Should I upgrade to High Sierra Yet?

Many of our users are wondering, "Should I upgrade to High Sierra Yet?"

On Monday, September 25, 2017 Apple released MacOS 10.13, known as "High Sierra".  Normally, it is a good idea to allow Apple to produce at least a .2 release before converting your system.  These point releases shake out the major bugs that are inevitable.  And, since 10.13.2 has been release, we believe as far as Screenwriter is concerned, you can safely upgrade -- so long as you also have Screenwriter 6.5.2.54 or greater.

However, High Sierra introduces a major change that might affect the normal upgrade timeline: a new file system, known as APFS, or Apple File System.  This new file system has been in test for a long time, and in fact is the underlying file system running on the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch for the past year.  It is a major step forward in reliability, security, and for some systems, speed.

However, there exist great potential for incompatibility with third-party software vendors, and we are no exception.  We have prepared an update to Movie Magic Screenwriter 6.5 (6.5.2.54) that addressed the few incompatibilities we have discovered.

One thing to be aware of is that when installing High Sierra on a Mac with an internal Solid State Drive (SSD), the High Sierra installer will perform a mandatory conversion of your internal SSD drive from HFS+ Journaled to APFS.  It's not optional.  For users of spinning hard disks, or Apple Fusion Drives that combine a spinning hard disk with an SSD, you can NOT elect to convert to APFS at this time.

As of December 21, 2017, Apple is presently beta-testing macOS High Sierra 10.13.3

Tags:  High Sierra MacOS 10.13 APFS compatible compatibility