Huh. That might actually work, if I’m reading the requirements right; and it says that it’s free.
Wonder which of the things that I use is it going to break? – I’ll have to pick a day when I’ve got time, run the backups, and take a chance on it.
Will 10.15 allow me to run standard Firefox, though? and I wonder whether it would get Mail to work with current Yahoo.
I recently (within the past two weeks) upgraded my late 2014 Mac to Monterey.
Worked like a charm. It’s on the current release of Firefox. I don’t use Mail so I can’t help you there.
Yes, 10.15 is the oldest OS that supports full fat Firefox. Your machine is upgradable all the way to 12 if you want to make the full jump but 10.15 is safer in that there’s likely to be almost zero incompatibility between 10.13 and 10.15.
Just a comment. @thorny_locust stated that they had a Mac mini late 2014 with CPU = 2.6 GHz Intel Core 15, and RAM memory 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 (I added some bits to the cut/paste). There were a number of Mac mini late 2014s sold by Apple, and those specs are great. But most Minis of that era came with 500 GB HDDs, some with Fusion Drives. If this Mini came with an HDD, I personally recommend against installing MacOS 10.14 or higher. Right around 2014 Flash Drives (SDDs) became affordable, and Apple designed their OS (and Apple File System, a different can of worms) to work well on SDDs. I’ve installed 10.14 on an HDD, and it proved excruciatingly slow. Perhaps a factor of 6-10 slower than 10.13, almost unusable. I’ve seen in forums that 10.15 is even worse. So if this Mac Mini contains an HDD and not a Fusion drive or SDD, I consider installing 10.14/10.15 contraindicated. My $0.02.
I would very much suggest trying out one of the browsers mentioned rather than installing a new version of MacOS on your machine, @thorny_locust. It sure sounds like there are a couple mentioned in this thread (or possibly the other one) that would work.
This issue has sparked quite a lively discussion on the meta-Discourse site (the “Learn more” link in the OP). It looks like the developers are sticking to their guns on this. Like it or not, I don’t think there’s going to be a reprieve. At least I have a workaround, but it means I have to use a special browser primarily just for Discourse.
Me too - not a big deal.
OK, what it’s telling me is:
Physical Volumes:
disk0s2:
Device Name: APPLE SSD SM0128G
Media Name: APPLE SSD SM0128G Media
Size: 120.99 GB (120,988,852,224 bytes)
Medium Type: SSD
Protocol: PCI
Internal: Yes
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
Status: Online
S.M.A.R.T. Status: Verified
PV UUID: 1844118D-A190-417C-8886-FA9E09588812
disk1s2:
Device Name: APPLE HDD HTS541010A9E662
Media Name: APPLE HDD HTS541010A9E662 Media
Size: 999.35 GB (999,345,127,424 bytes)
Medium Type: Rotational
Protocol: SATA
Internal: Yes
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
Status: Online
S.M.A.R.T. Status: Verified
PV UUID: C05042FB-A173-458F-B363-5218E6C78967
so is that SSD or HDD?
Nah, I can’t read before coffee.
You have what’s called a fusion drive where you have a 128GB SSD as a “cache” for a 1TB HDD. I’m not familiar with the issue @Guilty_Conscience mentioned but it seems like, from his post, that fusion drives are not affected by the issue.
Confirming @Shalmanese’s identification of your drive as a Fusion drive. I don’t have experience with these running MacOS 10.14+, but it’s probable that it will perform better than a regular HDD running this. The OS files + kernel are stored on the fast SSD, meaning OS-based data swaps are faster than HDD. As @Shalmanese said, this also means that the SSD is used as cache for application data and associated swaps, so that’s faster as well. @thorny_locust, you made good choices when you upgraded the basic 2014 Mini to 16GB RAM and a Fusion drive (though at the time It cost you significantly).
Another thing you need to be aware of if you upgrade to 10.14+ is that the upgrade will automagically change your file system to Apple File System (APFS). Early versions of 10.14 had a bug associated with APFS that caused data loss for many people. This occurred because APFS is down-at-the-roots different from the traditional HFS, and Apple screwed up a key parameter. This was fixed in later 10.14 versions, but you want to be sure to apply all 10.14 updates to get to 10.14.6 (final 10.14 version) before you road-test it.
I still recommend going with Firefox Dynasty if you don’t view yourself as an (at least) intermediate level Apple expert.
Not my choices or my money – it was given to me by a family member. (Who hasn’t shown signs of doing it again, and I’m not going to ask; it was a pretty major gift the first time.)
Thanks for info, some of which I think I understand. Not sure what I’m going to do.
– Apple seems to be offering a jump right to 10.15.7 – macOS Catalina on the Mac App Store
Do you think that’s worth trying for? And how do I tell whether the Intel Core i5 is 64-bit?
All Intel Core chips are 64 bit, you are good there
Yeah, you might want to turn that on just in case the upgrade doesn’t go well.
You go to your Discourse email preferences (click your avatar in the upper right, then the little person icon at the bottom, then Preferences, then the Email tab in the second row). Or for you, just go to the URL https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust/preferences/emails (anyone else using that, you have to change thorny_locust to your own username).
Once there, change the setting “Email me when I am quoted, replied to, my @username is mentioned, or when there is new activity in my watched categories, tags or topics” to “always”.
Then you’ll get an email any time someone posts in a thread you’ve previously participated in. That way you should be able to reply to threads you’re already a part of, at least (by just replying to those emails).
You can also use the other email settings there , like the “Activity Summary”, to get emails about other new posts, but I’m not sure if that would let you reply to new topics you’ve not previously joined.
If you can upgrade to a newer browser, that would still be the safer bet. If you feel brave and have backups, jumping to the newest support macOS version would let you keep going the longest. If you’re not feeling that brave, at least going to 10.14 will let you run Orion. Up to you how far you wanna go, just make sure you have backups first.
Help. My email box would be so full of such emails that I wouldn’t be able to find anything else in it.
At least, for a while. Then if I wouldn’t be able to get into any new threads, eventually I wouldn’t have that problem, but I’d also have almost nowhere that I could say anything.
Indeed. It’s not a great workaround. You can try the “Activity Summary” feature for a daily or hourly digest instead, but I don’t know how well it works.
If you can upgrade the OS or just use Firefox Dynasty, it will be far better for you.
I’m pretty sure the ipad will work; more awkwardly than the desktop, but better than the email workaround. But I’ll probably try either the upgrade or the alternative browser.
After considerable discussion on the Discourse site, this has been delayed until an indeterminate date in July.
Based on the feedback from the community, and the extra information we’ve collected about the effect on Windows 7/8, we’ve decided to delay this change until after the next Discourse stable release in July 2025. That will give communities and users another 3 months to prepare for the change.
That also give self-hosted administrators the option to switch their communities to the stable branch, which will continue working on older browsers until the following release at the beginning of 2026.
– are these boards a “self-hosted administrator”?
To the best of my knowledge, no.
I believe Discourse does the hosting and I know they do all the updates for us.
I’m not sure how to verify the first part, but I’m pretty certain. I’ll page @engineer_comp_geek as he probably knows, @Chronos is another that might be certain.
Cool! That’s welcome news. I still hope they provide a true fallback.
Did you ever manage to upgrade to a newer macOS?