My experience helping people in Apple’s Support Communities is that anyone who makes their living using their Mac in the area of print publishing or graphic design (which usually involves 3rd party pro apps and fonts) would be taking a lot of risks to upgrade without a bootable clone of a working earlier MacOS to revert to if needed.
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And I remember very well the potential loss of past email that some early Catalina adopters reported.
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17.2 has fixed some long-standing Books layout problems I had, but it still won’t let me drag multiple books at once, which would be a big help. (I want my books sorted by author surname, which means I have to sort them manually, so dragging multiple books would be a huge plus.)
Annoyingly, Books on MacOS used to be able to do this, but the capability suddenly vanished a few versions ago.
The digital clock is a widget to replace the calendar in StandBy.
Really regret updating one of my Apple TVs. Not only is it harder to find my content, all the marks indicating that I watched an episode were lost in the move to the AppleTV app. Not a big deal for current seasons, but the Seinfeld box set my son and I have been slowly working our way through…
Just to be clear, I don’t recommend that anyone update immediately like I do. I think people should wait at least a month or two for major updates and at least a week or two for minor ones, though I sometimes recommend quicker updates for zero-day security exploits.
But I am saying that as someone who lives and dies by his Mac and iPhone working, immediate updates have never been a problem for me.
I’m not sure what this poor quality control record is. When you look back at the actual bugs listed in Apple release notes from this season’s updates, there are barely a handful. Nearly all the notes related to security fixes (which are bugs, I suppose, though not ones that users have experienced) or promised features. Howard Oakley just published a list of a few bugs that are known, including the Contacts printing bug I wrote about. But we’re just not talking about vast numbers of problems that everyone who has updated is living with.
That’s not to say that people don’t have individual problems, but those are a different beast because they may revolve around highly unusual configurations, specific corruption, or other variables that Apple couldn’t have known about.
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That is, of course, just the bugs that Apple will publicly admit. Most of the bugs I have reported that were eventually fixed were never actually officially recognized.
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Interestingly, the Apple Press Release for Journal quotes the founder of Day One. They’ve incorporated the Journal Suggestions API so you get suggestions directly into Day One.
Why I find this intriguing is because Day One will allow you to start a journal entry on the phone (using Apple’s suggestions) then finish the entries on a Mac - something I can’t do with the Journal app. It’s also quite affordable.
Paradoxically, Apple releasing the Journal app has made me more likely to use Day One.
One anomaly I have found since updating to MacOS 14.2 – in Apple Mail, the search function no longer works – it just does nothing. This makes life considerably harder. I went to Time Machine to see if I could reload an older version of Mail, or at least verify that 14.2 brought a new version of Mail, only to discover what others have apparently found, that Time Machine does not back up the Mail program. Have any others found a problem with search in Mail?
Welcome Ken.
Try booting into Safe mode, then shutdown and restart with a normal boot. It solved the broken Mail search for me. I picked up this tip from the web as the Mail search issue appears to have affected quite a few people.
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One anomaly I have found since updating to MacOS 14.2 – in Apple Mail, the search function no longer works – it just does nothing.
I have had search go non-functional in Mail (more than once) and discovered that it was excluded (unchecked) in Spotlight’s Preferences/Settings. Just rechecking the Search Results / Mail & Messages box has fixed it.
There is one change that caught me by surprise in watchOS 10.2. I am slowly recovering from some knee issues and an ankle injury so I cannot run as long as I used to, so I frequently do a running workout for part of my route and finish with a walking workout (3.8 miles running 1.2 miles walking for example.) watchOS’s workout app allows you to start a new workout directly while you are in another workout type.
watchOS 10.0 change the behavior from pervious versions. Rather than swiping right to access a series of controls and pressing the “new” button, the “new” button was accessed first by pressing the “end” button. This seemed senseless really, and it was despite the fact that removing the “new” button left a space on that screen of workout controls.
Unfortunately that created some muscle memory for me, because I didn’t notice that 10.2 reverted back to a the “new” button back on the list of controls. I found out the hard way the other day when I ended a workout when I really wanted to start a walking workout.
This change was not listed in the change log for 10.2.
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Only once regretted an update, when an OS update borked FCP. Since then I’ve checked key app discussion fora prior to updating.
Never been an issue since.
My Apple TVs for some reason always lag way behind on updates, but the described upgrade to the TV app may be reason why I switch the home button to open the TV app first rather than the Home screen. The TV app still doesn’t integrate with Netflix, but I’m watching fewer and fewer things on Netflix these days anyway. I’m going to force the update on at least one of my Apple TVs and try out the new interface.
I just installed iOS 17.2 and found a setting that hasn’t gotten much press. You can now specify what sound you want for the default alert. In one of the previous iOS updates the default alert had been changed by Apple to a soft ‘pop’ sound called ‘Rebound’, that wasn’t nearly significant enough for me, with no option to change it. I just read on MacRumors (see item 26) that we can now use Settings>Sounds & Haptics to set ‘Default Alert’. This is in addition to our existing sound settings for texts, mail alerts, calendar alerts, etc. The default alert is the sound my preferred weather app uses to alert me to severe weather and ‘pop’ just wasn’t noticeable enough. I now have it set to something that gets my attention. IMHO, this is a great improvement by Apple.
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Has Apple re-introduced the ability to choose the default sound for countdown timers? They removed it in 17.0, much to my annoyance.
It has for me, in the sense that whatever sound you choose remains the default until you choose another. That is how I understood it to work before
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Dave W.
My (single) timer has always used a custom tone (music I edited) and that didn’t change when I installed 17.0 (or 17.2). I just created some timers and this is what I found. If I create a new (second) timer it will use my existing custom tone (call it Tone A) unless I choose a new sound (Tone B). If I create a third timer it will use Tone B unless I change it, and I do have the option to change it if I want.
Right. So here’s just another bug introduced with an update.
None of it is at all “individual” or “highly unusual”. Apple rushed a Sonoma update to release without bothering to properly test it against a standard Sonoma feature: virtualization. Something certainly many Sonoma devs use these days and actually such a common feature that somebody like Howard Oakley posts about it about once a week. So how about we just stop trying to spin failure. This is a plain old bug courtesy of Apple’s bad QC. Or ongoing de-facto public beta. Whatever you want to call it. But it’s yet another one. Care to detail. Where has that gone?
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Ironically, it turns out one of the memory leaks Howard has been complaining about for quite a while might not be a bug after all, but Apple’s intended behavior (caching thumbnails). Perhaps, instead of an actual memory leak or bug (which it apparently really is not), what people should be bemoaning in this case is Apple forcing their view of memory management upon users (thinking of the 8 GB RAM crowd here) without giving them an option. Well, I guess since you can just nuke the Finder to regain that memory, that could be considered Apple’s “option”. 
It’s an interesting read for sure.
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