In October 2014, IT issued a recommendation not to upgrade to Mac operating system (OS) Yosemite, OS X v10.10. Faculty and students alike inquired why they should continue using Mavericks, instead of upgrading to the newest operating system.
IT Support Specialist, Bill Klemm, stated, “When a new Mac OS is released, Mac experts in IT volunteer to explore the exact release every Mac user will actually experience if they upgrade.” The IT systems specialists document their findings as they can, squeezing in time to research the new OS between their more demanding day to day job requirements.
Klemm explained, “Thorough testing of a new OS is time-consuming, so IT typically recommends not upgrading to a new OS until several months after the public release. The reasons for postponing are based on an absence of control over the environment. If a customer upgrades to a new OS and a web tool like Esther or OWL-Space does not work well in say, Safari, the customer reports a problem with the Rice web application when in fact, the application is working, but is not necessarily compatible with this new OS.”
How can Rice IT resolve this issue? “We can’t.” Klemm replied. “That’s between the software developer and Apple. We have to wait for them to duke it out with patches. Almost all of the potential problems with Yosemite or any other operating system are out of our control.”
“If you want to update your own computer as an early adopter, please do. Feel free to report any oddities, bugs, or incompatibilities on the wiki article comments.”
https://docs.rice.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=46901280
“However, we recommend that Rice faculty and staff not upgrade simply for the sake of upgrading — because the update may break older software, on which they depend to complete their work. The upgrade to Yosemite might be free, but the update for older versions of software, such as Finale 2012 and Mathematica, to make them compatible with the new OS, can be rather expensive.”
IT recommends holding off until a follow-up .1 patch is released. This gives all the developers time to play catch-up. If you choose to upgrade, we suggest you back up your computer first, and make sure all of your key applications are compatible with Yosemite.