I received quite a few emails and customers in response to that post. Most of them were incredulous that anybody would be in a hurry to upgrade a production machine to a new OS, especially one with as many changes as Catalina.
I can understand that it's frustrating if you have bought a new Macintosh, and it comes with Catalina pre-installed, but honestly is there any real driver to upgrade to it?
My main role in our shop is IT so when I see an update, I'm thinking about the defect repair and security enhancements that come with it rather than any of the new features it might bring. Most people in this industry chant "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" but what most people don't realize about software and operating systems is that
there are likely serious things that are currently broken, but the good guys haven't noticed yet.
And when I say "serious" things, I mean security issues. When MacOS High Sierra was released late 2017, someone noticed that anybody could log in as the "root" account (which has the power to do anything unchecked) if they just left the password field
blank. So basically it was wide open for anybody to use. An update a week or two later fixed that. The "NotPetya" worm that same year that cost shipping giant Merck $650 million in damages didn't work on Windows 10 machines with "Credential Guard" turned on, which had been available for 2 years at the time. Many more less-known issues that also have security implications are fixed, introduced, and secretly persist update-to-update. Waiting to update leaves you vulnerable to those security issues which are only going to become more well known over time to the guys writing the ransomeware scripts.
With that reality staring me in the face, the best thing I can do for my company security-wise is run every update available as soon as possible. I am indeed forced to slow down that cadence when vital 3rd-party software lacks compatibility with publicly-released versions and the only thing I can do about that is pressure the vendors to update and support the newest versions.
It's also a little worrying to me that the only thing keeping a prepress employee from dutifully accepting an automatically-prompted OS upgrade on launch day, thus removing that machine's ability to use said vital 3rd-party software and requiring a time-intensive rollback...is noticing a vendor email that says "Wait!". Your insight into why PitStop testing isn't done until the public release is made (because Apple has in the past made last-minute changes no one had time to test) is understandable to a degree, but with that philosophy PitStop will
always be incompatible with a new release instead of
sometimes incompatible, the (hopefully few?) times Apple behaves badly with last-minute changes. But I'm also not privy to the ways PitStop can fail when parts aren't working right (hidden software errors that make it to print can be catastrophic too) so I can't say for sure that "my way" is the right way. Just thankful for the openness in reasoning why and glad the wait isn't too long in the grand scheme of things =)
