I am finally taking the plunge and upgrading to Mohave (public beta.) I am running Sierra right now and have to waited till now to upgrade because i heard there were some bugs with the new file system and Fusion Drives (& Time Machine too.) Will my 32 bit apps (ex. Picasa) still work? (i thought i read that they will still work but they will have a warning label when opening them. Will all my backups in Time Machine still be available to me? Can you hide the sidebar (in certain views) in the Photos app?
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Questions before I upgrade to Mohave (from Sierra)
- Thread starter ToddJ
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It Depends.
If your apps require Carbon, the writing has been on the wall for Carbon since Leopard (ahhhhh!) so they should have been updated for Cocoa by now. Carbon and QTKit have been largely vacated from Mojave. ***EDIT: though Carbon support has gotten better in the later Mojave betas, it's still likely to be thrown away by the time of macOS 10.15. Can't tell you what will work until you try.***
If they're 32 bit Cocoa apps, then Mojave does have a compatibility mode for them. That will slow down Mojave, and that mode won't be around for whatever macOS follows Mojave.
You might find it best to stay on High Sierra, depending on your needs. Or you could put High Sierra in a VM ala VMware Fusion, although that solution will only work if your apps don't rely heavily on OpenGL or Quartz Extreme.
If your apps require Carbon, the writing has been on the wall for Carbon since Leopard (ahhhhh!) so they should have been updated for Cocoa by now. Carbon and QTKit have been largely vacated from Mojave. ***EDIT: though Carbon support has gotten better in the later Mojave betas, it's still likely to be thrown away by the time of macOS 10.15. Can't tell you what will work until you try.***
If they're 32 bit Cocoa apps, then Mojave does have a compatibility mode for them. That will slow down Mojave, and that mode won't be around for whatever macOS follows Mojave.
You might find it best to stay on High Sierra, depending on your needs. Or you could put High Sierra in a VM ala VMware Fusion, although that solution will only work if your apps don't rely heavily on OpenGL or Quartz Extreme.
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Yeah, sorry for that confusion on my behalf! Sierra has been a bit slow to get security updates lately, so it might not be in the best interest to stay on that version for everyday computing.
The VM solution still remains; Sierra works OK in that setting, mod the same caveats about graphics support being software only, meaning OpenGL or Quartz Extreme are still a no go.
The VM solution still remains; Sierra works OK in that setting, mod the same caveats about graphics support being software only, meaning OpenGL or Quartz Extreme are still a no go.
Regarding using VMware for macOS: how do you get it to perform decently? Every time I try to make a macOS VM on my rMBP (2015, base model 15”), it performs like utter ****. I usually allocate at least 6-8GB and 4 cores.
Any tips?
Mac OS X Leopard Server performs really well in a VM, but starting with Snow Leopard, each successive version of Mac OS X/OS X/macOS leans heavier on pushing more rendering work to APIs that prefer to work on a GPU. Like OpenGL, Core Animation, OpenCL, etc.
Since that's translated to the CPU through a series of abstraction layers when you run it on a VM (the OpenGL 2.1 software-rendering driver, Core Image on software, etc), that's where you're seeing utter four star performance.
(This isn't entirely true. For instance, 10.8 performs better than 10.7, but this trend towards leveraging GPUs usually holds true for most macOS updates. I think El Cap was also an improvement for VMs from Yosemite, but I don't know why.)
My best advice is, with exceptions (El Cap preferred instead of Mavericks + Yosemite, Mountain Lion preferred instead of Lion), use the earliest possible major version of macOS that you can in a VM for the best performance.
This is an area that's absolutely worth requesting as a desired feature request in Feedback Assistant or (for devs) as a Radar. I've been told that there are Apple engineers who want to make the state of graphics support for macOS in a VM better, but that they need more Radars to escalate that effort.
Since that's translated to the CPU through a series of abstraction layers when you run it on a VM (the OpenGL 2.1 software-rendering driver, Core Image on software, etc), that's where you're seeing utter four star performance.
(This isn't entirely true. For instance, 10.8 performs better than 10.7, but this trend towards leveraging GPUs usually holds true for most macOS updates. I think El Cap was also an improvement for VMs from Yosemite, but I don't know why.)
My best advice is, with exceptions (El Cap preferred instead of Mavericks + Yosemite, Mountain Lion preferred instead of Lion), use the earliest possible major version of macOS that you can in a VM for the best performance.
This is an area that's absolutely worth requesting as a desired feature request in Feedback Assistant or (for devs) as a Radar. I've been told that there are Apple engineers who want to make the state of graphics support for macOS in a VM better, but that they need more Radars to escalate that effort.
I appreciate the response here. I wasn’t sure if it was just my hardware, or the fact that VMs will inherently have a drop in performance.
I don’t have a true need to run macOS VMs, but I just like to try our new software before installing it. For example, I tried to test out the Mojave beta using a VM, but it was so laggy and slow that I gave up.
Will file a radar report for sure!