So, because of the MS Office death knell on July 19, I bought an iMac (refurb) with the M4 chip, four ports, and one TB drive. Nice machine. Very fast. However, jumping from Catalina to Tahoe (26.4) is taking some getting used to. Lots of things to configure. Increased screen size over the old machine is significant. I don’t love the new rounded corners look but I don’t hate it either. Configuration is taking a while since I did not migrate my apps but decided to install fresh. New/updated software is going to cost some money. Office alone was nearly $200 and has the absolutely worst, most annoying licensing procedure anywhere (I hate them even more now). A few brief comments:
Thunderbolt 4 ports, so fast compared to the USB-3 on my old iMac. Appreciate that.
Don’t mind the power brick with the incorporated Ethernet jack. Setup was simple.
I’ve had to enter my password far more than I would have liked for various operations.
Figuring out where settings are has taken a while, but I more or less know where they are now.
Not all my mail is here since I didn’t migrate. I may simply drag my “On my Mac” mail folders on the old machine to the TWC section of the inbox so they’re available to all devices. Simpler that way.
How can I easily import my Stickies notes? I can’t find a way to do that simply unless I do it individual note by individual note.
Printer is going to be an issue. I had to order a USB-to-Type-C connector so I could test it. It’s an older Brother DCP-8080DN (scanner + copier). Very good laser printer. Works fine. I won’t know until I attach it to this machine but is there a driver for this printer on Tahoe?
Safari is okay but I’m still figuring it out. I installed Firefox as well but I prefer the old interface on Catalina to the Tahoe Firefox, where I can’t seem to find anything. Finally got my Favorites links up on the Safari toolbar.
Other Apple apps are familiar.
Desktop icons don’t automatically sort. You have to use Clean-up By….
Spotlight is fast although it looks in far too many places. I deselected Safari, for example, assuming that meant it will also do a Web search for things. If not the case, maybe I can turn it back on although I don’t see what use it will be.
Using default resolution and standard iMac color spectrum.
Mail was very easy to set up, basically email and password.
A workaround for moving or backing up info stored in Stickies:
On my iMac running Ventura, I used File > Export All to Notes in Stickies’ menu bar to move all my Stickies to the Notes app. The resulting folder, “Imported Notes”, can be viewed on any iCloud-connected device or dragged to the On My Mac category if cloud-access to the info isn’t desired.
Yes, I tried that and did the export but I cannot find the Notes Folder on my iCloud account. I would like to import the data into Stickies on Tahoe. I can see the exported file on the Notes app in iCloud but can’t do much with it. There doesn’t seem to be a way to save it as a file that Stickies can import.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that given Apple’s lack of updates or changes to Notes over many, many years, I simply left the exported Stickies in Notes. I don’t want any of my Stickies data stranded or lost if (when) Apple decides to do away with Stickies. In any case, I prefer Notes now due to the ability to lock individual notes and the option to share or not share notes via iCloud.
The printer should be fine. In the worst case, set it up using the Generic Postscript or PCL drivers. (Go through the normal motions of setting up the printer, and choose one of the generic drivers from the “Use:” menu in the “Add Printer” window.
Nonetheless, you may see better results by downloading the Catalina CUPS printer drivers using similar steps to those I suggested in the scanner thread.
As @mHm wrote, this printer has Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I’d use that connection before trying any kind of USB connection. In addition to being easier, it will let anything else on your LAN use it without your Mac acting as as server.
As for compatibility, the official supported OS list only goes up to macOS 10.15 (Catalina). But that’s not the whole truth.
It can print using PCL and PostScript (which they call BR-Script). So even if macOS has no compatible drivers, you should be able to use generic PCL, PS or AirPrint drivers with it.
The copier feature clearly doesn’t require a computer
The ability to scan to FTP should work with any computer that runs an FTP server. They aren’t typically hard to set up.
Proper scanning (via an app) may not work if Brother doesn’t have any available drivers.
The manual says that Brother provides a TWAIN driver. But that’s useless, since macOS hasn’t supported TWAIN for quite some time. I don’t see an ICA (image capture) driver available on the Brother web site.
Definitely look to see if any third-party scanner apps work with it. VueScan has support. It’s not free, but you can download a trial copy to decide if it’s worth paying for.
There is one, but you have to click on an extra link to find it. I posted instructions in the related scanner thread. It’s from 2019, but it installs fine on a Tahoe virtual machine. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Brother scanner handy to verify that it actually works. There’s also a 2019-era printer driver available by the same method.
Thanks. The print function seems to work fine with the PCL driver that Tahoe supplies. I haven’t run into any problems with it yet. There is an ICA driver on the Brother site as mentioned above. I am going to try that later. Yes, I looked at VueScan yesterday and they support this scanner. But the software license is about $95. For the time being, I can still scan to my old iMac by just moving the USB cable back to that machine. Not ideal but a workaround for the time being.
I’ve been fortunate in that my Stickies notes have migrated successfully over the years, so I can’t vouch for manually migrating them in bulk. That said, the contents of Stickies notes are stored in rtfd files in the ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Stickies/Data/Library/Stickies folder. Supposedly, if you move that folder from the Catalina system to the Tahoe system, that will accomplish a manual migration in one step. Some sources also say that if you have a ~/Library/StickiesDatabase file on the Catalina system, you should copy that to the Tahoe system, too.