Saturday, October 18, 2014

Going To Yosemite

This post will possibly be of interest only to those running OS X. On Thursday evening, the newest version of Apple's operating system for the Macintosh was released and they named it Yosemite. I guess they ran out of large cat names. I must be a geek as I couldn't wait to try it out on at least one system. After downloading the 5.18GB installer, I followed the directions readily available on the Internet to make a bootable USB stick to avoid having to download it more than once.

The in-place installation went without a hitch and took a grand total of 18 minutes on my Macbook Pro from start to finish. (SSDs are wonderful things) By comparison, on a 27" iMac with a much faster processor but a spinning hard drive took almost 3x as long and an older Mac Mini took well over an hour. So far, the only non-compatible program appears to be an old version of Printopia that I don't need or use any longer. Most of the changes seem to be cosmetic with the exception of Continuity which is only significant if you also have an iOS device like an iPhone or an iPad running the newest version of iOS.

One really cool feature using the cell service on the iPhone is that I can send and receive SMS messages and voice calls. This may sound rather useless but I, like many others, usually spend much of the day staring at the computer screen and now I can answer calls or respond to text messages without digging the phone out of my pocket.

No complaints, everything seems to work and the hand-off features between iOS and OS X seem to work pretty seamlessly. I've upgraded several of the Macs here in Barrow and all have been seamless upgrades.

9 comments:

  1. Yeah well for the rest of us Apple says they are improving ios8 on Monday with another go at upgrading...
    Keep gloating Mister...your Apple Confusion day will come. I'm sick of mine.

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    1. Probably right. As time goes by, there seems to be more and more problems with Apple stuff. I'm having problems with my iPad that is on iOS 8.02 but more annoying things not deal breakers.

      The Mac hardware and OS X is still easier to use than the mess that Win 8.1 turned out to be.

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  2. We've been taking about this at work too since we have all iMacs there. We're running Maverick there.

    I am still running 10.6 here at home so I really need to upgrade. Gmail is telling me my version of Safari is too old. Wonder if it will let me jump to Maverick.

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    1. You should check and see if the hardware supports it. Apple has a web site with minimum specs. If so, when the download is finished at work, make a bootable USB thumb drive to upgrade other machines. That way you only need to download once.

      With that, you could upgrade from 10.6 but I would consider copying anything important like photos and do a clean install. But whatever you do, make a good backup first.

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    2. Of the three installs I've done, one each of 10.9, 10.8 & 10.7. All were done as upgrades but all had standard apps only. Nothing unusual about them.

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  3. I installed it today and the first thing I noticed was the more vibrant images. Almost like HD quality. Not sure it will really do much for me, but I have it.

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    1. I think the only ones that will see any real "value" are those that have both a Mac and an iPhone. But, at least it doesn't seem any slower and the interface does look a lot cleaner.

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  4. I was looking for pretty park pics!
    I've inherited Rachel's laptop - a macbook air. I don't know what OS it has. I need to go to a mac store and get help moving my stuff over to it. My ipad and iphone are both nagging me to udate to whatever is the latest thing

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    1. Sorry, but once you install the new OS X they install a bunch of pretty park pics to use as screen backgrounds.

      There are some benefits if you have a Mac and iOS devices like your iPhone and iPad (not the original iPad).

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