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.
-awlabrador