Looking for advice on OS updates

[Gloomy]

Hello all,

I currently have all my devices running a bit behind, mostly due to all the hoopla over Liquid Glass and performance issues regarding iOS/iPadOS and macOS 26 that popped up last year. Visual familiarity and performance is important to me with tech, and so I have held off this long. But to give an idea of where I am at; my iMac M4 is running Sequoia 15.7.7, my iPad mini 6 and iPhone 13 Pro are running iOS 18.7.8 and my Apple Watch Series 10 is on WatchOS 11.6.2.

My reason for posting is to ask folks with similar hardware running OS 26 - is it now in a place where it is stable and fast enough compared to the versions I am currently running (Sequoia and iOS 18 in particular?) All of my devices function extremely well as is and my fear is that pushing the update to them all at once is going to cause me no end of grief.

I welcome any insights as to how it runs for you and whether I should just bite the bullet or hold off until macOS 27 is out of beta.
Many Thanks!

 

[Fishrrman]

After experimenting with Tahoe on an external SSD
and
Also experimenting with the first release of Golden Gate yesterday...

... I think I'm going to keep Sequoia as "my main boot OS" for the foreseeable future.
No desire to "go further".
I don't care a whit about OS's that are "no longer supported" or "out-of-date" ...

 

[Mousse]

All of my devices function extremely well as is and my fear is that pushing the update to them all at once is going to cause me no end of grief.

I subscribe to the philosophy of only upgrading the OS if I have to. I value stability over newfangled features. If a program I want to runs requires a newer OS, then I upgrade. I have heard too many horror stories of bleeding edge users whose system becomes unusable after an upgrade.
"Ads every five minutes. The old app never had ads."
"The latest OS broke a program I depend upon."
"The new system removed a feature I need."

If you depend upon you system for work, have test machine to see who upgrading might affect you work flow. Unspoken rule of tech, "Never trust a first [version 1.0] release."

 

[Alameda]

I have Watch, iPad, and MacBook Pro as well. They’re all on the latest software and I have no problems.

Whatever OS you’re using, when it came out, the same people were running around saying it was unstable, it would eat your children, blow up, blah blah blah.

I saw a thread started by a guy who said Tahoe is absolutely unusable because… because one of the “please wait while we update” dialog boxes got to 100% but it still wasn’t done and he had to wait longer.

People want attention so they say outrageous stuff. The rest of us just install the latest patches to stay secure and everything just works.

And I work all day long on my Mac, with a big monitor and tons of software, etc. I haven’t really noticed how Liquid Glass looks any different and it certainly works no differently.