So. Should I upgrade to macOS High Sierra? Apple releases a systems nerd nirvana today, a new OS that’s packed with more profound and interesting under-the-hood technology features than Apple has released for years. But should you rush out and upgrade to macOS 10.13 High Sierra? Well, certainly not, if you want to maintain a set of working peripherals. And emphatically …
"The iOS 10.3 update earlier this year converted everyone's iPhone to APFS, so with north of a half billion successful conversions I think Apple is more than ready for doing it on the Mac".
^ That APFS file system is a welcome and much needed modern replacement for the old HFS/HFS+ file system which really was long in the tooth. It now just needs to be rolled out for conventional Mac hard disk drives as well.
Good thing everyones accustomed to being a Beta tester these days.
If Microsoft went about testing and updating the way Apple did, Microsoft Vista would have never been released. I know that's very annoying to Redmond fans, but that's a simple fact.
With a full new release it is always worth being cautious, but in general I have had very few problems upgrading for the years I've been using both iOS and macos. I am more cautious with this update because it changes something VERY fundamental to the system, but in general I am not regretting my switch to macos from Windows, also because it's easier to make a Mac talk to a Linux box than a Windows machine.
Apparently the release version of 10.13 has a problem with copying files larger than 2 GB to FAT32 volumes. That's 'the release version', as apparently the betas didn't have this problem, and '2 GB', not the FAT32 limit of 4 GB.
There is much screaming over on the Apple 'help' forum.
I like hamsters. My nieces used to have hamsters. My brother's ex sometimes came around (it should be noted that she didn't get custody, and _her parents sided with my brother_...) and occasionally a particular one would escape its cage and bite her. I called the hamster Tribble, as she was obviously a Klingon, probably the third Duras sister. (I repeat, her parents sided with my brother. Why he ever married her was beyond me.) My brother told me to not say that near the girls. Pity.
That was my mistake this time...I usually await the 2nd or 3rd bug fix before adopting a new release but this time I went for the 1st release of the “Final”...big mistake. The cursor on my MBA (recent) became uncontrolable (it was like playing a video game) to the point that I couldn’t even get to my TM backups to do a restore to 10.12.6. The nearest Apple Store is 50 miles away so I took it to a local “authorized” Apple dealer and had them do a clean install. It made the cursor better but did not resolve the issue. Apple has now released the “supplemental” 10.13 install and I was hoping it would fix it. No such luck. So, I’ve pulled out an older MacBook and I’ve resorted to using my iPad Pro (which is pretty good with the keyboard...in fact, that’s what I’m doing this post with).
I should have read this article before I went with the 10.13 Final release...would have saved me a lot of frustrating moments.
Maybe it's the encoding that needs the grunt not the decoding?MPEG is asymmetric in that the encoding is many times more intensive than the decoding, perhaps HEVC shares this trait.
Yes, this is the case and much more so as well. Real time, or preferably considerably better than real time if you're into any kind of video work, needs a lot of capable grunt on the CPU/GPU front. The general guideline is that HEVC (H.265) requires 10x the computer compared to H.264 encoding.
In addition to what @Keef said, note that your TV will be using dedicated hardware to decode HEVC, it won't be trying to do the decode on a general-purpose CPU or GPU. (More accurately, the TV has a single chip that has some CPU cores, hardware decoders for both MPEG2 and HEVC, the GPU, video scalers and blenders, and some other useful hardware blocks. This is cheaper than a chip with a really powerful general-purpose CPU that has to do everything in software).
More modern desktop PC GPUs tend to have hardware decoders for HEVC, too, and sometimes hardware encoders.
Mac mini with an external tower... Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I must look at whether there is a time machine docker container available...
Ooh - yes, there are several. That's me sorted then (just need to decide on one)
HP Microserver, SSD for a base OS, now have three large HDDs, will add a fourth at some point. Going to use clusterFS and snapRAID on those...
Then everything gets containerised away to make life far easier than it would otherwise be...
FreeNAS mini would be an all-in-one. Works awesome for TimeMachine backups.
As do QNAP NAS units.
There is one bug that bit me - if you have an AD-joined Mac (like my home MacBook Pro - and yes, I have an AD domain at home. Doesn't everyone?) and your home directory on the Mac is marked as a mobile directory then the TouchID preference pane won't load.
Which mean, in the final stage of setup, you'll get prompted for your login in order to unlock TouchID and that login will fail every. single. time. And there is no option to skip, so the install will fail.
And, looking at the logs on my domain servers, the login doesn't even get presented to the Windows servers to authenticate.
All of which means that a 'nuke from orbit and go back to the Carbon Copy Clone copy that I did just before the upgrade[1]'. Then unjoin the machine from AD and re-run the upgrade. Which worked this time. Then register your fingerprints, rejoin to the domain (at which point the TouchID preference pane no longer loads again) and await the update to fix the issue.
I'm sure there are more creative fixes that you can play about with in order to force the TouchID pref pane to load but I haven't had the time to play.
HP Microserver, you can get a previous year model for about £200
Put a USB stick in the internal USB port for the base os
You have 4 bays for hard drives, and you can put a 5th in the optical drive bay
Put FreeBSD on it + Netatalk
Change a few configuration settings
You have a fully working Time Machine
This will take about 10 minutes from taking machine out the box if you know what you are doing, or maybe 30 minutes if you don't know what you are doing, but have previous experience with Linux+Samba or similar.
1. I will wait for a few point releases to even test the waters.
2. I still have a 1tb TimeCrapsule, backs up the 3 macbooks no problem.
3. I've managed to build up 12+tb storage in the house, I don't care about smaller formats for pix and vids at this time.*
4. Bottom line, nothing to see in this update.
*Glad to see development of this in any case.
> 2. I still have a 1tb TimeCrapsule, backs up the 3 macbooks no problem.
Wow, yours still works? I had all 4 of mine die on me.
Several got repaired under known issues. Others I didn't bother to fight them and replaced it with another solution, because Apple just doesn't care about anything released more than 6 months ago.
>Wow, yours still works? I had all 4 of mine die on me.
Good point, I avoided the problem by just connecting a USB or Thunderbolt drive to the system and let it do it's thing. On my home system just use a USB Drive, at work use a USB and a Thunderbolt drive and let it auto swap. I've had to recover/upgrade several times and this has always worked for me.
I also Sync my MacBook to my iMac and use CCC to backup document/working material on a regular schedule to NAS/File Server. One can never have too many backups. Sometimes my colleagues laugh at me but all of them at some point have come sheepishly into my office asking for a copy of something that has accidentally been lost somehow.
Nah, I'd say it's more like Windows used to be when the arrival of Service Pack 1 fixed the "stupids" in the vanilla .0 release and didn't introduce too many new bugs.
Nowadays, with the Windows 10 update style of "take it or, oh wait... no, your only choice is to take it and if it breaks your computer, tough" bollocks, we dream of having properly tested* service packs and .1 releases.
* Well, sometimes they were fully tested...
…well other than Webex integration in Outlook causing Outlook to crash, but Webex was never the best written bit of software. Other than that though, I’m very happy with High Sierra (especially since they didn’t observe the silly superstition of ignoring 13).
That said, your mileage may vary - and the advice not to install immediately (wait for 10.13.1) seems wise.
They didn't miss it, since they've offered an argument against it. It's just not a very convincing argument. Per Apple, since SSDs contain ECC error correction they were unable to create a statistically significant number of errors over the service lifetime of any of their machines.
Except that, you know, they then thought checksumming was worth it for file metadata. And apparently are unaware that external drives exist?
But 'missing it' isn't quite right.
The issue is with programs like "make" that compare timestamps. They do things like "compile X.c to X.o if X.c is newer than X,o, then link X.o to get X if X.o is newer than X". If timestamps aren't precise enough then everything ends up with the same timestamp.
Yes, nanoseconds are probably too precise (there's only 2 or 3 clock cycles per nanosecond) but being too precise doesn't cause a problem. The old precision of 1 second is definitely not precise enough and can cause problems. FAT has the same problems, it has 2 second precision.
1 nanosecond precision does not imply 1 nanosecond accuracy, as those of us who got marked down for having unjustifiably more significant digits in out lab results knew. See also: laughing at Spock's reporting of probabilities.
IIRC IBM's System 360 (1965) specified a higher resolution than the clock speed of any model at the announcement. Each model added the appropriate number of "ticks" for each actual timer update.
As previously mentioned, "make" really wants precise time-stamps. Also accurate ones. A build cluster with large NetApp storage array was the bane of my existence some years back. I always wonder if some of the problem being that NetApp were the only folks I knew to keep "Spread Spectrum Clock" enabled in the BIOS after passing RFI tests.
Perhaps you can download it from the link given here and make a bootable installer from it using the createinstallmedia command?
Here's a little tip for the future:
When you want to keep the option of installing a macOS version later, but don't want to upgrade right now, that's very easily achieved.
Just go to the App Store and click to get the new OS. It'll start downloading the installer pack, but you don't actually need to install it. Just don't let it install, delete the 'Install macOS' app from /Applications once the download has finished if you want.
The important part is adding it to your App Store account while it's the one being offered.
Then you can forever more download the installer pack from your Purchased screen as and when you might want to actually install the thing.
Obviously, it's too late to do this for Sierra now, but this is the method.
I upgraded yesterday.
This is mainly because my design clients will often click on ANY link from Apple for an update/upgrade!
Personally I would like to wait at least a fortnight but it's not an option.
Using VirtualBox to run OS X 10.11 and 10.12 support of older software and works very well - much better than parallels with Windows 7.
For a filesytem cleanup, opted to create a USB boot disk using the built-in createinstallmedia.
Time Machine backup, boot of USB disk and format disk as AFPS, install 10.13, use Migration Assistant built into installer to restore home folders and Applications.
Then test, test, test…
There are a few things on Apple that there is no functional equivalent on Windows.
1. Target Disk Mode - been using this since OS 9 with SCSI devices.
Allowed you to mount another Mac as a local disk - great for running disk/volume repairs etc…
Fun fact is once another mac is mounted locally as a disk, you can actually reboot your Mac off the other Mac's disk!
2. Migration Assistant - been around for quite a few years.
Great for doing a clean install and then bringing back home folder and Applications without alot of the cruft that accumulates with multiple OS upgrades over the years.
It is especially good at bringing back installed software and keeping all the licensing intact.
3. ASR (Apple Software Restore) - perfect for imaging and deploying OS X using monolithic images which has been around for at least a decade.
Since OS X does not need licensing - (only needs a valid Mac to install onto) it makes creating deployment images a cake walk .
No sysprep to deal with - build a new image and it will boot and deploy on ALL apple hardware that supports the new system which is invariably the last 7 years' models.
There are a lot of gripes - especially on the higher end for video production, 40Gb networking, zero server hardware, crappy RAID, dealing with resource forks of old Mac PS fonts (still!!!)
Overall - I can't, in good conscience charge for weekly/monthly maintenance like all my Windows tech contacts - the machines are simply too reliable and don't break down enough!
I do bulk billing instead so clients can per pay for their support and use as issues actually crop up.
HEIF is all well and good but it's impact in the real world will be limited. Apple could have done its users a bigger favour by including support for the WebP format for bitmaps in Safari. When it comes to photos and videos on the interwebs Apple is a much smaller player than Google. Using HEIF with HEVC for bitmaps is unlikely to take off because, unlike WebP, HEVC is encumbered which will dramatically limit the spread of applications that can create the files.
I'm surprised nothing has been mentioned about the external GPU support added in High Sierra. You can now spend ~£300 on an external case with a 350w PSU, PCI-E Slot and a Thunderbolt 3 Adapter. You plonk a proper GPU in there (Nvidia or AMD/ATI) and suddenly you've proper graphics grunt on a mac again (something none of the current machines really have). It even works with bootcamp/windows and can be used with convertors so a TB1/TB2 Mac can still have an eGPU to increase graphics grunt without upgrading. Lots of the creative/video types are looking at this for the video encoding grunt.
I've upgraded and have experienced no problems whatsoever.
There again I'm not a creative type.
I use it for Java/EE/Scala development, IntelliJ IDEA-EAP, MySQL, JBoss WildFly 10.1.0. MongoDB.
I do use CCleaner and Dr. Cleaner every five minutes to empty Caches etc. Upgrade everything the moment it's released/
I've upgraded and have experienced no problems whatsoever. There again I'm not a creative type.
I use it for Java/EE/Scala development, IntelliJ IDEA-EAP, MySQL, JBoss WildFly 10.1.0. MongoDB.
I do use CCleaner and Dr. Cleaner every five minutes to empty Caches etc. I upgrade everything the moment it's released.
I didn't upgrade to 10.12, but a couple days ago that became necessary as I needed to install a later version of XCode. But 10.12 was no longer available (anywhere) so I took a punt on 10.13. This of course broke my VPN and Elixir/Erlang dev env, so I checked out the options for rolling back to Sierra. None. The only option was to obtain another Mac and use the High Sierra mac as a table mat.
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