Sierra is Apple’s answer to the Galaxy Note 7.

OK, so Sierra doesn’t physically blow up your servers and cause your iMacs to Halt and Catch Fire; Apple are still offering Sierra whereas the Galaxy Note 7 is history. But this is the first update since Puma that I haven’t updated to within a few days of release, followed by long periods of evangelisation broken only by the next release.

I’m a Web developer and a more traditional software developer. As such, I live and die by my tools, a good number of which have yet to be certified and/or field-proven to work properly under Sierra. I’ve been in software long enough (37+ years) not to be fazed by a few bumps and bobbles during an upgrade, but the number, severity, and anxiety of the pleas for help of Sierra would-be users has yet to even begin to plateau on the fora I follow.

All our Macs are on El Capitan and are going to stay that way for quite some time. I don’t see Sierra being on our desktops, let alone servers, until at least the 10.12.2 timeframe, if not 10.13. We skipped Mavericks completely after initial evaluations were disappointing; while I’m not keen to skip a major update altogether, we do have top-management-sanctioned precedent.

Apple has a proven brilliant operations guy running the show. We need a tech- and customer-focused leader who is as passionate about the Mac as about iOS devices. As a shareholder and formerly evangelical long-time customer, I am not optimistic we’ll get what we need. Microsoft have improved dramatically under Satya Nadella, but they have a ton of backward compatibility (technical and cultural) to carry around. The Year of the Linux Desktop was 1998, and has been fading steadily since. The decline of many things in modern time can be traced to having few viable options where previously there were several; so it is in software.

Blast and damn.