Ok, my trusty early 2014 MBA, and 2019 iMac are still running Mojave,which is no longer supported. I never bothered with Catalina, and the latest compatible OS for my MBA (early 2014) is Big Sur. I prefer to run the same version on both machines, so will have to upgrade both to Big Sur.
Anyone upgraded straight from Mojave to Big Sur, any problems or tips etc?
I have a big music and media library stored on a raid, and the music is also on my iMac in iTunes, none bought through Apple, they were mostly ripped from my CD's or downloaded from other sources. As iTunes is replaced by Apple Music on Big Sur, (for which I wouldnt want a subscription) what happens to my old iTunes media library, and will I be able to play it via apple music?
I'm not really tech savvy, so can any info' be in an idiots guide for dummies format please
I can't answer the direct upgrade questions as I did the intermediate versions as well, but you should still be able to listen to your iTunes library, it justs opens in Apple Music instead, and you can still download music from the iTunes Store from within Apple Music. No subscription needed.
Despite the names, the upgrades are fairly minor in construct. Im not sure of your reasons for wanting to have both systems on the same platform but an argument could be made for moving the iMac to Ventura. It is designed to be compatible with systems running previous versions of the OS.
As a general advice, it's always good to back up what you really need and use.
I usually do upgrades from Mountain Lion (recovery over internet)to Sierra / or next available OS, but this is a major upgrade and it comes in some steps.
From your version you should not have any difficulties ... but ... you might be the 1 % where it fails, so again, back up your important stuff.
2014 and 2019 Macs should be able to run up to Big Sur. My 2011 Mac mini runs High Sierra without any issues, in fact it is one of the most stable OS‘s since 7.5
It’s the last OS I’m going to deploy on this mini though as I am not going to deal with compatibility patches.
But if your Mac is compatible with Big Sur, then I would not expect any problems.
As someone who does music production with literally hundreds of plugins on my two studio machines, I can confirm the biggest pain for me in the last 12 years using MacOS was Mojave to Catalina and the forced jump to 64-bit applications.
As someone mentioned already you can check for this but this for me meant having to buy a whole new version of the MS Office Suite for openers which might not be such an issue for you personally but cost me some cash.
Thankfully most of my music stuff it was just a case of waiting for 64-bit versions and patching them up appropriately, which was a fair chunk of work in installation time, but a one-off hit at least.
Since Catalina I've had no issues with any of the upgrades at all, but then I always patch to the latest version about a month or two before the new version comes out which ensures all my music plugins are usually patched for any early version issues (like GUI changes when they removed OpenGL for example). I have a 2013 Mac Pro and a 2019 Macbook Pro both running Big Sur (for the Pro thats its last OS supported version).
Full time machine backup and ideally if you have it a Carbon Copy Cloner image of your system drive beforehand will make rolling back much less painful should you need it.
My personal take on that is that its way too early to risk Ventura yet. We've even been told not to patch at work yet due to issues with Citrix on it.
Always better to use the previous year for 9 months of the new version being out IMO. Unless you've bought new hardware obviously and then you don't have the option.
I'd say I'm tech savvy but not a real mac user Catalina was the first OS with mid-step security improvement, whilst the recommendation was to use the new frameworks a lot of legacy drivers could still work. Big Sur was the first to enforce the new reality for the app developers, but it had serious issues which have never been fixed (I was mostly annoyed by networking issues), patched a bit, but not really fixed... so if you do upgrade jump ahead to Monterey
Nonetheless, be warned that the architectural changes of the OS makes the hardware seriously under-performing, *depends on the application. Apple decided to close the kernel space, period (it's much like on iOS now), so application which relied on kernel extensions for getting close to real time performance often works like a crap on old Intel based macs. The new M1 architecture is fast enough so people won't notice any issues.
The biggest issue for me was the VmWare Fusion performance. It's really crap since Big Sure.
Like I said before, networking changes are a big issue. Since Catalina, or maybe since Big Sur, all networking software have to use apple framework which has limitations and bugs. Cisco VPN and others don't work well anymore. They can't overcome the limitations enforced by the system. If you must upgrade, jump straight to Monterey, but hey nothing would be exactly the same as before
Now refer to my post before that one saying how I have HUNDREDS of audio plugins....
It often takes vendors 3-6 months or more sometimes to offer full support for the next MacOS version depending how big a vendor they are and how complex their plugins are.
Ok. So my recent update to Ventura is NOT going well. After the update, my machine was left without an Administrator account. (It appears the admin user was converted to a standard user account.) It is now a machine where I have three standard users and cannot modify any significant settings and can not add a new user with Administrative privileges.
The machine was also FileVault encrypted and the Recovery Key is not being accepted when I try to use Recovery or access the file system in single user mode. I cannot enable TimeMachine in order to back up the existing standard users and I cannot use the Migration Assistant in order to move everything to another Mac.
Most likely I will have to manually back up the users to an external drive and reformat and install a version on the OS. A lot of wasted time.