had downloaded 9.3) is a 5.2GB download, the previous version I downloaded, 8.3.2, was 4.5GB.
Performance of Xcode on High Sierra on the 2014 Mini (dual-core) vs. my other computers (quad core about the same CPU frequency) is OK but I've been doing mainly maintenance-type stuff thus far.
I see more people have issues with computers around the 2012 timeframe and earlier, mainly in regards to the GPU. If you have 3rd-party software from smaller developers, particularly those that no longer update their software, that can be an issue or if you don't take the time to find out if updates are required for High Sierra.
I recently upgraded my 2014 Mini without major issues mainly because I too need to run the latest Xcode version. I won't be upgrading my other (mainly older) Macs. I had a couple of more unusual apps on the 2014 Mini and in one case it's a 32-bit app and there's a warning about that (the developer says a future version will be ready when the macOS which only supports 64-bit apps is available). For the other app, I don't know if an older version would have worked but the latest version on the Mini required an email to the developer's tech support and additional troubleshooting on my part since the developer had made major infrastructure changes. So those are the types of things that happen with an OS upgrade. Also, I notice that 9.3 (9.4 just recently came out, after I had downloaded 9.3) is a 5.2GB download, the previous version I downloaded, 8.3.2, was 4.5GB.
Performance of Xcode on High Sierra on the 2014 Mini (dual-core) vs. my other computers (quad core about the same CPU frequency) is OK but I've been doing mainly maintenance-type stuff thus far.
Right, yeah I'll wait for the next point release to come out. Looks like it'll be out soon.
Thanks a bunch!
Thank you for mentioning all of this. A majority of my software is from the Mac App Store, so I don't think I'll run into too many app issues. I'm mainly concerned about performance.