Is the Latest Sonoma Update Safe Now?

[esprememrn]

I've been holding off on updating to the latest Sonoma version for about 4-6 weeks because I've read about various issues affecting Macs. I have an M2 Max with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage, running 14.2.1 (23C71). Is it safe to update now? Have the recent bugs been resolved?

 

[TonyAguila]

Your main concerns probably involve compatibility with older software and hardware (e.g. one that I recently addressed concerning a 3rd-party keyboard). If you can invest in an external SSD, you could install the latest version of Sonoma and test your setup for compatibility issues. I actually have two external NVMe 4-terabyte SSDs, mainly for testing beta versions of macOS, as well as running older versions (Ventura and Monterey) should I have apps that will only run in older versions of macOS.

By the way, 14.2.1 (23C71) is a really old version of Sonoma. Version 14.4.1 (23E224) preceded the latest version 14.5 (23F79), which, in my experience, is the best version to date. Mind you, 14.5 went through four beta versions, compared to five betas of 14.4.

 

[OldSchool]

I haven't had any trouble with it nor the previous version.

 

[TonyAguila]

Keep in mind that, depending on your configuration with software and hardware, you can’t be 100% sure that everything will go well. If you have Time Machine backups, you will at least have a chance to restore your previous data. Just read up on making a complete restore, in case you are forced to reformat your drive to perform the downgrade. It might seem a bit much, but downgrading is probably one of the most troublesome procedures you can do with macOS. I always maintain two Time Machine backup drives, as well as redundant clones of my data partitions using Carbon Copy Cloner.

 

[swandera]

Is battery drain solved?

 

[esprememrn]

Thanks TonyAguila. I'll look into setting up an external SSD for testing. I appreciate the version update info as well. I'll make sure to back up with Time Machine before proceeding.

swandera, the battery drain issue seems to be resolved in the latest update according to other users.

 

[TonyAguila]

For what it’s worth, any installation of macOS, over time, can and will eventually develop “faults” that can be tricky if not impossible to fix. In my case, numerous updates eventually could not handle my original home folder (/Users/*me*) and so it created a new subfolder containing the active user data. Generally, the older data will be ignored, but being myself, I couldn’t let it go, so I persisted in trying to fix it. Long story short, I started going down this rabbit hole… until I decided to try wiping the entire drive and installing the first beta version of macOS Sequoia, followed by a migration from backup data. The process took a couple of days to do, and I ended up running Sequoia as my primary drive. I consider myself fortunate that 99% of the system seems to work fine. A few (to be expected) incompatibilities persist, but I can live with them just fine.

I consider this event to be more luck than anything else and don’t advise others to follow. But this is to share the fact that Sequoia is the very first beta version of macOS that I consider to be totally useful and have still to find any bug worthy of reporting. I really think that the Mac community will find this version to be the best, and most advanced version of macOS, ever.

Don’t forget that whenever you wipe your startup SSD to install macOS, you must re-enable TRIM. Very important!