Last Week on My Mac: Upgrade games

Autumn is upon us. Yesterday we had the first frost of the season, amid the leaves now shedding from our trees. In Scotland, the first falls of snow have painted the mountains in their winter colours. And those who haven’t yet upgraded to Apple’s latest version of macOS are already being pestered if not tricked into installing Sequoia, as we suffer Apple’s annual upgrade game-playing.

For many, upgrading to macOS 15.0 isn’t an option at present. Reasons fall into two categories: third-party support, and the limitations in this initial release.

Much as we might desire, several major vendors of Mac products haven’t yet been able to test against recent versions of macOS 15.0 and confirm their products are fully compatible. Latest information from Adobe, for example, states that “We’re currently in the process of testing and optimizing our latest apps to run on macOS 15 Sequoia. We recommend that you check the system requirements of your Adobe apps for the latest information on compatibility with operating systems and hardware.”

Although Microsoft’s most widely used products such as Office are reported to be fully compatible, that’s not the case with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Mac, for which Microsoft warns: “We’re recommending that customers who have Network Protection enabled in their organization to either: delay updating to macOS Sequoia (version 15.0); or use the instructions to disable Network Extension as described in Troubleshoot NetExt issues in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Mac. This causes Network Protection, Web Content Filtering, and IP address/URL Indicators to be nonfunctional.” There are similar warnings from VPN providers and vendors of security software.

That brings me to draw attention to one of the known limitations in Sequoia 15.0. There have been widespread reports of problems with networking, many attributable to the software firewall. Products across a wide range of vendors are affected, and many simply can’t function properly in Sequoia.

Upgrade games are dangerous too. Many of us use our Macs to work, not just for leisure. Upgrading to face problems that prevent productive work has serious consequences. It’s not as if reversing a macOS upgrade is a trivial and brief process. For good security reasons, modern macOS makes it hard and time-consuming, and for most it involves preparing a bootable installer of a previous known good version, and replacing Sequoia with that. In some cases that may require migration of all user data from a backup, adding further risk to the process. In many cases, downgrading will take several hours before the user can resume their work.

I faced my own problem, which has had significant impact on writing articles for this blog. This was an inconvenient time for me, as last week I’ve been writing a tutorial and my regular monthly section for MacFormat and MacLife magazines, while trying to maintain my average of two full articles every day for this blog. Troubles never occur when you’ve got the time to deal with them.

This blog is hosted in WordPress at WordPress.com, but written and maintained using Red Sweater’s outstanding MarsEdit. When I upgraded my iMac Pro to Sequoia on 16 September, MarsEdit started unexpectedly quitting in the midst of my editing articles. I sent Red Sweater an automated bug report, although at that stage I didn’t have a clue what was the cause of the problem. Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater got back to me within a few hours to follow up, and within a further hour had reproduced and identified the bug. It only affected Intel Macs, is new to Sequoia, and he had already reported it to Apple, although it clearly hadn’t been fixed in the 15.0 release.

I was stuck in Sequoia – my two articles required me to be running it, and no substitute was possible – but editing blog articles was like playing Russian roulette. For a few days, I did most of my editing in BBEdit, pasting completed articles into MarsEdit once they were ready to upload. Then Daniel Jalkut came up trumps with an update to MarsEdit that worked around the bug in Sequoia. Just as I had dispatched my two articles for publication, and was about to write those for this weekend, everything returned to normal. It was a reminder of how troublesome a first release can be, and how much we rely on the skill and knowledge of third-party developers like Daniel from Red Sweater.

I’m sure that Apple’s engineers understand full well the dangers of precipitate upgrading, and many will be just as concerned at the marketing thrust to cajole and trick users into upgrading without making an informed decision that it’s a wise move. So when macOS notifies you that your upgrade to Sequoia is “ready”, don’t assume that your Mac has downloaded it and is poised to automatically install it whether you want to upgrade or not. Chances are that the upgrade is only “ready” on Apple’s software update servers, and you can safely let it stay there until you’re ready to upgrade as a choice, not a compulsion. However much I might enthuse for early upgrading, it requires voluntary informed consent, please, Apple.