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I don't understand why there are nine pages of grumpy posters complaining. The update is free, unlike back in the days of Snow Leopard (I remember standing in line at a store to buy upgrade discs), and macOS works amazingly well. I feel like some people have unrealistic expectations that aren't ever going to make them happier human beings.
 
I've been running the beta for about a month (installed accidentally, actually).

All issues I've encountered (text-highlighting in Nova is all that comes to mind) are fixed. They're almost doing nothing that could even break the OS, actually. Waiting for the "point one" release is always good advice, but tbh I think it will make no difference this time around.

My Studio Display stopped working after a beta driver update, though, 4-5 days now. I'm now firmly convinced that it's the worst thing Apple has released since the butterfly keyboard, and anyone interested should walk right past it to the Samsung.
My Studio Display is the best monitor I've ever owned. Completely stable. But I haven't loaded beta drivers on it. Isn't the purpose of running betas? To try out new things and find the bugs? If so, not a monitor issue.
 
I don't understand why there are nine pages of grumpy posters complaining. The update is free, unlike back in the days of Snow Leopard (I remember standing in line at a store to buy upgrade discs), and macOS works amazingly well. I feel like some people have unrealistic expectations that aren't ever going to make them happier human beings.
About the only think you can criticize Apple about is in the past after several gens of Macs your Mac won't be able to run the latest MacOS. But that might have changed with the switch to ARM. Since they are already very capable SoC's as exemplified by the 2020 M1, and that we are not seeing as fast a progression with computer requirements since most is done within the SoC even as we go past the M2 to the M3, M4 and beyond. Since Big Sur the same 2020 M1 Mac is running faster and faster as long as what being hardware decoded is utilized. Just as Ventura showed a M1 Mac running very fast, Sonoma continues this trend, so its quite possible unless Apple changes things a lot, you will be able to use your older Mac a lot longer if is a AS Mac. :)
 
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did you even bother to read the section "Compatibility"?
Did you bother to read my question. I asked how many of the features in Sonoma would work on the 2018 Air. I am aware that Sonoma is compatible but it doesn’t mean all the features work for every compatible device. I don’t get these sassy comments.
 
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I really wish Apple would stop with the yearly OSX releases. Its exhausting wondering if your apps are all going to be compatible and in the end I just end up waiting several months until I know everything works and there won't be an app I need that hasn't been updated or crashes regularly.

Just refine what we have and go on a two year cycle of upgrades. Then they will seem more significant.
Can't you just skip every other year and stick with say Monterey plus security patches? Nobody is ultimately forcing you to upgrade each year.
 
5k 27" iMac users have been left high and dry now there is no equivalent product for them to upgrade to. Yes, I know they could buy the Studio Display and add a Mini or Studio but I know several people who have now abandoned the upgrade route because they are confused by Apple's change of direction. They saw the iMac as a one-stop solution that was straightforward to implement. They see the new solution as applying to professionals or at least prosumers. Those 27" users also don't want to downgrade to a smaller 24" option which is also beginning to look neglected. Just to top things off the ideal of a 5K screen to achieve appropriate scaling leaves limited choice - Apple or Samsung with the LG option having received poor reviews. I'm not sure why Apple has done this or if there are any stats to show a decline in purchasing by older, more casual buyers.
This is true. I was going to replace my Late 2012 27" iMac with an M chip version, but Apple went and dumped that 24" piece of colorful plastic crap on customers and said, "Enjoy!" - No thanks. Moving on.
 
So I guess everyone is just going to ignore this addition which was very controversial a year or two ago:



Is Apple going to include something that scans your local files now under the guise of security? And also thinking that this will fly under the radar and no one will notice? I'm an Apple fan, but this is severely questionable and raises a lot of red flags. Using child porn as an reason to remove personal privacy protections is always the excuse. What's next, no more encryption? It goes without saying that protecting children is of the utmost importance. But this is not the answer.

I hope more people notice this item in the list and are troubled by it. This makes me not want to upgrade to any further MacOS versions.
They already scan your local files to find faces, dogs, plants, etc. This isn't anything different.
 
Desktop widgets. Wow. Glad we are finally getting Windows Vista features on the Mac… said no one ever. Remember when Apple actually had an innovative widget solution? It was called dashboard. And it was way better. It’s sad how a feature from OSX Tiger had it figured out in 2005 and Apple engineers of today completely forgot about it. Why does everything have to be cluttered and dumbed down on the Mac these days? I blame mainstream appeal of the Mac. I miss the days that it was a niche product. Now the entire system is designed for people who can barely operate a desktop computer.
 
I don't understand why there are nine pages of grumpy posters complaining. The update is free, unlike back in the days of Snow Leopard (I remember standing in line at a store to buy upgrade discs), and macOS works amazingly well. I feel like some people have unrealistic expectations that aren't ever going to make them happier human beings.
I would gladly pay for something on the level of quality that Snow Leopard was. Ever since the Mac adopted the neon iOS 7 look several years back, it’s been a hardcore dumpster fire every year. Snow Leopard was amazing.
 
I just love people coming to threads like this just to say "last time I upgraded the system was in 2017 and I'm not doing it this year either!" and others still having wet dreams about Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard was great though. It’s unfortunate that Apple hasn’t had a release of that kind since. Well Mountain Lion was great. I think the big problems started right around when Apple started the public beta program. Not that the program itself is the problem, but more the changing attitudes within Apple that led to the creation of such programs. The attitude of rushing things out the door and fixing them later. And also dumbing down the OS to make it appeal to computer illiterates.
 
If you think the update is tiny and incremental then it isn't a big deal if you don't get it. You will still get security updates.

These days? Steve Jobs' Apple stopped supporting all PowerPC Macs pretty quickly. 2011 Lion was the last OS to support PowerPC, two years after 2009's Snow Leopard.
I don't know if someone already corrected this later in the comments but I purchased the last iMac G5 (to bring me through the transition) and OS support was over with 10.6 Snow Leopard in 2009. 10.5 Leopard is the last OS you can use on any PowerPC Mac (not counting the one beta of 10.6 that can start up on PowerPC, of course).

Lion started the every year update schedule and was the last BIG update to Mac OS X. It also changed a ton of how basic things worked which didn't go over well with a lot of pros. Most pros didn't upgrade from 10.6 until 10.9 came out. I was no exception.
 
Im still on Monterey on a m1 max 14".

Stability is my priority, not widgets, game mode, safari web apps much less any of the other laughably trivial stuff in this list

And I thought they would be

Based on iOS17 and multiple other releases, I think I'll wait a week or two, until after the not uncommon "security & bug fixes" that get pumped out shortly after the initial release.
 
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According to Wikipedia, the Apple II was 1298 USD (equivalent to 6576 USD today).

The Mac Portable was 7300 (18075 in 2023 money).
If any Apple II variation had been US$100 more than the Atari 800 in 1979, Atari would have had a difficult time taking a foothold in the personal computer space. I'm not sure who would put US$1298 into Wikipedia, but I never saw any of the Apple II variations for almost half the price. Perhaps, that was the used price years later.
 
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If any Apple II variation had been US$100 more than the Atari 800 in 1979, Atari would have had a difficult time taking a foothold in the personal computer space. I'm not sure who would put US$1298 into Wikipedia, but I never saw any of the Apple II variations for almost half the price. Perhaps, that was the used price years later.
There are plenty of other sources listing that same price. This might clear it up:

"The original retail price of the computer was US$1298 (with 4 KB of RAM) and US$2638 (with the maximum 48 KB of RAM)."
- https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/492/Apple-II/
 
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Weren't widgets a feature of earlier iterations of macOS? The background app, whose name escapes me, withered and eventually disappeared altogether, probably with Yosemite. I recall useful radio, weather, news headlines etc in small windows floating on the desktop. I wonder which additions with Sonoma will be Apple silicon only? I write this on a 2014 iMac running Ventura thanks to OpenCore!
 
The background app, whose name escapes me, withered and eventually disappeared altogether, probably with Yosemite.

The app was called Dashboard and it was magnificent :)- absolutely unobtrusive yet powerful enough to show all the information needed. Now there are so many places where widgets can be found that I hardly use them at all and to be honest I don't know who does.
 
Weren't widgets a feature of earlier iterations of macOS? The background app, whose name escapes me, withered and eventually disappeared altogether, probably with Yosemite. I recall useful radio, weather, news headlines etc in small windows floating on the desktop. I wonder which additions with Sonoma will be Apple silicon only? I write this on a 2014 iMac running Ventura thanks to OpenCore!
 
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Weren't widgets a feature of earlier iterations of macOS? The background app, whose name escapes me, withered and eventually disappeared altogether, probably with Yosemite. I recall useful radio, weather, news headlines etc in small windows floating on the desktop. I wonder which additions with Sonoma will be Apple silicon only? I write this on a 2014 iMac running Ventura thanks to OpenCore!

Widgets require maintenance, both for the client and the server and somebody has to provide the service. Microsoft and Apple clearly didn't want to do that and there was a changing environment towards the web. What I think happened recently in the Apple world is that widgets have been in iOS for a couple of years and they are popular so that it makes sense to maintain support on the client and server. Then the work to merge things between iOS and macOS has resulted in widgets on macOS in the Notification section and now on screen. These things will be supported because they have a wide customer base.
 
I hope this fixes the USB connection for the iPhone 15. Finder says "The contents of the iPhone "...." could not be read. Click Restore to restore this iPhone to factory settings."

When I search on this error, one reason is that you have to update to the latest updates. I hope just updating the Mac will fix this problem.
 
Impractical to utilize anything longer than annual marketing revolving against WWDC hardware/software technology advances. Apple hasn't done it different since 2011 Tiger.
Tiger was 2005. I think they should stop messing with the core OS so often, if they (God forbid) did a Microsoft thing and offered yearly "feature" updates, the OS just might stay more stable and we could reduce the yearly "avoid the new OS until at least the .3 because of bugs" issue that we've had for many years. Or better yet, not have the built in apps tied to the OS, be able to update/install/uninstall them separately.
 
I don't understand why there are nine pages of grumpy posters complaining. The update is free, unlike back in the days of Snow Leopard (I remember standing in line at a store to buy upgrade discs), and macOS works amazingly well. I feel like some people have unrealistic expectations that aren't ever going to make them happier human beings.
With the high cost of Apple hardware, you are most definitely paying for the software, just all upfront.
 
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Safari keeps getting more efficient with displaying multiple web pages with faster graphics, on my M1 based Macs its now doing speedometer 6.1 at 439 which is a lot faster then Crome ever worked. Yes there are still some graphics codec support I like to see it do such as AV1 which is still experimental.
Where are you getting speedometer 6.1? I'm seeing 2.0 everywhere, including e.g. https://browserbench.org/

I do NOT run full-screen mode but on external displays, which may or may not have some impact on results, but M1 Max 64GB nets Safari 298 and Chrome 323 - essentially the same, Jetstream 237 vs chrome 280, ... I don't think Chrome has been 'standing still' on performance. I much prefer Safari, although Chrome is a tier 1 browser for most businesses as well as our apps, while for many Safari still is not. I use Choosy to split between work and personal links and browsing so that e.g. anything I click on link-wise from Outlook email, Teams, Slack, ... all go to Chrome (work browser) vs others to Safari automatically.

Back to the releases - eh. I'm fine with 'internal improvements' types of releases, and wish we'd have another Snow Leopard type release focusing primarily on performance. The IOS-ization of MacOS (control panel layout, various others) leaves me a bit cold, and most of the added features over the past few MacOS releases have been pretty much - who cares for me.

Universal Control is pretty neat when it is working reliably, although nowadays it's a transient thing at best for me, used briefly when I get a new/new-to-me system and am replacing the existing one. I do occasionally use the extend displays to iPad to add to my daily setup of MBP alongside a 28" ultrawide (seems like was added a few OS releases back), but those are the only remotely standout features for me over the past few releases (other than of course, Rosetta2 is pretty amazing from an engineering and usability standpoint - non-trivial and it does generally 'just work').

So yeah, I don't see anything in this release making me 'need' it, while I need to ensure VMWare Fusion and compatibility remains for a few other bits of software before I'd consider it. (not expecting much in the way of internals changes, but - never know).

iPadOS on the other hand - Stage Manager is a mess I wanted to like, but it effectively blocks part of some apps like Teams with it's controls, making it literally impossible to hit the 'send' button when using Teams, for example, full-sized. Yes, I perhaps could work around this via app settings (not positive offhand, Teams has always lacked in obvious settings, e.g. enter -> sends message, and when it initially implemented it's own noise cancellation but gave no way to disable it (and nearly cost us a large contract as it continued to mute my boss and I during a critical presentation when the company was pushing from WebEx -> Teams (never again)), but basically it didn't 'just work and work well,' it got in the way and cost me wasted time.

It does feel Apple 'innovation' may be slowing down at least in some areas - Studio display with wonky camera, let alone the pro with the 'gold' stand purchase. FineWoven phone cases that made it into stores instead of cancelling or fixing them. Vision Pro is cool tech and has possibilities, and am happy to see MagSafe make a return for laptops, but it's feeling overall a bit stagnant on the phone/watch/macOS front to me.
 
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