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Mac OS X

What’s your favorite version of macOS/Mac OS X?

Update: The poll is now closed, and the results weren't even close…

Snow Leopard wins in a landslide.

With the 2020 (Virtual) WWDC about a week away—and with it, more than likely, the reveal of Yet Another New macOS Version, I thought it might be interesting to run a little poll…

What is your personal all-time-favorite version of macOS/Mac OS X? Instead of trying to add a polling plug-in here, I quickly created one using surveyplanet. It's set to full anonymous mode, so no IP info is collected—it's just for fun…

If you need more details as to what came with each release, check out this Wikipedia article.

Personally, I'd have to say it was … nah, I'm not going to reveal my vote just yet! There's a small comment box on the poll, or you can add comments here if you have more thoughts on the question.



Number of days until fifth update for macOS releases

  • macOS

Updated for the fifth release of macOS Mojave (10.14), which came out on January 22, 2019

When the third release of macOS High Sierra came out, I charted the pace of its updates compared to all prior Mac OS X/macOS releases. I said I planned to keep that chart current, but decided that I'd use the fifth release (typically around six months from the OS release date) as the baseline.

Here's the latest update for Mojave's fifth update—a bit late, as that update (10.14.3) came out back in January. (Note that 10.0 is not shown, as it had only four releases.)

Click the above image for an in-window larger version, or just view the full-size version directly. (Dates are pulled from my long-running A useless analysis of macOS (OS X) release dates post.)

macOS 10.13 is clearly the outlier of the bunch, taking just 120 days to reach its fifth update, but macOS 10.14 is the only other release to hit its fifth update in under 200 days.

It certainly appears that Apple started pushing more updates more quickly when macOS 10.13 was released, but it's hard to say just why: Is it a new strategy to push updates more quickly, is it buggier macOS releases, or are they catching bugs due to better reporting, the public betas, etc.? I don't have a clue, but it's clear that "more and faster" is a good summary of the last two macOS versions' update releases.



How to download macOS Sierra

This morning on Twitter, Antonio asked…

I thought "Well, that's an easy question to answer—via the Mac App Store, of course." As it turns out, that's the right answer, but it was much harder to find than I expected it to be. I started on the Purchased tab in the Mac App Store app, where you can (theoretically) see all past purchases, including prior Mac OS X versions. However, those old releases stop with Mac OS X El Capitan from 2015; neither Sierra nor High Sierra are listed.

Next I tried searching the Mac App Store for Sierra, but that nets only Server and High Sierra, and a few apps that appear to have gotten away with using "Sierra" in their descriptions:

I then tried the Apple Developer site, but they don't offer Sierra for download either.

Somewhat stumped, I then started searching, and after way too many attempts, I finally landed on this useful page at Stack Exchange, which attempts to explain how to download all older versions of Mac OS X/macOS. Here's the relevant bit for Sierra:

For OS versions since Sierra.

Sierra itself has now vanished from everybody's Purchase History. However, Apple are keeping Sierra fully available, even though High Sierra is out. No Apple ID is required.

Apple KB - How to download macOS Sierra
Sierra - Direct download link from the App Store

Given how much trouble I had finding this page, I thought I'd post it here for anyone looking for Sierra. Going forward, keep that Stack Exchange link handy, as it should be updated in the future as new releases come out.



macOS quality as measured by update release rate

There's a lot of chatter out there that High Sierra is potentially the worst macOS release ever, in terms of bugs and broken or missing functionality. From the recent Month 13 is out of bounds log spewage problem to the root no password required issue (whoops!) to a variety of other glitches, High Sierra has presented many users, myself included, with a near-constant stream of issues.

But is it actually any worse than prior macOS/OS X1I'll just call it macOS from here on. releases? There's really not a lot of information to go on, given Apple's very-private development process and non-public bug tracker.

However, the one data source I do have is a list of every macOS release date. With 10.13.2 having just been released, I thought it might be interesting to see how quickly the third update arrived on each version of macOS. If High Sierra is worse than usual, I'd expect that the time required to reach its third update would be notably less than that of other releases.

After some fiddling in Excel, the data proved—with some caveats and observations—my hypothesis…

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Quickly toggle visibility of invisible files in Finder

Update: If you're running macOS Sierra, ignore the rest of this tip because it's irrelevant! I had no idea Shift-Command-Period would show/hide hidden files directly in Finder in macOS Sierra. Thanks to NaOH for the great tip via the comments!

Basically, if you want to show invisible files in Finder in Sierra, pressing ⇧⌘-Period will toggle them between hidden and visible. Nice! If you're on an earlier version of macOS/OS X, however, you may find the macro version useful for easily showing and hiding hidden files in Finder.

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