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macOS Sonoma 14.4: Reasons Not to Update

I also experience a lot of kernel panicks and restarts when I put the Mac Mini to sleep. External monitor with HDMI and one external SSD (but it happens even if the SSD is not connected). I see online that restarts during sleep has happened on some ealier versions as well, but 14.4 really seems to make the issue much worse. I have had to disable sleep, as described here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1b9yvxn
 
6163621 said:
Sorry but I disagree. Firstly one argument for the Apple tax and their relatively limited range of products/control of the OS is exactly that they CAN make a better fist of it than a typical Windows machine, that could be high quality or dog excreta in terms of compatability.

Second, only a few thousand beta testers? From casually looking even at Macrumours it seems to be a metric F tonne of people bragging about using a beta milliseconds after it comes out [well you get the picture...] Maybe not all betas are equal or distributed to the "masses", and I guess out of that F tonne of hobbyist testers, most just use it for the latest emoji pack and bragging rights that they are on build 5433 rather than current stock. The why to such is best left to psychologists to wonder about.

But release after release with Apple's legendary software QA and attention to detail, it seems that there are many issues that are hardly obscure, e.g. Calendar closes with an error if you enter a date of 13 March 1975 and write in the subject line of the entry "Perkele".

If only a fraction of Cook's nose for nickel and diming could be used on software QA, maybe even focussing on the important real core stuff and reliability then "woohoo another 150 emojis and a talking head animation program" we might actually get some half-decent release.

I've been only using Macs personally for a shade under 30 years. Before that I used them at work, swore AT them and not BY them, as those lovely bombs used to love coming just before production deadline. Many commentators have noted that there was a golden time for stability and some feature development. Now it is a tacky lottery. There are no doubt some features I personally don't care for, or use, that I accept might be useful for some. A lot of "new stuff" seems to be polishing around the t--d though.

Have a sprint for stability and get a bedrock back again. And fix the bloody Finder for once and for all. It's a joke of a GUI if you do more than click a file on your local drive every so often. [slight hyperbole, but Finder users will know it is not rock solid by any means, especially with those new-fangled network accesses].
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Some good points. And they all reinforce my own point. Thanks!
 
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neuropsychguy said:
Caldigit TS3 Plus. It's been quite solid. It's currently $200 on Amazon -- pricey for a Thunderbolt 3 dock but I got it with a short-lived deal for $165 a few months back. That's still expensive for an older product but it works well. I'm driving a 4k monitor at 60 Hz and a 2K monitor at 165 Hz with my M1 Pro through it, which should cover me for at least a few more years.
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I have been looking at the uGreen 208: https://a.co/d/2T9bHyX
Three downstream TB ports and three usb ports in the front. Plus Ethernet. Has anyone tried this?
 
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The question is, will all of these things be remedied in 14.4.1, or will this be a typical Apple move for macOS 16?
 
My concern is that Apple has lost the understanding needed to competently manage MacOS. Maybe too many senior devs left (or were forced out). Maybe the code base has passed a complexity point such that no one really understands it. Anyway... daughter just opted for a new Windows laptop for her heavy STEM uni work eventhough I promoted the 14 inch MBP pretty hard. That is probably something Tim needs to really worry about. Been a Mac user for many decades now. Cannot, despite trying, get the next generation to continue. (Will note that she got an AMAZING laptop for the $1,600 we spent.) That's Apple real worry as its comeback got cemented back in the day by college students being heavy initial adopters.
 
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MacGizmo said:
The audio industry has always been obscenely slow to upgrade their software and hardware to accommodate new computer tech and OS upgrades. Those in the industry just know to never update anything on the first version – in fact, most of them wait until a full version passes before updating. And even then, there can and almost always is a remaining compatibility issue or trade-off involved.
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I run a Mojave vm still in order to use library and editor software for my korg microsampler

Granted it’s pretty old, but yeah,
RedWeasel said:
That's why I still run Monterey.

View attachment 2360635
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I’m sure you are aware that only the most recent version of macos gets all security updates in full in a timely manner
 
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Since 14.4 new messages received in iMessage are not arriving. Until I send a new message from MacOs the app doesn't receive any new messages. Anyone else have this issue?
 
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davedude said:
macOS was updated every other year under Jobs. He was gone by the time they switched to a yearly cycle. Apple’s quality control was much better in the late 2000’s.
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macOS version history - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Looks like a little of both, actually. 10.0 through 10.3 were released yearly from 2001-03 and in the case of 10.0 Cheetah and 10.1 Puma, just six months apart in the same year. The two-year release cycle then starts in 2005 with 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard in '07, and 10.6 Snow Leopard in '09.

Then in 2011 the annual update cycle we know today kicks off with 10.7 Lion. But I agree, much better stability when they were releasing major versions every other year.
 
6163621 said:
It feels that only two departments now get the full support.

1. Nickel and diming department, reporting to T Cook.
2 Boasting about support to "good causes" and the like, reporting to T Cook.
3. Emojis and tacky animation sh-t - reporting to some veep no doubt. Craig possibly.

Engineering, QA, etc... pah, cost centres. We're a mega trillion dollar company with a captive/sheepy audience on the main. They'll be back with their money regardless because "Wow MacOS Wholesale District is coming, with 500 emojis including with our demands for total equality everywhere transsexual Asian-looking Finnish horses."




* For the avoidance of doubt, and it is sad you have to point this out to the "can't read" generation, but this point is satire and does not seek to dismiss the trans lobby, but merely points out some things go in extremis.
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Haha! No I realize you meant no malice and neither do I. There's nothing wrong with supporting causes they care about at the corporate level if they want to do that. But I agree, it shouldn't take priority over serving your customers.
 
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Another 14.4 little bug? It doesn't happen in macOS Ventura and I also don't remember it from previous versions of Sonoma. In Numbers and Pages when saving as PDF from the Print dialog box, if the file has its extension visible, the resulting PDF contains both the numbers or pages extension along the pdf extension. It is necessary to manually delete the extension in the dialog box prior to saving the file. If the PDF is generated from the Export menu this problem doesn't appear.
 
Stability should be job 1. Compatibility handling (without crashing), Job 2. never was, never will be unfortunately. Their priorities are scattered way down the list from there.
 
I just post to urge you people affected (I'm one of them, the iLok audio plugins issue) to use the Apple Feedback website to report the bugs affecting you. The more noise we make, the sooner they might fix macOS. Here we can vent frustrations, but we gotta knock on Apple's door for them to listen.
 
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This is why it is _critical_ that Apple separate security patches from other updates.

We are compelled to update to the latest version because of reportedly “in the wild” security risks that it patches, but updating comes with other risks, as illustrated in this article.

When security patches are only available as part of larger system updates that include non-security changes, as is Apple’s current practice, it’s “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” for us users.

Apple sticking with this approach is actively harmful to users.
 
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I just downgraded this week to Ventura. The mouse pointer bug that has been there since release has not been fixed, so I gave up waiting. It's not impacting everyone, but there are a lot that are.
 
nathan_reilly said:
the issue I take (by the way I'm not the person reinstalling printers, that's another commenter) is that you hop on a post about "reasons not to update" and you're here running defense, saying "how long did that take you" is for sure a peanut gallery comment when the whole purpose of this thread is listing the "reasons not to update". Why are you running defense?
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Peanut gallery? That's more like the constant complaining we hear every time Apple updates any of their OSes. Yet if you go out into to the world where the non-developer crowd is, it becomes to difficult to verify these kinds of complaints. It gets tiresome.

Having to reinstall a printer, which is a couple of clicks and maybe two minutes at best, is not an issue and shouldn't be made into one.

Does someone need approval to express an opinion or to be certified as not being a member of the "peanut gallery? Come on. There are a lot of people on this website who are not developers or coders, etc. Are they not entitled to express their opinion?
 
6163621 said:
Might have been five minutes for you [or me]. It could be hours for my father before he phones me and says the Internet is broken... It might cost 50-100 dollars/euros for someone without a support network and no real clue about computers [the market Apple used to brag about targetting as "It just works"] to get a computer store to [try to] fix it and not upsell them another computer etc - there are rogues out there. "Oh that machine is too old/not supported longer/that's why the printer stopped working -- here's a nice new supported shiny shiny only 1500 euros with Apple tax..."
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I will assume you are in the EU.

You could set up a screen share with Dad and fix it for him. Why don't you try that with your father? I have been doing with my elderly mother for quite some time. Through my brother and me she las learned to come to us before any third party even gets near her.
 
Realityck said:
Last minute security patching applied to a public release can cause other issues it not adequately vetted with external testers. Take this example

This was working with earlier 14.4 betas but when it went public it wasn't working Oracle said. So this example should not be difficult to remediate, as its reproducible.
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I appreciate the explanation.
 
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