Miscellaneous Upgrading a Mac OS after a nasty experience

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It's really a shame. Apple systems are pretty good but their OS strategy sucks big time.

I'm really not a fan of Apple products. I bought a MacBook air in 2011 as I liked its slim and lightweight profile.

It's still running but I am now using a Chromebook as my home secondary laptop. It's simple and does most of what I need outside work. I also use Ubuntu Linux... More on that later.

My wife is on mac. She had a MacBook pro 2012 that was terribly slow. Almost unusable. I bought her a new MacBook air M1 that does the job. And recently managed to repair her old MacBook pro that looked very bad... I thought she dropped it or something but it was the replacement battery that almost exploded inside that pushed the touchpad out of its casing and the whole thing looked damaged beyond repair.

But after a careful disassembly, I managed to fix it. Removing the unused DVD drive, replacing it with an SSD, upgrading memory to 16gb and replacing the exploded battery... I kept the original HD untouched for now, after reinstalling macOs on the SSD drive.

What got ne started was my mother's old iMac from 2009. I backed up what was on it and installed Ubuntu on it. It works great. So much so that I purchased a 2013 iMac that's now running both Catalina and Ubuntu, but I use it mostly on Ubuntu.

All this to say that these machines are very capable but condemned by Apple through their obsolescence scheme.

We live in a crazy world where change leads to wasting perfectly usable systems just drive more sales and profit by companies like Apple that are already absurdly rich.
 
Jimmymack said:
That might account for my recent experiences with it.
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I actually had to start again from scratch, and it's no longer possible to delete individual files or folders from the backup, which is useful to save space if e.g. you move a whole folder on your computer or drives.
 
My day job now, as a pretty much retired musician, is as a computer technician; but I'm much less experienced with Macs than with Windows. I have a few older Macs laying about for me to experiment on - 2009 MBPro, 2014 iMac and a late 2015 MacBook Air running Monterey - and enjoy messing them up just to see how to recover them! I'm planning on buying a new Mac Mini and setting it up with some DAWs just to see what trouble I can get myself into. I do all my serious work on PCs which seem to handle updates very well these days.

The implications of updates for software not actually written by Apple seem huge, and I am constantly hearing horror stories of musicians and photographers who have been locked out of their work after taking updates and upgrades and of course I sympathise with people who loose data. However, there really is no excuse for not taking external backups of data on computers, either Macs or Windows. We've been warned that computer failures are a case of 'When', not 'If' for years now. Even if you don't use online backup, it's so easy to plug in an external drive and run off all your docs, pics and music every now and then, and particularly before a serious update of the system!
 
Apple iMac's have suited my needs for the last 15 years, but now I am stuck, older Mac's with 27" monitors and Intel chips are so versatile I run windows through Bootcamp and have the best of both worlds but now Apple have moved to there own chips that is no longer possible unless I buy another piece of software and then it's not so good as what I have now.
Why do they constantly mess with the OS, when you upgrade to the latest OS it's rarely better and frequently just cause's more pain, I know with iPad's they constantly want you to buy a new one by not supporting older tablets, my next computer will be Windows based but hopefully not yet.
 
I have an old iPad, about 10 years old, that runs fewer and fewer apps and can't be updated. I can tolerate this as I don't do anything serious with it but Safari won't update and that renders some websites unavailable. One of the reasons I was wanting to update the Mac is that I get the occasional message saying that I need to upgrade for the iMac so I assume at some point things won't be available there as well. The introduction of Apple's own chips has changed things again and is the reason, I think, that the latest OS is out of my reach.

As regards the 'when' not 'if' warning, and the idea shared by many Mac users that the machines don't fail, I've got the hard drives from 2 Macs that did just that. One of them failed and switched to the bootable backup and kept running so that I didn't notice for a week or so, it just seemed to be a bit slow.
 
Upgrading to a version of the operating system in one go is asking for trouble.
Do a clean new install of the OS. At least that will make sure that you backup all of your data!

Almost relevant: my 2006 iMac was abandoned by Apple a decade ago. It runs Devuan linux now. If you are keen on faffing with photos you will get to try out The Gimp. It is free and some people hate it. I don't mess with photos enough to have an opinion.
 
I'm sure you're right but a clean install is what I wanted to avoid, it's what I ended up doing with the other machine and, although if I'd done it in the first place I could have saved a lot of time and anxiety, I'm not sure it's worth it to me. What has been posted here has been very useful and hasn't encouraged me to go ahead. Mojave is at least stable.
 
DaveT said:
Almost relevant: my 2006 iMac was abandoned by Apple a decade ago. It runs Devuan linux now. If you are keen on faffing with photos you will get to try out The Gimp. It is free and some people hate it. I don't mess with photos enough to have an opinion.
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Gimp is great. Once you get a handle of it. There are many tutorials that help you do things that may not be obvious, including adding and using plugins that are very powerful additions to the base program. And it runs very well on linux, so that's a plus. For me...
 
Jimmymack said:
I'm sure you're right but a clean install is what I wanted to avoid, it's what I ended up doing with the other machine and, although if I'd done it in the first place I could have saved a lot of time and anxiety, I'm not sure it's worth it to me. What has been posted here has been very useful and hasn't encouraged me to go ahead. Mojave is at least stable.
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If Apple are still releasing security updates for 10.14 Mojave then we are all very happy for you to continue to use it!
If Apple have stopped releasing security updates for Mojave then we 'The Sad Sax Playing Geeks' ALL urge you to upgrade!
UPDATE: I just checked. The last security update for Mojave was on July 21st 2021.
We 'The Sad Sax Playing Geeks' hereby FORBID you to keep running Mojave.

10.15 Catalina was abandoned by Apple on 30th November 2022.
11 Big Sur was abandoned by Apple on 30th November 2023.

If your Mac will run 12 Monterey you really really should upgrade. Really.
And judging by those dates above - expect Monterey to be abandoned on 30th November 2024!

Do it one release at a time. An Upgrade to 10.15 Catalina should go smoothly with no need to do a full clean install.
Doing an upgrade in one go by skipping releases to whatever the most recent release your machine will run is will go badly unless you bite the bullet for a clean install.

If Monterey is the most recent version of OSX your Mac will run then you have most of 2024 to learn about Linux.
I recommend Devuan and if not that then Debian. (Not going into the sad techie geek reasons for preferring Devuan!)
 
This is all still under consideration and I appreciate the concern about security updates, it was one of the things behind my wanting to upgrade. Catalina was the one that caused problems for my wife (actually for me) and so is jinxed, although my machine is newer and more powerful than hers so can maybe handle it more easily. But she is stuck with a computer that no longer gets security updates anyway so what price Apple's wonderful protection system?

In all truth though I can't see myself going through the slog of 4 or so upgrades and hoping that none of them fouls up and I definitely have better things to do than spend the rest of the year learning Linux, never mind Devuan.
 
DaveT said:
Do it one release at a time. An Upgrade to 10.15 Catalina should go smoothly with no need to do a full clean install.
Doing an upgrade in one go by skipping releases to whatever the most recent release your machine will run is will go badly unless you bite the bullet for a clean install.
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I agree with what you are saying, one step at time is best but if your machine can't handle the new OSX then even a clean install won't make a difference, I checked with Apple and they said there was no problem but it was a nightmare, in fairness to Apple they tried everything including a clean install but it just made ever program to stop responding including safari, mail, even finder so I went backwards to Big Sur yes I know it's not supported but it was the best move for me and my sanity.
 
There is a school of thought that Macs don't suffer from viruses, this is encouraged by Apple who don't deny their existence but will encourage you that as long as you are up to date with your OS you will be protected. This may even be the case but as previously noted this isn't always possible to be up to date. Macs can also host Microsoft viruses with no ill effects but they can be passed on.

Discussion of this always results in somebody saying that Macs don't get viruses or that Mac antivirus is useless, or both. They will also say that it slows down your Mac.

As the negative responses are always the same and effectively shut down any real discussion it would be interesting to get positive any opinions about the many options now available or a critique that goes beyond just being dismissive. It's a bit like asking which heavy neck screw you should choose.

I used to use Sophos but that's no longer available to me. I've no idea if it made any difference but I never go any viruses.
 
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I've been using Windows since '93 and never had a virus in any of my machines.
Never paid for any anti virus software, have whatever microsoft put on and Malwarebytes free version. I think broadband provider has some automatic anti virus as well.
 

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