As promised, Apples’ latest major update to the Macintosh operating system software ships today. Mac OS 10.14 “Sonoma” is promising, but I’m here to remind users not to upgrade the first week — at least not on a “production” machine in your business or personal life; if you want to run it on a spare I’ve no objection to that.
Many of us tech support people, in the trenches supporting real businesses, will offer comparable advice. Why? To save you, the user, from not only bugs in the new software, but in compatibility issues that may crop up with key software, popular web sites, and more. The safer course is to allow early adopters to find the bugs, allow software companies to address compatibility, and allow the dust to settle before adopting a new major release. We techs would rather support known, solid software than help you surf the latest cutting edge of Apples’ marketing hype. That being said, I’m sure at least one of my customers will jump the gun and run into trouble; I’ll be happy enough — at my regular rate — to come over and clean that mess up for you. But if you heed my advice, you’ll wait and that won’t be necessary.
How long to wait? That varies. I’m optimistic that I will be signing off on Sonoma pretty quickly; as I say it’s a promising release and Apple has pledged to make it more of a reliability and functionality release than a new feature release. Watch this space for a post when I feel that businesses can start using Apples’ latest code.
For customers of our Maintenance plan, you’ll be automatically held off from installing the new update for now. For those that insist, manual update will be available; we are not pushing the update, but nor are we blocking it.