Apple provided developers with two Release Candidates of macOS Sequoia 15.1 this week. Provided there are no serious problems that come to light in the second of those, it’s likely that 15.1 will be released early next week, probably on Monday 28th. This article looks at what that brings, whether it’s safe to upgrade to Sequoia yet, and what comes next.

All supported Macs

Traditionally, the x.1 update is scheduled to be released about a month after the initial upgrade to a new major version of macOS, and brings with it the first wave of bug fixes, and a few features that weren’t quite ready in time.

Although there are reports of some other bugs in Sequoia, by far the most disruptive have been those affecting networking. Apple fixed the most serious of those in 15.0.1, released on 4 October, but some have continued to experience problems. Opinion from those testing betas of 15.1 are that it does resolve all those, and for the great majority should be ready for general use, provided that third-party apps are compatible. So if you normally wait for the x.1 version to be released before considering upgrading, this should fit the bill.

Apple does provide a list of fixes for developers, although as there’s no mention of any networking problems there, I suspect this isn’t of much help to users.

Apple silicon Macs

For those whose Macs run an M-series chip, the main interest in 15.1 is the first batch of Apple Intelligence features. Over the coming months, these should include:

• Writing Tools, a suite of mainly on-device features for summarising and rewriting text.
• Image Playground, producing synthetic images such as Genmoji, again using on-device methods.
• Siri and related enhancements for user assistance, using on-device methods.
• ChatGPT access, for more general AI features using text.
• App-specific enhancement to Photos, including Clean Up, and others.

Of those, 15.1 brings Writing Tools and some other enhancements, but doesn’t bring Image Playground or ChatGPT. Although some have claimed that makes 15.1 little better, that understates the value and quality of Writing Tools for many.

Writing Tools should be accessible to pretty well any recent app that displays significant amounts of text. Although I haven’t intended the lower text view in SilentKnight to support them, Writing Tools are available there from the contextual menu (Control-click). They work great with all the text editors I have tested, including TextEdit, BBEdit, CotEditor, Pages, my Rich Text editor DelightEd, and even in my PDF viewer Podofyllin.

The initial release of Writing Tools in 15.1 does have language and regional limitations. It requires that your Mac’s primary language, as set in Language & Region settings, is set to English (US), although you can still switch to a secondary language such as English (UK) if you prefer. The other key control is in the new Apple Intelligence & Siri settings, where Siri’s language needs to be English (United States). As I don’t like Siri’s spoken interface, I have disabled that by setting the Listen for control to Off, and instead enabled a Keyboard shortcut to open Siri’s interactive window.

Apple has announced future support for non-US variants of English, and next year for other primary languages. However, Writing Tools still work excellently on British English, even that of Charles Dickens, with the settings described above.

When you have updated or upgraded to Sequoia 15.1, I suggest you download text versions of books by your favourite author(s) from Project Gutenberg and explore features in Writing Tools using those as prose sources.

Future Sequoia updates

Apple has this week released the first beta-test of Sequoia 15.2, with most if not all of the other Apple Intelligence features, including Image Playground and ChatGPT. Assuming testing proceeds well and there are no serious problems, this is likely to be released in the first couple of weeks in December. Although not confirmed yet, this should open supported languages to include most major regional variants of English.

Slated for next year is the extension of Apple Intelligence to cover French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, and others. However, these features aren’t likely to appear in the countries of the EU this year, and Apple hasn’t yet indicated when that’s expected.

For those concerned about on- and off-device AI and privacy, all the standard features of Writing Tools and Image Playground involve on-device processing, and don’t send your data to remote servers. If you choose to enable ChatGPT access, then that is handled off-device, but is opt-in, and requires a separate sign-in process to access either an anonymised free account or an existing ChatGPT account. You can also require confirmation of any Siri requests handled with ChatGPT before sending any information off-device.

Apple has already published a list of fixes in the first beta of 15.2, although it remains to be seen what it does for users.

M4 Macs

Apple has also signalled that it will be releasing new Macs next week, widely rumoured to be the first to use the M4 chip.

Summary

• Sequoia 15.1 early next week, probably on 28 October, with Writing Tools in US English, and remaining networking bug fixes.
• Sequoia 15.2 already in beta, probably for release in early December, with Image Playground, ChatGPT, and the remainder of this first wave of AI tools, including most other English variants.
• Try Writing Tools out: I think they’re wonderful.

This is the time of year when macOS keeps offering you the upgrade to the new version of macOS, but you may not want to go there yet. This article explains how you can stay running your existing version of macOS, while keeping it up to date.

Skint and SkintM

By default, SilentKnight is intended to download all the latest updates from Apple’s software update servers. Although you can configure it to behave differently, as I explain below, you may like to look at Skint or its menu bar sibling SkintM. Those don’t check for updates, they only check installed versions. They will warn you when your Mac has fallen behind with updates, and let you decide what you want to do.

Skint and SkintM do check that your Mac is running the latest version of its major release of macOS, and is happy if you’re still running Monterey, Ventura or Sonoma, as well as Sequoia, but it will advise you when they fall behind with their security updates; after all, that’s what it’s for.

Switching SilentKnight to manual

For many, SilentKnight’s button to Install all updates is most worrying, as that might inadvertently upgrade macOS to Sequoia. In fact, it isn’t dangerous at all, but before I explain why, you can remove that button altogether. Open SilentKnight, and its Settings, and set them to look as below.

This will still download and install the updates you want, but you won’t be tempted to inappropriately install the lot of them.

Once you’ve done that, click the Set button, quit SilentKnight, and run it again. Now when it tells you there are updates to be installed, you can’t click on a button to bring upgrade disaster.

In fact, after testing SilentKnight with macOS updates and upgrades, they don’t work like that anyway. If SilentKnight were to download a macOS update or upgrade, it can’t complete its installation. macOS first tells you that the update couldn’t be installed, then offers to install it in Software Update. All you have to do is shut your Mac down at that point, then start it up in Safe mode and the update will be stopped.

However, for your comfort and safety, I recommend unticking Allow Install All Updates, just in case.

Installing only the updates you want

Having avoided the update you don’t want, you now need to download and install those that you do. Scroll the lower text view to the bottom, to reveal all the updates available. Each has an opening line that declares it’s a Label, like
* Label: XProtectPayloads_10_15-142
It’s that label you use to identify each update.

In the File menu, select the Install Named Update… command to open the manual updating window. One by one, copy and paste the label from the main window into the Name of update box and click on the Install Named Update button. SilentKnight will then tell you that it has been downloaded and installed. It only takes a few seconds to work through a list of updates like XProtect that you do want, and bring your Mac up to date without inadvertently upgrading it to Sequoia.

Further information

SilentKnight has a wealth of additional information that will help you solve problems like these. The most common are explained in its short text SilentKnight Help, in the Help menu, and there’s also a detailed Help Reference in the same menu.

Key points

Open Settings, and untick Allow Install All Updates, click Set, then quit the app. Open it again, and install each named update one at a time using that command in the File menu, pasting the Label in for each wanted update and clicking the Install Named Update button for each.

This assumes that you are running the latest version of SilentKnight, 2.11. If you’re still running version 1 you need to update for Catalina or later.