Should You Upgrade to macOS Monterey?

Now that macOS Monterey has been out for a while, is it a good time for you to upgrade your system? Let’s consult our old friend the 🎱✨

Ahh, that seems about right.

So far we haven’t heard of any major Monterey problems from our users. Our apps are compatible and we aren’t aware of any significant new bugs. But the smart question is how many Nisus users are actually using Monterey? To answer that let’s look at macOS Big Sur’s usage share for Nisus users:

You can see the big drop-off for Big Sur in November 2021, the first full month that Monterey was available. Although the numbers for December are incomplete (today is Dec 10th), this month shows that Big Sur and Monterey are exactly tied, both with a usage share of 33%.

My own upgrade to Monterey was relatively smooth, but there were some issues. The only potentially critical failure was that Apple Mail did not import all of my emails. Several hundred emails were completely blank and invalid:

I can’t be totally certain, but these emails appear to be unimportant messages from mailing lists and other impersonal sources, so it didn’t worry me too much.

Otherwise there are only a few irritating Monterey regressions, like how all windows on my screen are incorrectly resized and repositioned after my external monitor goes to sleep. But there are no showstoppers. And hey, it wasn’t all bad. I mean, just look at this cute ASCII art error from Apple’s developer notarization tool:

Everything considered, is it a good time for you to upgrade to Monterey? Maybe. But if you don’t have any compelling reason to upgrade, it might be best to follow the advice of the 8 ball or TidBits and wait for Apple to smooth things out a little more.