I'm running MacOS Ventura. Any reason I shouldn't upgrade to Sequoia?

I don't recall many major regressions in Apple software that would justify staying on old software like that, and as a developer I don't and am unlikely to ever care about people running old software. It is one thing to decide to not participate in a beta, which is my own choice, but I don't think there's much of a reason to avoid updating to the latest software. Furthermore, as a top of the line Mac Studio owner, I don't think you have much of an excuse to not just create another APFS volume to install and try the latest macOS yourself and then deciding whether keeping the old one around makes any sense, unless you went all in on performance and cheapskates on storage.

The computer I'm currently typing this on is an M4 Max Mac Studio with 128GB of unified RAM, the only major version of macOS supporting this hardware is Sequoia, and so far the only instability that I have come across was caused by accidentally loading the latest 120 billion parameter open GPT model that OpenAI released a couple of days ago twice using Apple's MLX framework, which might have caused it to request an excessive number of memory pages to remain in physical memory and the system rebooted spontaneously due to a kernel panic. I work in software development, not music, so my workflow is totally different from yours and as such your mileage may vary, but this is my experience. On the other hand, the Safari not responding problem has been mostly non-existent in the latest minor Sequoia updates, so that alone is enough reason to upgrade in my opinion.

Bruce, a lot changed in those two releases, and it's impossible for me to say what you might or might not find objectionable. Here are my two biggies:

* VoiceOver occasionally skips the first few words of what it's supposed to speak, and I have to navigate back to hear it a second time. This is an annoyance that should have never been introduced, and the fact that it persists in release after release makes me believe they don't have a single engineer on staff that uses VoiceOver on a daily basis.
* Pages no longer consistently moves by paragraph. Not just Pages but pretty much any text app--TextEdit, Scrivener, even a Mail composition window. But I seem to be the only VoiceOver user who is concerned about this regression. Apple certainly doesn't seem to be losing any sleep over it.

I could open Feedback Assistant and list about a dozen other bug reports I'm waiting for a resolution on, But those two are the grit in my coffee this morning.

I think João Santos has the best advice. Make room on your SSD or buy an external one and give it a try.

Firstly, let me say you write some incredibly insightful comments on here and I love hearing what you have to say. However, I would also say that you are on another level to most of us mere mortals.

As such, I do disagree with some of what you say.

Upgrading from Ventura to Sonoma was a massive mistake on my part. During the end of its cycle it wasn't too bad, but at the start it was totally broken in a number of ways. Some major new annoyances, but for some things I had to suddenly start to learn how to use my work Windows laptop in a panic because the Mac just wasn't working any more.
So I totally agree that upgrading is a risk and waiting until near the end of a release cycle is pretty sensible if you have the willpower.

However, I do agree that if you have the time, disk space and inclination then the safest thing to do is to install on a new partition or USB stick and have a play to see how it works for you. One thing I have learnt is that one person's experience can vary very very wildly with another's.

At this stage of Sequoia I can't think of any new showstoppers. There are a few annoyances with navigate by heading, switching activities, hearing terminal output and so on, but nothing I can't work round. I can't remember if I was suffering from SNR in Ventura, but I certainly was in Sonoma very badly. It is now quite rare.

In my opinion, the Mac's main problems are to do with inconsistencies with focus. Things like if you take one step back, then then step forwards and find you are somewhere entirely different. Or how you need to remember exactly where you shuold use VO keys and where you should use tabs and arrows and how it doesn't always make immediate sense. But I don't think any of these are new problems and I'm not convinced that Sequoia is worse than Ventura in this regard.

I've had my M4 Mac Mini for almost a year, and I'm happy to say I haven't experienced the Safari not responding problems with Sequoia. I think it happened to me once, but it was only for 3 or 4 seconds which seems to indicate it's now working as designed. Ventura more than likely received its last updates at the end of July, so the sooner you move to a newer release, the better. Make sure all your music production software is compatible, but at this point, Sequoia is in maintenance mode, so you should be safe. If you value the ability to customize every single VoiceOver command, you're going to love Sequoia!

finally, to João Santos, you might waznt to read posts more carefully, such as mine where I wrote: "Are there any major annoyng bugs in MacOS Sequoia still uncorrected, tormenting blind users? Please don't respond if all you are going to say is "I don't have any problems."

I did read that, but still decided to reply because we're in a public forum, your choice to stay behind does not make any sense to the general public or in the general case, and ultimately you don't get to decide what people should or should not do in a public environment (moderators might but regular users certainly don't). While my comment might feel useless to you, it got you to explain your reluctance to update, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything you mentioned in the original post, so its purpose was served, I also made a suggestion to try the latest macOS in a dedicated APFS volume that I consider perfectly valid but you chose to ignore for whatever reason.

Thank you, gentlemen. Your experience and advice are helpful. I made the grave mistake of upgrading to Ventura, mistake because of reasons shared by others and because of firmware incompatibility of my interface with MacOS

Ventura. It took the interface manufacurer nearly eleven months to upgrade their firmware, and only then was I finally able to use my digital/audio interface again.

Apple is well known for breaking compatibility with old stuff without much regard for the consequences, so my advice is to either stick to hardware vendors that work with standard interfaces that are less likely to lose support over time or to make sure that they have a good track record of providing support for a reasonable amount of time, which might not be useful advice to you but others might find important. Another suggestion that might also not be useful to you but others might consider, is to buy the baseline Mac Mini, which is pretty cheap compared to any Mac Studio especially if you aim at refurbished options, and use it as a test canary for new major macOS updates, because anything is better than lingering on older software especially out of potentially unjustified fear.

You should also check compatibility. Usually some place like Sweetwater or the manufacturers themselves will say if they've tested whether their interface is compatible with the new OS version. I mean, if that's important to you, find out first. I know when I switched to Mac the software for my interface hadn't finished testing yet. But since the interface is class compliant and the software just gives you some nice extras, I didn't worry about it too much.

https://support.audient.com/hc/en-us/articles/7956519800852-EVO-Range-Compatibility

I have the Evo 16, and the software became compatible aprox. two months after I switched, and Aprox. 3 months after 15's initial release. I was curious if I could find out so I googled quick. So I mean, you don't need to wait and wait until some sort of magical upgrade time. Just check if your stuff's compatible. If not and you need to use it, yeah, obviously wait until that's fixed.

Staying on old software has its disadvantages, but it's not inherently bad. I kept a Windows 7 laptop around for as long as my low vision held out, a good ten years past Win7 EOL, so I could continue to use Paint Shop Pro 6. This allowed me to do image processing in a familiar environment. There was no downside. I simply kept the machine off the internet. As text editing with VoiceOver on MacOS continues to degrade, I'm tempted to do the same thing again.

Every time a vendor drops a new release in my lap, I get to choose my poison. Stay where I am, upgrade, or switch platforms. In order for me to upgrade, there must be some value that outweighs the other options. And it has to be more than liquid glass.

Everyone experiences software bugs differently. What may be a showstopper for some may be a non-issue for others. And this is okay.

Coming from someone who has no immediate plans to upgrade his brand new M4 MacBook Air to macOS Tahoe 26 upon its release simply because I love the zippy performance of brand new hardware on the OS it was built for, boy can I empathize with Bruce.

One thing I think would be helpful to keep in mind, is that when someone asks a question like this, they are seeking information and experiences. They aren't looking for someone to tell them whether they should or shouldn't upgrade. They certainly are not looking for someone to challenge their decision. "Please tell me how it works for you and I will decide whether it is a good idea for me."

One thing I think would be helpful to keep in mind, is that when someone asks a question like this, they are seeking information and experiences. They aren't looking for someone to tell them whether they should or shouldn't upgrade. They certainly are not looking for someone to challenge their decision. "Please tell me how it works for you and I will decide whether it is a good idea for me."

I put the kind of question asked on this thread along with the original poster's reactions in the same selfishness bin where I put those people who ask for help on a public forum, find a solution to their problem elsewhere, and then just post a reply stating that they no longer need help because they found a fix without documenting it for future reference or even linking to the location where they found the the solution, and that's when they even bother replying to return to the thread at all. These people are essentially taking advantage of a community and don't even have the decency to contribute back.

The original poster to this thread asked whether there were any showstoppers without even mentioning why they were reluctant to upgrade, and since people's decisions to linger on old software are, in my opinion, problematic, due to ending up forcing responsible developers to back port security patches and thus contributing to the dilution of sometimes scarce or expensive engineering resources that would be best spent polishing the latest versions, I decided to provide my opinion on the matter which apparently wasn't very well received. I think that offering a rational criticism along with potential solutions to specific behaviors is a much better choice when it comes to informing the general public than any kind of self-moderation, if nothing else then just because sometimes it might be worth questioning established norms that everyone repeats without thinking, even if the information is not well received by the original poster or any other contributor to the thread.

When I post questions or reply to a public forum, my audience is not just the people debating on its threads, it also includes the rest of the world now and in the future, so providing as much information and as many solutions as I can think of is one of the ways in which I try to document processes that might be of interest to anyone. Case in point, until reddit decided to kill private messages a couple of months ago, I used to get messages from random people every once in a while about obscure reverse-engineering and low-level development subjects, because in all those cases the only relevant information they found while researching the same subjects were posts that I made to that platform either asking questions or explaining things to other people sometimes years in the past.

Since my reply to you would not be helpful to anone but you, please contact me at my private email address (...)

This will not happen. If you want to share insight, it's best if you share it publicly, because as I mentioned above, even if nobody who participated here is interested in it, we are debating on a public forum, so our audience is the whole world both now and in the future.

To be fair, I didn't necessarily need to challenge updating. But I posted the rest of it because part of the reluctance to update, it seems to me, is getting burned by the audio interface manufacturer not updating for the new OS version until almost a year later. To be clear, that is indeed a great reason not to update. It's also perfectly understandable that you'd have some reluctance about updating after that.

But you don't have to find out by updating and then getting slammed by not being able to use your hardware. When I switched to Mac, neither Native Instruments nor my audio interface's software was validated for 15. But I figured I'd need to learn Mac anyway, so I wouldn't be jumping right into that stuff, and as I started learning recording software on the Mac, I used the default audio from the Mac and built-in instruments in Garage Band and later Logic.

But my overall point is, you can find out whether your hardware and/or software is usable, unless you're dealing with something really obscure. So you don't have to just jump into an update and hope you land safely. You can find out and wait if it doesn't work, and you can find out when it does work so you know you're safe to update.

So if I were in the middle of a project, or more than one, that heavily used Native Instruments say, and NI said "hey we haven't tested with the new version yet", sure, not updating would be the best choice, assuming I couldn't or didn't want to wait for it to be verified or fixed for the new OS, as the case may be. But again, I can find that out. So to me, that's just a practical strategy Re; updating.

I also a little nervous about messing with partitions, but I am also tempted to give it a try. But don't forget you can also install on a USB stick and boot from there if that feels safer.

I have a stupid question for those that have gone through this before. Let's say I created a partition and installed a newer (or older) version of MacOs on it. I then boot up into this other version. I presume I can still access the other partition? Would I be able to run applications I have installed on the other partition or is this likely not to go well?

I think there's a little misconception that goes beyond naming here. A partition is exactly that, some allocated and reserved space to host a filesystem, whereas an APFS volume is more like a filesystem namespace where everything is separate but the volume itself shares exactly the same partition as all the other volumes in the same partition, so the only space that is taken by a new OS installation on an APFS volume is the space of the files themselves. As for accessing content, while a new macOS installation will likely create a new data volume, you might be able to share the original data volume with the new installation, however I have never actually tried that and suggest against doing it since the new system might save its state in formats that might not be recognized by the old system. Even if the volumes are not shared across different macOS installations, they can still be mounted using Disk Utility or diskutil from the command-line.

Running multiple installations of macOS on a single Mac is perfectly supported, and unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't really care how many macOS installations you run both natively and on virtual machines as long as they are ultimately running on genuine Macs. Switching between system versions can be accomplished either at boot time by pressing and holding the power button or TouchID to turn the system on for a few seconds, which will make the firmware display the boot options screen, at which point the firmware version of VoiceOver can be turned on and used to navigate the available options, or alternatively by going to System Settings -> General -> Startup Disk from any macOS installation. These instructions only apply to ARM-based Macs, since I no longer have any Intel Macs and never actually had any with a T1 or T2 chip so can't speak from experience.

though I don't run Logic any more on the Mac, because I sold my recording equipment do to obsalensence of the hardware, I have in the past. Logic Pro X was the version I had. I ran windows 10 unactivated for six years on Mac hardware from 2015. I beta tested on that, and that's when I partitioned my SSD. you cannot run apps from a main volume on a secondary volume unfortunetly. otherwise, , it works quite well.

That makes sense - thanks very much for clearing things up.