Their new product launch videos make everything look so appealing :-). I’ve stopped watching those and it has gone a long way to suppressing the desire for new “candy”.

--
Bev in TX

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--
Bev in TX

On Jan 19, 2025, at 12:33 PM, Andrew Buc <abuc@...> wrote:

About a year ago I found that my 2012 Mac mini had slowed down. I’d often get the beachball. I had my Mac tech check the system out. He couldn’t find anything wrong and said it was fairly normal for new versions of software to run slowly on older systems.

It’s “normal” on Windows. It is abnormal for the Macintosh. Your Mac might run slowly for a few days after upgrading to a new version of the Mac OS, because it’s doing things like re-indexing your hard drive for Spotlight in the background, but that is only very temporary.

It’s a myth that new(er) versions of the Mac OS use more RAM and/or slow down your older Mac. Once again, probably because that’s very common on Windows. But each new version of the Mac OS tends to use *less* RAM, due to improved memory management, and they tend to actually run *faster* then earlier versions.

The one big exception is if your older Mac has an internal rotating disk hard drive and it gets re-formatted from HFS+ to APFS in the process. That will indeed slow things down precipitously. Mojave and later will do that non-optionally.

See:

Macintosh Slowdown Solutions




__________________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Essential But Hard To Find Macintosh Software and Advice

__________________________________________________

Exactly, Bev. One size does not fit all. It requires a case by case determination.

Since sells hardware, Apple does its best to make the new eye-candy as appealing as possible, but not to make many new features backwards compatible, thereby requiring new hardware.

Brent

On my iPhone Xr

On 19 Jan 2025, at 11:03, Randy B. Singer via groups.io wrote:

On Jan 19, 2025, at 10:14 AM, Jim Saklad via groups.io wrote:

High Sierra is 7? years old.

There are things some of us want to do that it cannot do.

I’m already hearing reports that Safari under High Sierra doesn’t always work properly. It’s the same for Brave.

I was definitely experiencing that with Safari under High Sierra, not so much with Brave. I started using Firefox for some websites. It wasn’t entirely satisfactory, but it was the lesser evil. Now that I’m on Sequoia, I’m going back to viewing those sites with Safari.

About a year ago I found that my 2012 Mac mini had slowed down. I’d often get the beachball. I had my Mac tech check the system out. He couldn’t find anything wrong and said it was fairly normal for new versions of software to run slowly on older systems.

As expected, my new M4 Mac mini talks to my iPhone and iPad much better than the old Mac did.

On Jan 19, 2025, at 12:44?PM, Brent via groups.io <whodo678@...> wrote:

Yeah, and most of those new things are nice, but just eye-candy, not life critical tasks. So, it you are not rolling in the bucks…

Everyone has different needs and requirements. Sometimes those include “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”, but not always. AFAIC, there is no one size fits all.

Those needing to take advantage of Accessibility features would most probably find that they continue to improve over time. That’s one of the reasons why I keep my OS up to date on all of my devices. Some of those only work on Apple silicon Macs (mine is Intel). On the other side of the coin, my husband detests continually having to deal with OS UI changes, so he lags behind. We both do what is needed to accomplish our objectives.

--
Bev in TX

On Jan 19, 2025, at 10:14 AM, Jim Saklad via groups.io <jimdoc@...> wrote:

High Sierra is 7? years old.

There are things some of us want to do that it cannot do.

I’m already hearing reports that Safari under High Sierra doesn’t always work properly. It’s the same for Brave.

I agree with the sentiment that “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” in that some folks are too quick to update to the latest version of the Mac OS, and they end up fighting some bug that needs to be patched. But if you let your Mac’s OS get more than five or six years out of date, you run the risk of some of your software becoming outdated.


__________________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Essential But Hard To Find Macintosh Software and Advice

__________________________________________________

Brent

On my iPhone Xr

On Jan 19, 2025, at 10:19, Jim Saklad via groups.io <jimdoc@...> wrote:

?Randy B. Singer wrote:

UPDATE!

David Nanian of Shirt Pocket Software says that SuperDuper! can once again create bootable clone backups under Beta 2 of macOS 15.3. So, one can presume that once the final verison of macOS 15.3 is released, folks will be back in business for creating bootable clones.

However, you can create a bootable clone in any case by first using Apple's OS Installer program to install a copy of the macOS on your external drive, and then using something like SuperDuper! to do data-only clone backups to the drive.

I have been making bootable clones using SuperDuper! for years; I have not tried to do so since Dave Nanian’s warning about macOS 15.2.

However, since I *HAVE* a bootable clone of 15.1, I can boot from it and then update its macOS version to the latest, then reboot to my internal drive, and use SD! to update the data partition.

That what makes this what I call a “problem in thinking”, not a real problem.

You can still get the same results, you just have to take a different path to get there, as both Randy and Jim S have explained work arounds for this temporary glitch. Unfortunately, you may have to think for 2 seconds.

Or to look at it another way, they run the headline, “The sky is falling!”, to sell more newspapers.

Must have been a slow news day.

Brent

On Jan 19, 2025, at 10:14, Jim Saklad via groups.io <jimdoc@...> wrote:

?John Mills wrote:

Yet one more reason all our computers are still running just fine on High Sierra.

Why use a 2017 macOS?
Why not a 2002 version?

Mine is running fine on Sequoia, and has been for 4+ months.

High Sierra is 7? years old.

There are things some of us want to do that it cannot do.

--
Jim Saklad

Yeah, and most of those new things are nice, but just eye-candy, not life critical tasks. So, it you are not rolling in the bucks…

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I agree with John, if you can truly live without the latest eye-candy, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. ?

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Randy B. Singer wrote:

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John Mills?wrote:

Yet one more reason all our computers are still running just fine on High Sierra.

Mine is running fine on Sequoia, and has been for 4+ months.

High Sierra is 7? years old.

There are things some of us want to do that it cannot do.

On Jan 18, 2025, at 6:45 PM, Randy B. Singer via groups.io <randy@...> wrote:

There is a very interesting article about this in TidBits:

UPDATE!

David Nanian of Shirt Pocket Software says that SuperDuper! can once again create bootable clone backups under Beta 2 of macOS 15.3. So, one can presume that once the final verison of macOS 15.3 is released, folks will be back in business for creating bootable clones.

However, you can create a bootable clone in any case by first using Apple's OS Installer program to install a copy of the macOS on your external drive, and then using something like SuperDuper! to do data-only clone backups to the drive. See:

Install macOS on an external storage device and use it as a startup disk




__________________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Essential But Hard To Find Macintosh Software and Advice

__________________________________________________

On Jan 18, 2025, at 8:23 AM, Andrew Buc <abuc@...> wrote:

More detail under “You’re a mean one” on the SuperDuper blog:

There is a very interesting article about this in TidBits:

It’s Time to Move On from Bootable Backups


It’s not just SuperDuper!, it’s all software that makes bootable clone backups.

However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t make a bootable clone backup, it just means that you can’t do it simply by running a program such as SuperDuper! You can still create a bootable backup by using Apple’s OS Installer program to put a bootable copy of the OS on your external backup drive. From then on you can simply use your utility (such as SuperDuper!) to do a data-partition only backup.


__________________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Essential But Hard To Find Macintosh Software and Advice

__________________________________________________

More detail under “You’re a mean one” on the SuperDuper blog:

I found this out the hard way. :(

On 15 Jan 2025, at 7:28, Bayswater via groups.io wrote:

Looks like your problem is solved, but FWIW, I got one from a local store that does their own line of equipment, and is not available outside of western Canada. ?As for compatibility, I mean the protocol not the type of connector. ?So if the computer supports USB 3.2, then so should the hub. ?The important point is that it should say on the box what it works with and that you can’t assume it will work otherwise despite how obvious it seems.

Both the new and old hubs work with USB 3.1. The old hub has a USB-B port. Now I’m thinking of getting a 3.1 USB-C to USB-B cable and trying it out. If it works, I’ll be able to keep using the 16-port hub. If not, I’ll be out $10 and have a USB-C to USB-B cable in case I ever need one.

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As I said earlier, a few days ago I switched from my 2012 Mac mini to my new M4 Mac mini. When I connected my Time Machine drive to the M4 Mac, I got a popup asking me what I wanted to do about the existing backups on the drive. I don't remember all the choices, but I went with "keep existing backups" (or however it was worded), as I figured it wouldn't be a bad thing to have them.

But now the Mac is telling me that there isn't enough space on the Time Machine drive to make new backups. In the attached screen grab from Finder, "Andrew Buc's Computer" is the old Mac, "Mac mini" is the new one. If I expand Andrew Buc's Computer, it contains backups going back to June 2024. The odds that I'm going to need to restore an old file are slim, and I could just delete that folder, but I'd prefer not to. Any thoughts? Thanks.