macOS 14 Sonoma on Unsupported Macs Thread

[Riot Nrrrd]

@Kevo Good advice. I’ve tended to only make USB stick OCLP installers when going to a new major OS release, and do the Software Update OTAs for the point upgrades. I’ll try the root patches back-out trick before going to Sonoma 14.7.6.

 

[JedNZ]

A couple of you - @JedNZ and @RumorChaser - have said this past week that you backed out the root patches before going OTA to 14.7.6. What is the reasoning, is this common knowledge? I’ve never heard about it before today.

I update via a USB stick (not OTA). But I’ve read somewhere from others who recommend reverting Root Patches because it generally increases success. Previously I had an OTA update completely stuff my system so I’ve gone the longer but safer route ever since. YMMV of course.

 

[flipporabasta]

Hi all. Hoping to get some more insight of this issue. I am trying to install Sonoma on my iMac 27" mid 2011 with oclp. Have installed sequioa on 2 MP 5.1's and a macbook air 2013 without any issues. the imac just loop (lost count on how many times) and then the progress stops. the only thing i can think of that might be of an issue is that i upgraded the GPU to a GTX 780M a few years back when still running high sierra on it.

 

[Bigwaff]

OCLP assuming your iMac have original GPU. Because you replace GPU, you may have to build OC and specify your GPU type. In OCLP app, select your target model, go to "Advanced" tab, under "Graphics", select your GPU family from "Graphics Override" drop-down.

 

[flipporabasta]

OCLP assuming your iMac have original GPU. Because you replace GPU, you may have to build OC and specify your GPU type. In OCLP app, select your target model, go to "Advanced" tab, under "Graphics", select your GPU family from "Graphics Override" drop-down.

thanks. gonna try that. Have seen the override dropdown but was unsure what it did 😬

 

[TheIntruder]

Quick question -- are there any known issues with the Music app related to OCLP, or is it just a turd in general?

Finally got around to adding my music library to Music, and choosing the Music Videos pane always results in an insta-crash. Ok, wipe it clean, and start over, after removing a few stray videos in collection. Still crashes, even with no videos added from the library, only music files.

For all the guff iTunes received (much of it deserved), it rarely, if ever, crashed on me.

 

[JedNZ]

I have similar issues with Music crashes. I have to add songs from my iPhone to get around adding new songs. It may have something to do with AVX/AVX2 (Music plugins?) - check this thread out.

 

[TheIntruder]

I have similar issues with Music crashes. I have to add songs from my iPhone to get around adding new songs. It may have something to do with AVX/AVX2 (Music plugins?) - check this thread out.

Sounds logical. The i7-3667U I have does support AVX, but not AVX2, and there are plenty of other ways for it to break.

I only watch music videos on YT anyway, so easily avoided.

 

[Minghold]

I have similar issues with Music crashes....

Wean yourself off the Safari/Mail/Music/Photos ecosystem, replacing all of those with third-party alternatives. (I advise this for ALL operating system versions from corporate OEMs.)

 

[JedNZ]

Wean yourself off the Safari/Mail/Music/Photos ecosystem, replacing all of those with third-party alternatives. (I advise this for ALL operating system versions from corporate OEMs.)

It’s hasn’t got to the stage where’s it’s untenable - I have workarounds and for Music (which I seldom use anyway on my cMP), and Photos, Safari and Mail all work fine for now so I don’t need to make any decisions just yet. I’m certainly eyeing up Mac Mini M4 options but the added cost of having to buy additional external USB 3/4 or TB 4/5 enclosures for all the drives I have in my cMP is holding me back.

 

[aebaileyNC4life]

Why should we abandon safari, mail and photos system altogether? Did I miss something?
I’m not arguing at all, I just never heard advise to go the “Abandon Ship “ caution before.
Thanks

 

[Riot Nrrrd]

I tried to upgrade my nice, stable Sonoma installation on my 2012 Mac mini to Sequoia and it failed miserably. Kept trying to boot back into the Recovery Mode on the USB Sequoia installer, and finally after choosing the on-disk install step manually via Option-boot, it locked up completely. Caveat emptor …

 

[Minghold]

Why should we abandon safari, mail and photos system altogether? Did I miss something?

Because it's now Apple's deliberate marketing strategy to NOT update them. I.e.,"Oh, your OS is unsupported now; buy another computer to keep up!". For browsers, mail, and other trivial bits of text cruft that require no horsepower at all. What's worse, Apple has browbeat most thid-parties into tracking its hurry-up schedule of OS releases.

Meanwhile, I can slap a Nano11 LTSC (or literally any Linux distro) VM onto a 2011 High Sierra machine and immediately be running the very latest browsers and office/productivity suites, and won't have to worry about either Apple or Microsoft blowing anything up with an auto-update sneaking through against my explicit wishes.

 

[Kevo]

A Mac Mini is only $500. I've seen them for less on sale. That's a pretty low barrier to entry I think. If you have to get a new one every 5 years that's only $100 per year. That's way less than a lot of people spend on coffee.

 

[JedNZ]

A Mac Mini is only $500. I've seen them for less on sale. That's a pretty low barrier to entry I think. If you have to get a new one every 5 years that's only $100 per year. That's way less than a lot of people spend on coffee.

While this may be factually correct, it's not the full picture; it doesn't include the full cost a cMP 3,1 to 5,1 user will likely face when upgrading to any of Apple's more modern Macs: e.g. your Boot and User drives will most likely be larger than the paltry entry level 256GB Apple ships with the model you quote, and if you want to bring some/all of your other cMP internal drives there's the cost of buying USB or Thunderbolt enclosures if you don't already have them. That's what is holding me back - I'm in New Zealand so there's the "remote tax" on everything - e.g. base model MM M4 is USD$499 which with the exchange rate is ~NZD$830, but you actually pay NZD$1099, so an extra USD$150 over US prices. And I don't know that most cMP would be happy just upgrading to the bare bones MM M4 - they'd either go for the M4 Pro or Mac Studio so they'd be spending a shed load more than $500.

Luckily (thanks to @Dayo with MyBootMgr, and the OCLP team), I have been able to hang on to my old cMPs making the cost of ownership significantly lower over the 8 years I've owned these 16 year old machines. Part sentimental, part practical, I want to maximise my ROI even further. They also provide cheap heating for my office since it's winter over here at the moment, so add the cost of a heater when I eventually upgrade 😆

In other news, and back on topic, I've resorted to using this Terminal Command launchctl bootout system /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.mediaanalysisd.plist to prevent the regular crashes my cMPs suffer overnight when they're unattended. Unfortunately the setting in OCLP isn't available (grey out). Anyone know how I can add it to my config.plist file in OCLP instead (the syntax and location also)?

 

[Kevo]

While this may be factually correct, it's not the full picture; it doesn't include the full cost a cMP 3,1 to 5,1 user will likely face when upgrading to any of Apple's more modern Macs: e.g. your Boot and User drives will most likely be larger than the paltry entry level 256GB Apple ships with the model you quote, and if you want to bring some/all of your other cMP internal drives there's the cost of buying USB or Thunderbolt enclosures if you don't already have them.

All true, but there are always tradeoffs. I too am cheap and don't want to spend unnecessarily. I still run my 2012 MBP as my daily driver.

I was mainly responding to Minghold's comment about Apple having a deliberate marketing strategy to force upgrades. There is probably some truth to that, but it's an overly simplistic view and the fact that my original Performa from Walmart in the mid 90s on closeout cost more than an M4 Mac Mini at $500, and way more inflation adjusted, says to me that the situation has certainly improved quite a bit even if they are hoping people will upgrade hardware.

 

[Minghold]

A Mac Mini is only $500. I've seen them for less on sale. That's a pretty low barrier to entry I think. If you have to get a new one every 5 years that's only $100 per year. That's way less than a lot of people spend on coffee.

You're not factoring the cost of subscription-model software, which is about all the never OSes will run. --For $25ish, you could go to any reecycler in the country and pick up an i-series chip mini, and slap Mojave on it, install Parallels 18, and then Nano11 LTSC and Linux distros on an external SSD (i.e., not even bothering to take the thing apart to replace the rotatioal), and basically have a "forever" computer.fast enough for anything not involving rendering or LLM silliness. Bonus: the older mini will have a real HDMI port and Apple display port (for Thunderbold monitors).

(I see that, after rightly earning considerable rancor from people who knew exactly what planned-obsolescence shenanigans they were up to, Apple relented and again made the mini's drive replaceable in 2024 following six years of soldering them in.)

 

[Kevo]

You're not factoring the cost of subscription-model software, which is about all the never OSes will run.

Why would I? I don't buy subscription software and I don't advocate for it. Also, the built in apps don't require subscriptions.

Also, why would I buy a old mini just to run parallels for linux? Why wouldn't I just install linux directly?

I like linux and use it a lot for server things. It's definitely worth consideration for a lot of people. If you like Apple's Mail, Photos, and Music apps and the way it works with iPhone and iPad then you'll be hard pressed to get something equivalent going in Linux. What we need is a good linux phone and tablet with good syncing capabilities built in. That would make Apple sweat.

Sorry about getting off topic into linux land.

 

[Minghold]

Also, why would I buy a old mini just to run parallels for linux? Why wouldn't I just install linux directly?

Because it's a PITA, eats up drive space for a fixed* partition (if you're keeping a MacOS as well, especially if you have a soft spot for fast 32-bit material), and various proprietary drivers will be missing from 97% of them. But with Parallels VMs, all the driver calls are pass-through, and you can set the distro to share common-space (Trash, Downloads, Desktop, etc). The average distro with a few apps is generally 25gb or less, so you can play with a few dozen of the things on a 1TB.

(*Which you don't want on an APFS-formatted Mac boot SSD.)

 

[m4v3r1ck]

Updated Sonoma to 14.7.6 patched with OCLP 2.4.0.

This afternoon I had serious issues with the WindowServer crashing / quitting unexpectedly in the pre root patching phase after login into the updated Sonoma to 14.7.6.

Solved it by booting Sonoma - updated to 14.7.6 / not yet root patched - in Safe Mode. Applied the root patches OCLP 2.4.0 in Safe Mode and all rendered well in the end.

The GUI update sequence in Sonoma is very of par - read PITA - with the previous releases of macOS (12/13).

Update Now button unresponsive (lag between clicking and returned output)

First I was presented the update to macOS Sequoia 15.5. The More Info... link does not turn the cursor into a hand gesture. Also very unresponsive lag between the click and the returned output.

Update Now

After the install It rendered the update section again before rebooting. After the reboot Sonoma was NOT updated to 14.7.6.

Reboot and now got the Restart Now button - update was obvious saved

Rendering the Sequoia 15.5 upgrade yet again.

Clicked the More Info again

Unresponsive System Settings during the More Info

Restart

Restart Now

Glad this quest is over and done with. Worst macOS update/grade user experience ever on a Mac Pro 3.1/5.1 (2008-2012).

Bad things happens....

Work in progress is now preparing an USB Installer for a macOS Sequoia 15.5 clean install on a separate fresh SSD.

 

[wnlewis]

I have just installed Sonoma on an early 2011 17" unibody MacBook Pro, 2.2GHz, with a working AMD Radeon 6750M dGPU, 16 Gb of Ram, a 2 Tb SSD. The built in display is the only one being used (no other display connected). I am using a small app called gSwitch to select between the iGPU and the dGPU, or to allow dynamic switching.

On a late 2011 17" unibody MacBook Pro, with the 2.5 GHz processor and an AMD Radeon 6770M dGPU, performance on Sonoma was pretty good, until the Radeon processor failed.

This computer does not seem to be quite as fast and won't load the standard Sonoma wallpaper – I have that toggled off. The "show on all spaces" is toggled on and set for the basic Sonoma image.

When I first started up after installing Sonoma, the Sonoma "vineyard" image showed, immediately turned upside down, and then vanished, leaving just the grey screen with standard desktop and dock icons showing on it.

This will do, but if someone has a suggestion for how to make performance a bit better (this may be the best things can be on this machine) I would be interested. Ventura seemed to work pretty well, but I want to stay with Sonoma if I can.

 

[Minghold]

It’s hasn’t got to the stage where’s it’s untenable - I have workarounds and for Music (which I seldom use anyway on my cMP), and Photos, Safari and Mail all work fine for now so I don’t need to make any decisions just yet. I’m certainly eyeing up Mac Mini M4 options but the added cost of having to buy additional external USB 3/4 or TB 4/5 enclosures for all the drives I have in my cMP is holding me back.

When you use the OEM widgets, you are letting a four-trillion market-cap leviathan with intel-entity connections paw through your stuff.

 

[Meddvedd]

Hi Guys!
I've decided to upgrade my MacBook Pro 11,3 A1398 Mid2014 i7 16Gb RAM, 1TB Original SSD
What would be better for me - Sonoma or Sequoia?
What is more stable and faster?
Sorry if it's off-topic

 

[dogen]

Hi Guys!
I've decided to upgrade my MacBook Pro 11,3 A1398 Mid2014 i7 16Gb RAM, 1TB Original SSD
What would be better for me - Sonoma or Sequoia?
What is more stable and faster?
Sorry if it's off-topic

My impression: Sonoma, more stable; Sequoia, more up to date. With an MBP quad core you're likely okay with Sequoia; dual core MBAs like mine slow down noticeably.

 

[Meddvedd]

When I updated from El Capitan to Big Sur my MBP got a little slower
Is Sonoma slower than the Big Sur?