Perform Post-installation Tasks

If everything has gone as expected, your Mac is now successfully running Sierra. (If things haven’t gone as expected, flip forward to Troubleshoot Upgrade Problems.) But there are still a few tasks left to do before you get to work—or play—with your new operating system. In this chapter I cover some important initial setup and configuration activities you should get out of the way right now.

Respond to Immediate Questions

My test installations of Sierra have used various combinations of starting points, configurations, and upgrade paths. In some cases, after installing, I saw a normal Desktop and nothing more. In other situations—especially when I upgraded older versions of OS X, had a lot of third-party software, or wasn’t previously logged in to iCloud—I was immediately confronted with a large stack of overlapping dialogs and notifications.

Among the most common questions are requests for your user account password or Apple ID password. For example, certain apps may once again need an administrator’s authorization to make changes to your data, and various apps that use your Apple ID (including iTunes and iBooks) may need you to sign in again.

In some situations, you may also see a notification like the one in Figure 9. This appears to mean that, in the process of syncing your accounts via iCloud with your other Macs, Sierra found one or more email accounts that were either missing from this Mac or had different settings. To add (or update) the accounts, click Continue; Sierra then opens System Preferences > Internet Accounts, where you can verify all the settings. Or, click Not Now to leave your accounts as is for the time being.

Work your way through any such dialogs you see, even if they seem redundant. After that one-time process, most of them will not reappear.

Handle Software Updates

The next thing you should do is to update macOS itself (and any other crucial Apple software) to the latest version. Sometimes Apple releases bug fixes and security updates almost immediately after a major upgrade, and if any such urgent updates are available, it’s in your best interest to install them right away.

In Sierra, as in every version of OS X since Mountain Lion, all updates to Apple software—including macOS itself, built-in software such as Safari and QuickTime, and optional purchases such as Final Cut Pro and Pages—are delivered through the App Store app. And, of course, you can update all the third-party apps you’ve purchased from the App Store at the same time.

In some cases, the App Store notifies you automatically of updates, but I recommend checking manually, shortly after your Mac starts up under Sierra for the first time. You can open the App Store by clicking its Dock icon, double-clicking its icon in /Applications or in Launchpad, or choosing Apple  > App Store. Then click the Updates button on the toolbar.

Then, to update a single application, click the Update button next to it. (In some cases, Apple groups multiple software updates together; click the More link to see details on each one.) Or, to update all the listed apps at once, click Update All. The App Store downloads and installs the updates automatically.

In addition to installing any updates, decide how you want the App Store to handle future updates. Your Mac can check for, download, and even install updates in the background. Some people turn off all aspects of automatic updates—perhaps because they never want to be interrupted with alerts about new software, dislike the idea of anything downloading behind their backs, or need to keep an eye on a bandwidth cap. Others want all the new things right away without manual intervention and…ahem…have sufficiently robust backups that they can recover from any problems that may arise due to a buggy update.

Follow these steps to configure software updates:

1. Go to System Preferences > App Store (Figure 10).

   

2. Select or deselect (as you prefer) the Automatically Check for Updates checkbox to enable or disable automatic checking. If it’s selected, you can also select any or all of:
   • Download Newly Available Updates in the Background, which not only notifies you of updates but downloads them for you so you can install them as soon as you’re ready (click Install to install immediately; click Later and choose Try in an Hour, Try Tonight, or Remind Me Tomorrow from the pop-up menu to “snooze” the reminder; or click the notification itself to open the App Store and see which updates are available)
   • Install App Updates, which silently updates apps automatically after they’re downloaded (except those requiring a restart or other interaction)
   • Install macOS Updates, which does the same as Install App Updates except for macOS itself—that is, macOS 10.12.x—and will presumably prompt you to restart your Mac
   • Install System Data Files and Security Updates, which automatically (without prompting you) installs these essential updates—but only after they’ve been available in the App Store for 3 days
3. If you’re signed in to the App Store, you can also check or uncheck Automatically Download Apps Purchased on Other Macs, which does exactly what it says.
4. If you’ve previously felt that the App Store prompts you for your password too often, you can now make some small adjustments to that behavior. At the bottom of the App Store pane are two new pop-up menus under the heading Password Settings:
   • Purchases and In-app Purchases: Choose when a password prompt appears—either Always Require (the default) or Require after 15 Minutes.
   • Free Downloads: Choose either Require Password (the default) or Save Password, which means you won’t be prompted after the first time you enter your password for a free download.

Review the Incompatible Software Folder

If the Sierra installer encounters any known incompatibilities, it moves the problematic software to an Incompatible Software folder and explains what it moved on one of the final screens of Setup Assistant. (After Setup Assistant quits, you can find the Incompatible Software folder at the top level of your startup disk, at the top level of your home folder, or even in both places, depending on the location of the software that was disabled.)

This notice appears only for extensions and other low-level background software that would otherwise run automatically when you start up your Mac. As it says, the items in question are moved aside but not deleted. Whatever you do, don’t try to reenable this software manually! Instead, contact the developer and get a version that’s compatible with Sierra, and then reinstall it.

Deal with Other Surprises

You may encounter a few other peculiarities when first using Sierra that cause some initial surprise.

Apple Mail

If you’ve been using Apple Mail through a few OS X upgrades, you may not find this surprising, but if you’re new to the upgrade experience, a few aspects of Mail’s behavior are worth knowing about:

• Importing Mail messages: In some cases (more likely when using Plan B than Plan A), the first time you launch Mail, a window informs you that it’s “upgrading” your mail database. This step should take no more than a few minutes, and is necessary because the Sierra version of Mail has updated the database format it uses to store information about your messages.
• Mail plug-ins: The first time you open Mail after upgrading, it moves most incompatible third-party plug-ins (which are normally stored in ~/Library/Mail/Bundles) into ~/Library/Mail/Bundles (Disabled) and displays an alert telling you what it’s disabled. Don’t try to reenable these manually; Mail will thwart your every effort to get them working. Check with the developer to see if a Sierra-compatible update is available.

  If Mail hangs or crashes on startup or if Activity Monitor (found in /Applications/Utilities) shows it to be using excessive CPU power, it could be due to an incompatible plug-in that Mail was unable to disable automatically. Force-quit Mail, look in ~/Library/Mail/Bundles, and move anything you find there into ~/Library/Mail/Bundles (Disabled). Then open Mail again. If it works, you can quit Mail, move a single plug-in back into ~/Library/Mail/Bundles, and test again. Repeat until only the problematic plug-in(s) are disabled, and then see if the developers have updated versions of them.

First-run Alerts

After upgrading to Sierra, you may see an alert (Figure 11) the first time you open a previously installed third-party application that wasn’t downloaded from the App Store.

This alert doesn’t appear if you double-click the app icon, but only if you open it by an indirect method such as double-clicking one of its files. To confirm that you did intend to launch that app, click Open.

System Preferences Changes

As usual, Apple added, moved, and renamed a few items in System Preferences. I won’t catalog all the changes here, but I do want to point out a few things that might throw you:

• Dictation & Speech: The erstwhile Dictation & Speech preference pane is gone, but its functions are still there; they’ve just been moved. What was in Dictation & Speech > Dictation has been moved to Keyboard > Dictation, and what was in Dictation & Speech > Text to Speech has been moved to Accessibility > Speech.
• Dock: A new “Prefer tabs when opening documents” pop-up menu lets you configure Sierra’s system-wide tab option. With the default setting, In Full Screen Only, tabs appear for new documents only in Full Screen Mode. The other choices are Always (self-explanatory) and Manually, in which the creation of new tabs is entirely up to you. (In general, you first choose View > Show Tab Bar, and then add a new tab by clicking the plus button on that bar.)
• Language & Region: A new Temperature pop-up menu lets you choose whether to use Fahrenheit or Celsius. And, if you have at least two languages in your Preferred Languages list, a “List sort order” pop-up menu lets you choose any of numerous regional preferences for sorting lists (the default choice of Universal is best for most users).
• Security & Privacy: In the General view, under “Allow apps downloaded from,” the Anywhere option is gone. That means you can’t configure Sierra to let you download unsigned apps from just any old source by default—which is a good thing, because such apps pose a security risk and may contain malware. However, you can still force Sierra to open any individual unsigned app just as before: right-click (or Control-click) the app, choose Open from the contextual menu, and click Open in the dialog that appears.

  In addition, if your Mac was introduced in 2013 or later (see Recent Bluetooth Hardware), you should see a checkbox “Allow your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac,” which lets you avoid typing your password to unlock your Mac—as long as you’re wearing a properly configured Apple Watch.

• Siri: In the new Siri preference pane, you can enable or disable Siri, turn the Siri menu bar icon on or off, turn voice feedback on or off, change Siri’s language and voice, set a keyboard shortcut, and change which microphone is used.

Other Noteworthy Changes

For the details on what’s new in Sierra, read Scholle McFarland’s Sierra: A Take Control Crash Course. In the meantime, let me point out a couple of items that may surprise you:

• Storage management: Sierra’s new Optimized Storage feature, which optionally stores rarely used files in iCloud (removing them from your disk until needed), as well as its automatic Trash emptying and clutter-reduction features, are accessed in an extremely odd place—the System Information app (in /Applications/Utilities). Once you open the app, choose Window > Storage Management to see your new options. (As a shortcut to open System Information and display the Storage Management window, choose Apple  > About This Mac > Storage and click Manage.)
• Desktop & Documents sync: Sierra can now sync the contents of your ~/Desktop and ~/Documents folders to iCloud Drive, and from there, to your other Macs. You may have seen a screen in Setup Assistant asking whether to enable this feature. Regardless of what choice you made there, you can enable or disable this feature in System Preferences > iCloud by clicking the Options button next to iCloud Drive, then clicking Documents, and finally selecting or deselecting Desktop & Documents Folders. (You can also select or deselect Optimize Mac Storage in the same location. But for the other storage management features, you’ll have to visit System Information.)

Final Software Advice

The best way to confirm that you have all your software installed and configured correctly is to try each application:

1. Go through your /Applications folder (including the Utilities folder and anyplace else you’ve stored applications) and launch each app, one at a time. If an application uses plug-ins that you’re aware of, try to exercise at least one or two of them. When you’ve verified that the application works, quit it and move on to the next. Do the same with each of your third-party preference panes, by accessing them in System Preferences. (You needn’t do this all in one sitting—feel free to spread it out over several days or longer.)
2. Make sure your important data displays correctly in the appropriate places, such as: contacts in Contacts, events in Calendars, stored email in Mail, photos and media in Photos and iTunes, and browser bookmarks in Safari.

   Similarly, if you use any third-party cloud storage services (such as Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive), confirm that the relevant apps are running and that your data is in sync.

3. If you use Unix software (including command-line tools and X11 applications), check to see that it’s still present and functional. In particular, if you manually installed anything in /bin, /sbin, or /usr (except in /usr/local or /usr/share) in Yosemite or earlier, it will be gone—those are protected directories now, so you’ll have to reinstall those items in another location or restore them to a different directory from your backup.

   Also, if you use one of the following package managers, you’ll want to update it and all the binaries you’ve installed using it:

   • Fink: Update to the latest version. Try fink selfupdate first; if that doesn’t work, download a fresh copy.
   • Homebrew: Use brew update to update Homebrew itself, and then brew upgrade to upgrade all your packages.
   • MacPorts: Follow these migration instructions and install version 2.3.4 or later.

After following these steps and using Sierra for a few days, if you haven’t discovered any missing files or software that doesn’t work, you can conclude that Sierra is working properly, and you can overwrite your just-before-upgrading bootable duplicate with a new version (remember, you turned off duplicates in Turn Off (Yes, Off) Automatic Duplicates?)—and turn automatic duplicates back on.