Upgraded my Macs, iPhone, iPad

Stocks A to Z
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Well, I updated almost all my Apple devices, including my Macs to Sequoia. Normally I’d wait until the 0.1 update, but instead, I figured I’d just attack upgrade issues head-on. Being not only multi-Apple-device but also multiplatform (I have two Ubuntu laptops in my office at work), I have options.

On both my home iMac and my work MBP, I had to update Macports. I expected a number of libraries, programs, or utilities not to update properly, and that’s what happened. Plus, I had to change a sources.conf file to point to a different macports repository. I uninstalled the things that didn’t compile, and I figure I’ll have to deal with the issues if it turns out I need them later.

The big headache has been the revisions to iCloud. It seems like a lot of settings simply get turned off or on whenever I upgrade any Mac to a new OS. Actually, what’s worse is that things I had deliberately turned off in iCloud before have been turned on without my consent now.

So, I’ve never used iCloud Photos. I don’t want or need my Photos synced between my Macs. I keep work photos on my work Mac, say, not family vacation photos. Also, there was a time when people weren’t sure of the security of their photos on iCloud and also had a difficulty getting them off, so I just decided never to use iCloud Photos.

With the Sequoia upgrade, I found out (two days later) that iCloud Photos was turned on for my Macs. I turned it off. It’s hard to tell what happened, but while the work Mac definitely doesn’t have every photo that’s on the home Mac, there are certainly a lot of family photos on the work Mac that I’m pretty sure I didn’t put there myself.

Similarly, Passwords was on on both my Macs. For me, that’s a huge problem, because I have always segregated all my most important passwords between work and home with Keychains. It’s an extra little bit of security, e.g. so I don’t access my personal financial stuff from my work Mac, and if it’s ever stolen or compromised, there are fewer personal footprints there. Also, I don’t fully trust Apple with my secure information – there was a time when elements from my keychain and those from my family members’ keychains got mixed together on our login accounts on a shared Mac. I have no idea how that happened, but I certainly didn’t go around entering all those passwords on my family’s accounts or vice versa. I concluded it was likely a leak somewhere in iCloud or whatever Apple had at the time, or maybe some glitch during an OS upgrade, but I couldn’t figure out a mechanism. Whatever the case, I definitely ditched blindly trusting Apple.

Another thing that got hosed in the Sequoia upgrade is my separate collection of Safari bookmarks. Again, I had separate bookmarks for work and for home, and I kept them off iCloud. Now, after the Sequoia upgrade, I found they’d been turned back on on iCloud, and all my work bookmarks are mixed with my home bookmarks. It’s less critical than mixing together my passwords, but it’s more irritating, because I use them all the time. Suddenly, my bookmark menus have ballooned, including all the folders, and a lot of the bookmarks seem to have been mixed together rather than sorted by their original machine.

:angry:

-awlabrador

3 Likes
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Oh, here’s another one: I had an AppleID long, long before Apple came out with their unified online services – iTools, .Mac, MobileMe, and now iCloud. I used it for purchases, mainly, and also for accessing the developer tools.

So, when Apple came out with their services, I ended up getting a .Mac-based Apple ID. Or iTools. It was more or less required.

But, because I had already had so much invested through the other Apple ID, I maintained the original one for purchases (e.g. iTunes, music, movies, books, and eventually including the Apple One services) while keeping the iCloud ID for the free services, like e-mail, syncing, etc.

Apple doesn’t allow merging or combining Apple IDs. There’s apparently no way to move my iCloud services over to the older ID, and if I were to move my purchasing over to the new ID, it looks like I lose access to the media purchases I made with the old one. There doesn’t seem to be a way to merge purchases seemlessly.

So, I’ve maintained the two Apple IDs for years, and Apple has long allowed doing so.

However, when I upgraded to Sequoia, some of the paid services apparently moved over to the iCloud Apple ID (e.g. TV channel subscriptions), while others (e.g. media) stayed with the original purchasing Apple ID.

I only noticed when all the tv channels disappeared from the TV application on my iMac. Luckily, I caught it in time before I started making purchases with the iCloud Apple ID.

Also, trying to change back to the purchasing Apple ID didn’t stick via the System Preferences panels. I had to quit it and switch over via, say, the TV application.

[Edit: This Apple ID mixup doesn’t appear to have happened on my MBP.]

-awlabrador

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Whoa, sorry to see your headaches, a very much more complex setup than I’ve dealt with over the years… Work and personal/family links never crossed her, work was on a PC, WinNT, far from any Apple connection, even my DW’s setup was a split, home iMac, work PC… Haven’t seen any AppleTV or iCloud issues myself, other than my ‘office’ TV wants me to update/replace the Xfinity/Comcast box, unrelated to the Mac updates…

Best of luck, in any case, being retired since '02 has simplified things, ridding us of the last PC, better, as it was a magnet for attacks, gone, the HD destroyed…

weco

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Thanks. So far, it looks like my mission-critical, super-important stuff on my work MBP still works just fine, and the updates to the software from Macports seem to have been worked through. I usually write down issues during upgrades in the Notes app, so I’ll probably be able to figure out which uninstalled ports need to be reinstalled (if possible) if or when it turns out I need them.

It’ll be a while before I’m entirely sure my financial stuff on my iMac is entirely safe.

Except for the mixing up of Passwords – which I find almost unforgivable – the rest of the issues are just big irritations, not show-stoppers like broken critical software would be.

For example, the tendency for my Settings (especially iCloud settings) to get changed apparently affected mainly my Intel iMac (and my iPhone and iPad) and not my M1 MBP. For a specific example, my Bookmarks used not to be synced across my iMac and my MBP. For a while, I synced the Bookmarks on the MBP (to iCloud, the iPhone, and the iPad), but I turned it off some time ago for whatever reason. When syncing got turned on for the iMac during this upgrade, a lot of Bookmarks there got mixed in with old work Bookmarks from the MBP, iPhone, and iPad, but it didn’t get turned on on the MBP. So those work Bookmarks on the MBP are still clean, which means that in principle I can go onto the iMac (and iPhone and iPad) and remove them by comparing one side with the other. That’ll be a lot of work, but it’s an option.

Anyway, I post these headaches here not to complain – well, yes, to complain – but also to give people a heads-up before upgrading and maybe to document some things, like I do for myself in Notes. Also, some things might not affect everyone, like how some things affected my iMac but not my MBP.

-awlabrador

2 Likes
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This is worth posting, and I’m embarrassed I hadn’t thought of it before:

I restored my Bookmarks.plist file to September 2 from my Time Machine backup for my iMac.

Problem solved. Same for my MBP.

-awlabrador

1 Like
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Excellent, I bet we all forget the handiness of Time Machine, it just chugs away in the background…

I hadn’t Opened the Console App in a long time, looking at errors, crash reports, none seem to cause any problems, but it’s always surprising at all the activity going on behind the scene we usually use. I’ve chased some in the past, only to find they can be ignored, so I don’t bother now… Lots of internal audits, cross checks we don’t really need to know about unless we were a developer…

weco