"Should I Update My Old Mac from High Sierra to Mojave?"
If you rely on old hardware or on old software you can't update, I suggest you leave Mojave alone. You're likely to run into a number of more or less serious incompatibilities without gaining much to compensate. In my own case, I had enough problems that I wound up downgrading from Mojave to High Sierra -- the first time I've ever had to revert to an earlier version of the operating system.
Here are a few specific reasons you might want to stick to High Sierra.
1. Sketchy support for older Macs. With my 2010 Mac Pro 5,1, I had to temporarily disconnect all internal drives except the boot drive before I could install or reinstall Mojave. Otherwise, the installer would stop partway through with an error message.
Also, Mojave required a firmware update that caused some sort of error with the saving of startup disk info. TinkerTool System identifies it as a problem with NVRAM, and though the Mac starts up on the correct disk, shutdown times can be unusually slow when switching startup disks. (This may actually have come with the firmware update in a later version of High Sierra, but since I did one right after the other, I can't be sure which update caused the problem.)
Note that this problem persists even if you go back to High Sierra. And as far as I can tell, there's no way to revert the firmware.
2. Sketchy support for older graphics cards. My AMD Radeon 7950 is on the list of graphics cards that Mojave officially supports, but its bootup screen showed weird purple streaks, and partway through startup, I got a few seconds of complete blackout -- neither of which the card gives me with High Sierra. It made me wonder what other incompatilities were lurking.
3. Sketchy support for older printers. While trying to figure out why BBEdit was suddenly printing with uneven font weight, I discovered that my HP Laserjet P2055 was officially NOT supported in Mojave. Driver support ended with High Sierra, apparently because Mojave's changes in printing were too much trouble to update for. Seriously, have you ever heard of a functioning LaserJet that went obsolete due to lack of a driver update?
4. Sketchy support for older software. For example, Adobe Photoshop's Save for Web no longer saved its current settings between Photoshop sessions, making you reenter them each time. This was fixed in a Photoshop CC 2019 update -- eight months after the issue was reported! -- but it will NEVER be fixed in earlier versions, including Photoshop CS6, like my wife is using.
The deal breaker for me, though, was discovering that Microsoft Word 2011 could no longer properly handle some GIFs when in .doc files or while saving to HTML. While that might sound like a minor problem, and while I could have resolved it by updating Word, I rely on that particular file format and Word version for producing Kindle books -- and since the app was completely rewritten in later versions, adjusting my workflow would have been a huge effort. At this point, I decided it was simplest to go back to High Sierra.
5. Difficulty in reverting. Luckily, all I had to do to revert my Mac Pro was switch to the partition where I still had High Sierra installed and then move over my recent email and redownload some app updates. It took most of a day, but it was manageable. But for my MacBook and my wife's, it was a different story.
It turns out there are just enough changes in the file systems between High Sierra and Mojave to cause trouble for High Sierra. Just replacing my Mojave system files with High Sierra files from a backup didn't work well enough, because the disk still had what High Sierra's Disk Utility believed were "invalid internal_flags."
Disk Utility's notices were warnings only, and I can't be sure those errors would ever have actually caused trouble -- but I didn't want to wait to find out. To get rid of them, I wound up erasing the Macbook drives entirely and then restoring ALL files. And that's pretty nervewracking. (Especially when the MacBooks then couldn't locate a bootable drive, and I had to use Startup Disk on the Recovery partition to fix it.)
Apple, I feel, did a real disservice by not putting off abandoning OpenCL graphics till the end of official support for 32-bit software and the old Mac Pro towers. The result is that you might think you can safely upgrade when you really can't. And if I'd known how tricky it could be to go back to High Sierra, I would never have tried.
For me, High Sierra may well be the end of the road. I updated to Mojave mainly because I was worried about eventually having to buy a new Mac with that MacOS version. But after checking on eBay, I have a new solution. I'll just buy another 2010 Mac Pro!
Update, Aug. 5, 2019 -- Some time after reverting to High Sierra, I discovered I had also lost access to the Recovery volume from the High Sierra partition on my Mac Pro, apparently because it had Mojave software. The solution was to reinstall High Sierra over the existing installation. This replaced the Recovery software with High Sierra's version.
Here are a few specific reasons you might want to stick to High Sierra.
1. Sketchy support for older Macs. With my 2010 Mac Pro 5,1, I had to temporarily disconnect all internal drives except the boot drive before I could install or reinstall Mojave. Otherwise, the installer would stop partway through with an error message.
Also, Mojave required a firmware update that caused some sort of error with the saving of startup disk info. TinkerTool System identifies it as a problem with NVRAM, and though the Mac starts up on the correct disk, shutdown times can be unusually slow when switching startup disks. (This may actually have come with the firmware update in a later version of High Sierra, but since I did one right after the other, I can't be sure which update caused the problem.)
Note that this problem persists even if you go back to High Sierra. And as far as I can tell, there's no way to revert the firmware.
2. Sketchy support for older graphics cards. My AMD Radeon 7950 is on the list of graphics cards that Mojave officially supports, but its bootup screen showed weird purple streaks, and partway through startup, I got a few seconds of complete blackout -- neither of which the card gives me with High Sierra. It made me wonder what other incompatilities were lurking.
3. Sketchy support for older printers. While trying to figure out why BBEdit was suddenly printing with uneven font weight, I discovered that my HP Laserjet P2055 was officially NOT supported in Mojave. Driver support ended with High Sierra, apparently because Mojave's changes in printing were too much trouble to update for. Seriously, have you ever heard of a functioning LaserJet that went obsolete due to lack of a driver update?
4. Sketchy support for older software. For example, Adobe Photoshop's Save for Web no longer saved its current settings between Photoshop sessions, making you reenter them each time. This was fixed in a Photoshop CC 2019 update -- eight months after the issue was reported! -- but it will NEVER be fixed in earlier versions, including Photoshop CS6, like my wife is using.
The deal breaker for me, though, was discovering that Microsoft Word 2011 could no longer properly handle some GIFs when in .doc files or while saving to HTML. While that might sound like a minor problem, and while I could have resolved it by updating Word, I rely on that particular file format and Word version for producing Kindle books -- and since the app was completely rewritten in later versions, adjusting my workflow would have been a huge effort. At this point, I decided it was simplest to go back to High Sierra.
5. Difficulty in reverting. Luckily, all I had to do to revert my Mac Pro was switch to the partition where I still had High Sierra installed and then move over my recent email and redownload some app updates. It took most of a day, but it was manageable. But for my MacBook and my wife's, it was a different story.
It turns out there are just enough changes in the file systems between High Sierra and Mojave to cause trouble for High Sierra. Just replacing my Mojave system files with High Sierra files from a backup didn't work well enough, because the disk still had what High Sierra's Disk Utility believed were "invalid internal_flags."
Disk Utility's notices were warnings only, and I can't be sure those errors would ever have actually caused trouble -- but I didn't want to wait to find out. To get rid of them, I wound up erasing the Macbook drives entirely and then restoring ALL files. And that's pretty nervewracking. (Especially when the MacBooks then couldn't locate a bootable drive, and I had to use Startup Disk on the Recovery partition to fix it.)
Apple, I feel, did a real disservice by not putting off abandoning OpenCL graphics till the end of official support for 32-bit software and the old Mac Pro towers. The result is that you might think you can safely upgrade when you really can't. And if I'd known how tricky it could be to go back to High Sierra, I would never have tried.
For me, High Sierra may well be the end of the road. I updated to Mojave mainly because I was worried about eventually having to buy a new Mac with that MacOS version. But after checking on eBay, I have a new solution. I'll just buy another 2010 Mac Pro!
Update, Aug. 5, 2019 -- Some time after reverting to High Sierra, I discovered I had also lost access to the Recovery volume from the High Sierra partition on my Mac Pro, apparently because it had Mojave software. The solution was to reinstall High Sierra over the existing installation. This replaced the Recovery software with High Sierra's version.
Comments
Post a Comment