S E E A L S O
The Trek to Ventura 2023
Moving to Monterey 2022
Moving to Mojave 2020
The Power of Patience: Installing High Sierra at Last 2019
Installing Sierra 2017
On to El Capitan 2016
Installing Yosemite 2014
A Day at the Beach (Mavericks) 2013
Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Sequoia For the Trees
12 November 2024
When Photoshop complained that it needed macOS 15, we knew we wouldn't be able to wait as long as usual to update our operating system.
Our last update to Ventura came as the result of purchasing an M2 MacBook Pro. We had to jump through a lot of hoops, particularly software hoops, to get up and running. Part of that was transitioning to Apple silicon and part of it was transitioning from Monterey.
All that work paid off, though, as we moved to the M2 to Sequoia. It was the most seamless system update we've ever experienced. And we go back to 1987.
The nightly backup just after we published this failed, pointing to the internal drive of the iMac on our network (which we've never associated with Time Machine). And the backup of our Intel MacBook has stopped as well.
When we try to setup the network drive on either machine (both of which have the password stored), the password dialog shows the wrong username an an uneditable password field.
So clearly something is broken. Meanwhile we'll sync the data between the two machines as a backup.
See our Time Machine Diary for how we are resolving the issue.
Considering we skipped Sonoma entirely, that was especially appreciated. Sonoma wasn't required by any of our applications and never seemed to get all of its bugs ironed out.
Sequoia on the other hand seems more like a revision of Sonoma. All the hard work (PHP, Perl, MySQL, etc.) of moving from Intel and Monterey to Apple Silicon and Ventura paid off with a smooth transition to Sequoia.
We've been running it since Saturday to publish here this week.
HIGHLIGHTS
We can't say we moved to Sequoia for any of its features. Or any of Sonoma's for that matter.
But we didn't just move for the hell of it.
The Photoshop warning was important. New features my require Sequoia.
And we were intrigued by our brief experience with Apple Intelligence on iOS 18. Especially given our difficulty typing and seeing what we've typed.
We did try iPhone mirroring, which we'll have to think up a use for. We composed in Notes on iCloud when we're away from the studio and use Air Drop to get out iPhone images to our Ingestor macro on the Mac. So we haven't needed the drag-and-drop file transfer capability but that's another feature we'll no doubt find a use for.
And operations seem faster and smoother in general. Which alone was worth it.
ONE PROBLEM
We've really only experienced one problem with Sequoia. Time Machine backups to our network drive failed repeatedly.
We mirror our data on our backup machine and rely on a nightly Time Machine backup to mirror our system setup.
But you do have to scratch your head wondering how Apple could have released a major system update that can't back itself up. It isn't just us. There have been widespread reports of the problem since version 15.0.
And just as many fixes.
We went through the dance, trying the simpler things first. But we kept getting a variety of errors.
But we finally managed a backup after we used the new Password application to enter our old user name and password for the network drive (which still mounted using our Keyboard Maestro macros using those) and running an automatic backup before reverting to manual.
We had the same problem on our Intel MacBook with Time Machine, oddly.