Lucky Thirteenth?
Jan. 17th, 2018 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThe name of the latest Macintosh operating system has changed each year for a good number of years now, but putting those changes into practice by upgrading my computer's software always seems to take a lot of personal nerving. I suppose it's summed up by the uneasy feeling online sites that would seem at first glance to be about working better with macOS have dark undercurrents in their comment sections of "never upgrade under any circumstances." It might be nothing more than my cowardly imagination fixing that in my mind, but I admit it can affect me.
Since the last upgrade I nerved myself to, I bought a late-model Macbook Air used to take on my long vacation last spring, a computer still theoretically capable of supporting the same operating system upgrades my iMac of about the same vintage can run. A first, subtle uneasiness the store that sold it would have made its own "never upgrade under any circumstances" statement by leaving an older system on the portable's internal solid-state drive vanished when I found it did have system Sierra installed, and near the end of last year I decided to "run a first test" by installing High Sierra on it first. To do that, though, I made a bootable backup on an external hard drive, restarted from that drive, erased the internal drive, ran the installer program, and reloaded all my applications and user data using Migration Assistant, something long promoted by individuals as possibly avoiding certain problems even if an electronic book series I've read has begun to suggest you could take the chance of running the installer in place so long as you have backups ready on the outside chance. To do the same thing with my iMac, much more loaded down with applications and files, would take a lot longer, and I also started wondering about the chance of errors creeping in during the read-back process. I'd also seen someone talking about doing a "clean install" but reinstalling every third-party application from scratch to make sure there were no preference file problems; that felt just a little too much, somehow.
At last, I took the chance I'd taken the last time around, even managing to think I was trying to fight against superstitious hesitance by running the installer on the thirteenth. (It wasn't until later that I remembered macOS High Sierra is "Version 10.13"...) Installing the recent "supplementary update" right afterwards did seem to tie up the computer longer than it had tied up my portable, but at last the computer was running again. So far, I don't feel troubled by the revised experience.
Beyond "your computer will crash all the time!", "your system will slow to a crawl!", or even "minor infelicities will drag on you," I suppose the obvious risk of installing operating system upgrades is that applications people have given up on updating will stop working. Multiple operating systems ago, that did happen for me with a TRS-80 emulator; nowadays, I have another program running via the "Wine" pseudo-emulator. However, the black plastic Macbook that can still run the old program can't run a lot of new programs, which got to me at last and was one reason why I went looking for something newer used. At the same time, though, one thing I did over Christmas (with considerable motivating encouragement and some general help from my family) was pry apart the small Powerbook G4 I'd bought used about nine years before to take on my first long vacation in years to replace its "who knows how much longer it'll last?" hard drive with a solid-state drive specially built (and more expensive than the regular kind) to link to its more old-fashioned connectors. That computer is still running OS X 10.4 "Tiger," but there's a fairly up-to-date version of Firefox still being adapted to PowerPC chips (if perhaps with its own subtle air of "never upgrade under any circumstances" folded into its promotion).
Since the last upgrade I nerved myself to, I bought a late-model Macbook Air used to take on my long vacation last spring, a computer still theoretically capable of supporting the same operating system upgrades my iMac of about the same vintage can run. A first, subtle uneasiness the store that sold it would have made its own "never upgrade under any circumstances" statement by leaving an older system on the portable's internal solid-state drive vanished when I found it did have system Sierra installed, and near the end of last year I decided to "run a first test" by installing High Sierra on it first. To do that, though, I made a bootable backup on an external hard drive, restarted from that drive, erased the internal drive, ran the installer program, and reloaded all my applications and user data using Migration Assistant, something long promoted by individuals as possibly avoiding certain problems even if an electronic book series I've read has begun to suggest you could take the chance of running the installer in place so long as you have backups ready on the outside chance. To do the same thing with my iMac, much more loaded down with applications and files, would take a lot longer, and I also started wondering about the chance of errors creeping in during the read-back process. I'd also seen someone talking about doing a "clean install" but reinstalling every third-party application from scratch to make sure there were no preference file problems; that felt just a little too much, somehow.
At last, I took the chance I'd taken the last time around, even managing to think I was trying to fight against superstitious hesitance by running the installer on the thirteenth. (It wasn't until later that I remembered macOS High Sierra is "Version 10.13"...) Installing the recent "supplementary update" right afterwards did seem to tie up the computer longer than it had tied up my portable, but at last the computer was running again. So far, I don't feel troubled by the revised experience.
Beyond "your computer will crash all the time!", "your system will slow to a crawl!", or even "minor infelicities will drag on you," I suppose the obvious risk of installing operating system upgrades is that applications people have given up on updating will stop working. Multiple operating systems ago, that did happen for me with a TRS-80 emulator; nowadays, I have another program running via the "Wine" pseudo-emulator. However, the black plastic Macbook that can still run the old program can't run a lot of new programs, which got to me at last and was one reason why I went looking for something newer used. At the same time, though, one thing I did over Christmas (with considerable motivating encouragement and some general help from my family) was pry apart the small Powerbook G4 I'd bought used about nine years before to take on my first long vacation in years to replace its "who knows how much longer it'll last?" hard drive with a solid-state drive specially built (and more expensive than the regular kind) to link to its more old-fashioned connectors. That computer is still running OS X 10.4 "Tiger," but there's a fairly up-to-date version of Firefox still being adapted to PowerPC chips (if perhaps with its own subtle air of "never upgrade under any circumstances" folded into its promotion).