The upgrade dance
Wednesday, August 11, 2022
I have two Macbook Pros at home. One of them is a 2015 model pass me down from my daughter which I still use for my personal use. The other is a 2018 15” Macbook Pro that I use occasionally but share with my wife. I had written earlier about the joy of features like Universal Control that was first added part-way during the "Monterey” release.
And over the last several months I have been struggling to install the macOS Monterey on top of these two machines. I tried when 12.0 was released last year and it said both these machines did not have enough room in their SSDs to install them, though there was clearly space to do so. Tried again with 12.1 and 12.2 versions to avail. Same challenges. And then I gave up. And stopped trying the updates.
Thankfully, Apple continued to upgrade macOS Big Sur with patches especially for security through to versions 11.6.5 so that helped make sure these had some sense of protection.
And then, finally, 12.5 came by, and suddenly this problem had been fixed. And I was able to finally upgrade both computers to the latest available software. But it took nearly a year to get them working. So much for ease of use and ease of upgrades. But giving them time to work on problems and the fact that they will finally figure out the fringe issues possibly helped.
More than six months after launch I finally got to use Universal control on my 15” MacBook Pro. Golden. But then again, I found that this feature is not supported on my older 13” Macbook Pro. Bummer. It had to be 2016 or later to work. An often made-up cut-off to supporting features, but that is what it was and I had to deal with it.
Also, I found that it is the end of the road for upgrades for my older Macbook and it would be able to get the next version of macOS Ventura which has great features like Stage Manager. Another bummer again. These machines are perfectly fine to last several years from here. I am hoping that Apple will continue the security patches for a couple of years at least so I can continue to get use from them well into 2024 or later. My second-generation iPad Pro is also facing the same fate of missing features though it can upgrade to iOS15.
These seem to be signs of the times. We talk a lot, but we are not really able to reduce, reuse and recycle things as much as we would love to. And that is a real shame.