Hiya Y,
Many thanks for the fleet admin perspective! Really good insight.
Is Ventura getting to the point where its ok to load onto your fleet of Macs?
I'm waiting until at least the new year before considering it - We don't want any hassles over xmas break.
The M1 MBA and M1 iMac are running fine at the moment, used for fairly light main stream home use mostly.
I'm trying to be a bit more timely on my future upgrades. I.e. I stayed on Big Sur on the MBA until very late into Monterey's year.... perhaps too long, and I endured an annoying bluetooth crash issue for ages until I finally did the upgrade to Monterey.
Hope you can advise
Martin
Hi Martin!
I think the answer to your question is largely subjective and highly dependent on what all is in your environment and what particular incompatibilities you might have with software. With our software, I do not anticipate any incompatibilities that aren't outright resolved by merely updating the installers we push for things. Not too bad. The more challenging stuff really comes with System Preferences being replaced by System Settings and with additional popups and notifications that users will surely get needlessly alarmed by (triggering an influx of Helpdesk calls). That and the default behavior of Ventura on Apple Silicon Macs to ask for users to enter in their passwords when attaching USB devices. None of that is insurmountable, but it's just work that has to be done and we've all been too busy to do it. It's otherwise likely stable for prime time. I use it at home and have had much better mileage with it than I did with macOS Monterey.
This is actually the best answer to the 2013-Present era question of "When should my company move to the latest macOS release?". Upgrading to the latest release when the next release is announced in June is usually my preference. However, the only caveat to that is that you need to stock up on hardware compatible with your older release. So, right now (and I've said this to my boss and co-workers profusely), we need to build a stockpile of the config of MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) that is the standard issue at my company while we still can (as, if rumors about its replacement coming out in the next month or so are to be believed, we only have that long to be able to buy macOS Monterey compatible 14-inch MacBook Pros). But, if you're able to make sure that you have hardware compatible with the OS you want to keep deploying, then this is a very good strategy that maximizes the chances of always having your users on stable releases.unless you are having issues with your current setup, updating "one year behind" is actually a good solution, as you probably won't find more mature macOSes than their "finalized forms", since the new ones will come with their own new sets of problems.
Monterey wasn't exactly glitch free either when it came out, but it came installed on my systems and i'm reading too many issues with Ventura to even consider installing it yet.
That all being said, when it comes to me personally, I have multiple categories of Macs. I have MacBook Airs that I strictly use for testing, consulting/side-project purposes, and then, in my personal arsenal, I have a group of MacBook Pros that I only will upgrade when things are validated as stable, with a secondary iMac that I will guinea pig my personal environment on when major releases of macOS first come out. The idea is that I'm comfortable testing things with my iMac (with many wipes and re-wipes) after having beta tested the OSes over the summer on the MacBook Airs. Once everything is copacetic, it goes to the MacBook Pros. And, sadly, as far as the first year on an Apple OS goes, our mileage will always vary when it comes to acceptable degrees of stability.