High Sierra and other updates

I updated my iPhone and iPad to iOS 11 some time ago, with no issues. There’s really nothing much in iOS 11 that I’m terribly enthusiastic about, but also nothing that bothers me. I do like the new screenshot stuff, so that’s cool.

And my watch is running watchOS 4 now. I was initially somewhat concerned that it would slow down my “Series 0” watch too much, or have a negative effect on battery life, but it’s not bad at all. I’m not really using any of the new features. I’ve settled on the “modular” watch face with a few useful complications, and I’m happy with that. And I continue to use the activity app to motivate me and keep track of my meager attempts at exercise. (For today, so far: move ring at 45%, exercise ring at 66% and stand ring at 33%. Step count at 4,474. Pretty good for 10:30am on a Saturday.) I was kind of hoping that the “auto-launch audio app” feature would be useful for me, but it’s an annoyance more frequently than it’s a help, so far. It tends to stay up after I’ve already stopped listening to music, and it sometimes appears for no discernible reason at all. Maybe it works better on newer watches.

On the Windows side of things, my desktop PC decided to apply the Fall Creators Update last weekend. I’m still kind of grouchy about the idea that I have little control over when major updates like this happen on Windows 10, and also about the crazy naming shenanigans. The update appears on the PC with an entirely nondescript name that doesn’t really let you know that it’s a major update (just “version 1709,” basically), while most articles about it use the “Fall Creators Update” name. I wish we could go back to the days when we just called these things “SP1,” “SP2,” and so on. Anyway, there’s not much there that’s of interest to me. The update installed with no glitches, and there haven’t been any issues post-install. I’m not really interested in any of the MR, VR, AR, and/or 3D stuff. I should probably look into the new stuff related to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and I am genuinely interested in that, but I don’t have much practical use for it right now.

Back in the Apple world, I tried installing High Sierra on my MacBook last weekend, but hit a snag. I got an error related to firmware, the same one described here. It sounds like this is common for people with third-party SSDs. One of the answers in the thread suggested running “diskutil repairdisk disk0” in the rescue mode terminal.  I was a little afraid to try that last weekend, in case things went wrong, so I put it off. I did it this morning, and it fixed everything, and the upgrade ran fine. I wasn’t sure if my disk would be coverted to APFS, since it’s not an official Apple SSD, but it was converted, and it’s working fine so far. I should probably review this document before I try my next Carbon Copy Cloner backup. And maybe I should just remove Disk Warrior, since I don’t really use it anyway.

I guess the last big update I’ll need to do this year is getting the Fall Creators Update on my ThinkPad. That machine is old enough that Windows 10 updates can be a little dicey, but it’s been fine so far.

I used to be a lot more excited about OS updates than I am today. I still remember the thrill of installing the Windows 95 Preview from floppy diskettes. (Raymond Chen says it was 13 disks for the release version. I remember the preview version being more than that, but I could be wrong.) I guess I’m getting old and jaded. I’m just glad everything’s working, I haven’t bricked any machines, lost any data, or set anything on fire.

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