Thanks to a stupid user error on my part, I found myself unable to retrieve my photos in the Apple Photo app because another machine had updated the library. My Macbook Air was running OS Yosemite and my library had accidentally been attached to an El Capitan iMac. Unfortunately, El Capitan is already history from the App Store so I had to plunge into Mac OS X Sierra.
Now this is my PERSONAL MacBook Air so I didn’t mind being a guinea pig for this new OS. It would not affect my paying work. I would NOT install Mac OS X Sierra on a professional workstation or any machine you use to make a living at this time.
Observations so far:
Overall operation of the entire MB Air is slower and hotter. One fix Apple Support suggested was to restart in Safe Mode to force the machine to clear out a lot of cache and it sounded like it did a bit of cleaning up on the startup overall. After doing that and then restarting the machine it does seem to work marginally better. The machine continues to run hot for no apparently reason. That area of the keyboard just below the “MacBook Air” name is almost continuously hot. Prior to installing Sierra, the machine would only really heat up if I was doing a render in Premiere Pro or After Effects which would be expected. But generally I’m only using this machine for writing and organizing photos.
Battery life is definitely degraded, seems I’ve lost at least an hour to 90 minutes of battery working time on the Air. Now this is probably connected to the hot machine since that’s due to the CPU working hard so something is making the Air work harder than it should.
Mail app is much slower to retrieve incoming mail and slower to open each piece of mail. It also has a weird refreshing behavior each time I open a new piece of mail. The entire screen refreshes when I look at a new piece of mail.
Safari and Opera continually shut down a page due to a non-working extension or other similar error.
Printing to an HP wireless printer is not working, but printing to an Epson is. It’s an HP OfficeJet all in one model that’s about 5 years old. I can’t print to it. But I can print to an Epson all-in-one wireless model we got earlier this year.
I have NOT launched any Adobe software on here yet. Am
On the upside, Wi-Fi connectivity seems to be better. I have several networks at my office and for whatever reason the Air would NEVER connect to one particular network. Now it does.
So if you want to dive into the OS X Sierra pool early, proceed with caution. ALWAYS CHECK WITH SOFTWARE MANUFACTURERS BEFORE UPDATING AN OS. The folks at ToolFarm have created a great Sierra Compatibility Chart that’ll get you started. But just because you don’t see your software on your list, doesn’t mean it will work.