macOS 14 Sonoma is out, and mostly OK
Apple release macOS 14 Sonoma today. I always install the major OS beta versions on my work Mac when they’re first released, to see if anything critical breaks before it affects my coworkers. That happens sometimes, like when macOS 11 Big Sur deprecated kernel extensions and affected some software we used. Sonoma and its 1st-party apps were in good shape from the start.
I stumbled across a few glitches with 3rd-party software:
- Little Snitch version 5.7 adds Sonoma support.
- Rogue Amoeba’s apps that use their Audio Capture Engine (ACE) need to be updated.
- SpamSieve version 2 doesn’t work because Mail.app removed support for plugins in favor of a new extensions API. Version 3 (a paid upgrade) works with Sonoma.
- Marked 2 crashes when loading docs with fewer than 999 visible bytes. It’s still broken as of today. Workaround: Add a bunch of lorem ipsum to the bottom of the file.
- Bartender 4 doesn’t work. A paid upgrade to Bartender 5 fixes it.
- Finbar didn’t work until version 1.10.
Summary: Sonoma is a good upgrade and I’ve installed it on my Macs. You may need to upgrade some of your other software at the same time.