macOS 15.2 Compatibility

[miawri]

Hi All,



Has anyone had any gotchas with macOS 15.2 as compared with 15.1 and 2024.10.1?



I see that there is no "official" support for 15.2 yet but I haven't seen any reported problems with it either. Would Avid publish if there were any obvious show stoppers for minor updates even if they haven' yet given their full blessing?


OS updates come thick and fast and are pretty much required for security patches nowadays so would rather update the OS sooner rather than later if possible!

[thin ice]

There never seems to be much risk with dot releases and I've upgraded already. It's on my M4 Mac with Pro Tools 2024.10.1 and I didn't notice any change. Always glad to get security updates of course.

[dominicperry]

I don't agree with this. There have been problems in the past with x.n.x OS updates and sometimes even with x.x.n releases.

If you update before Avid has qualified the release, you run the risk that it won't work and you may not be able to downgrade unless you've made suitable full-system backups.

Dominic

[tope d]

Hi,

You can check the list on the link below for more info on sonoma and sequoia compatibility
https://avidtech.my.salesforce-sites...a-Known-Issues

[Eric Lambert]

No problems here.

[sw rec]

Os 15.2 with Ultimate 2024.10.1 on a M1 Mac Studio Max. Everything is fine.

[miawri]

Originally Posted by tope d

Hi,

You can check the list on the link below for more info on sonoma and sequoia compatibility
https://avidtech.my.salesforce-sites...a-Known-Issues

"macOS Sequoia is supported with Pro Tools 2024.10 and later."


Which, to me, suggests 15.x is supported with 2024.10, regardless of x.

[miawri]

Originally Posted by dominicperry

I don't agree with this. There have been problems in the past with x.n.x OS updates and sometimes even with x.x.n releases.

If you update before Avid has qualified the release, you run the risk that it won't work and you may not be able to downgrade unless you've made suitable full-system backups.

Dominic

I'm curious, do you know when the last such issue occured?
Also, just because Avid haven't qualified it, does it mean it won't work? I'm guessing Avid's qualification process has LOTS of different scenarios which may not be applicable to most users.

[dominicperry]

Originally Posted by miawri

I'm curious, do you know when the last such issue occured?
Also, just because Avid haven't qualified it, does it mean it won't work? I'm guessing Avid's qualification process has LOTS of different scenarios which may not be applicable to most users.

Be really clear about what I'm saying here.

"just because Avid haven't qualified it, does it mean it won't work?" No, that's not what I'm saying. But if Avid haven't qualified it, it might not work. And if it doesn't, that's on you, because the problem might be hardware, OS, or PT, and there's no guarantee it will get fixed soon, or at all. Moreover, you may have problems backing out once you've upgraded.

A clear example is everyone assuming that M4 chips would be just the same as M1/2/3 chips - "they're running the same OS, aren't they". So now there are a bunch of angry people with expensive M4 machines which don't work properly. Is this Avid's fault - no.

As for specific examples, there is a recent inverse example - Sonoma has never worked with Carbon properly, Sequoia 15.0 works better but isn't qualified with PT, and Sequoia 15.1 is qualied for PT and Carbon, but not with Carbon Central, so you can only use a single box. 15.2 may or may not fix that problem. So, x.n.x releases sometimes make things work which didn't before. Which means they may also break things which did work before.

The last time I remember a x.x.n version breaking something was back around Catalina 10.15.x but I can't remember what got broken, nor how long it took to fix. Unusual, yes. Impossible, no. A security patch broke something whcih made PT unusable for some people. It was that serious.

In the old days, you could boot off an external clone or restore a TM backup or just re-install the older OS. Apple have made that much, much harder now.

And look at how long Avid take to fix stuff. The 2024.9 release came out as 2024.10, and they just released (in Jan 2025) a release with one critical fix in it as 2024.10.2

Do what you want, just be warned that keeping up with the latest security patches is incompatible with making sure you have a working PT rig.

Dominic

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by dominicperry

I don't agree with this. There have been problems in the past with x.n.x OS updates and sometimes even with x.x.n releases.

If you update before Avid has qualified the release, you run the risk that it won't work and you may not be able to downgrade unless you've made suitable full-system backups.

Dominic

The meaning of macOS version numbers have changed a lot over time so I am not sure what you are claiming here exactly.

Not taking minor macOS updates (minor being any sub-release within a major release like Sierra, Sequoia, Mavericks etc.) is unworkable for many uses, especially those that purchase new Macs. And I think it is a bad idea in general for many users not to take the minor updates when they can because of the frequent security and privacy updates they contain (i.e. take them between projects, when they have time to test stuff and always with a backup/rollback plan).

Avid does not have any program to do ongoing qualifications of existing Pro Tools releases on new macOS releases, and Avid staff in other threads about this in the past on DUC have stated that the practical expectation is users will take minor macOS release updates that are not formally qualified.

It's an impossible puzzle and there is just no perfect answer. There is no absolute guarantee that taking a minor macOS release update might not cause problems, even though in practice it seems extremely rare.

And on the other hand any new OS qualification has to wait for new Pro Tools releases and then taking that new release may involve more risk than just taking a minor OS update. DUC is full of threads about things breaking in new Pro Tools releases. If a user waits to see how stable the Pro Tools release looks along may come another minor OS update. There is just likely to be lots of misalignment, especially given the cadence of macOS minor updates. And I suspect typical users probably don't want to go through the additional gymnastics needed to install backdated macOS version updates.