Yeah, that is 100% a Finale marketing piece. I clicked "Unsubscribe" from that email and it said I was unsubscribing from their marketing channels. Finale has a financial interest in selling Dorico cross grades. The timing of abandonment was planned to motivate/scare their Mac users into making a snap decision to cross grade or be left on an older version of macOS. Windows update cycle is unpredictable anyway. 

Now, given MM abandoned Finale development on August 26th (but probably months before) and the Sequoia Release Candidate just came out last week, they have done zero actual testing on macOS Sequoia RC. I have, however, run Finale 27.4 in a VM running Sequoia RC and I have no major issues to report. Did I do extensive testing? No. I did open several of their stock files with four to twenty staves and it all seemed to work. My plan is to upgrade my macOS but create a VM of macOS Sonoma 14.6.1 with Finale 27.4 installed and then just move my activation whenever I need to do so. 

As someone who owns zero Windows devices, I will say Microsoft's commitment to keep legacy software supported in Windows is impressive. I might even set up a Windows VM just to keep Finale running. 

Wrong again, Ernie.

An email from MM covering their corporate butts in case something doesn't work changes absolutely nothing. 27 is supported over Sonoma and earlier and not Sequoia. The situation is exactly as I described a few weeks ago. Finale 27 is running fine over Sequoia here. For all of the yak, yak, yak... I've not read of nor seen a single thing that doesn't work.

One doesn't have to run a Virtual Machine, however. Just add an APFS Volume with Disk Utility, download Sequoia and install if you want to test — as I did when it was in beta,

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/add-delete-or-erase-apfs-volumes-dskua9e6a110/mac

Here's my drive setup. Sequoia Test is an APFS Volume containing macOS 15 and Finale—I updated from beta to the general release today. The Aura P12 is an 8TB external I have connected via TB4.

MikeH,

You can bloviate all you want but in the end Finale will finally come to suffer the Mac OS debacle.as do many software programs. Sooner or later it will, I know it and you know it.

Ernie, mi compa, I'm not sure Mike is the one bloviating here.

Am I to understand Windows updates never break existing apps and drivers? I must have missed that when I majored in management information systems in b-school.

I've been using Sequoia just fine. Nothing has broken. It's not really a very major release, os-wise, on the Mac. As a longtime development seed tester, the last time a macOS update was incredibly innovative and probably broke a lot of things was Big Sur, and that was three years ago.

Mike, as mentioned earlier in another thread, I'd been told by another user in this very forum that any APFS or other volume will be tied (and authenticated) based on the CPU, whereas a VM operates in under a serial number that does not change from the original installation, so that would make it not vulnerable to the loss of an auth server years down the road even if the CPU hosting the VM would have changed in that time frame. So I'm not sure having an APFS volume would be the way to go, but again, I'm not planning to be using Finale long-term anymore. It's Dorico or bust for me, and I'm spending nearly every day trying to figure out its quirks and complexities with a combination of their manual, users forum and trying things out in a Dorico file. Some things are incredibly powerful and well thought out. Other things are just, well, complicated. But not having to worry about which plug-in does what, whether old plugins and .lua scripts that have AWOL developers (think TGTools) still work, dealing with the extremely complicated and PC-centric Perfect Layout, etc is already a real plus from using Dorico.

I'd been told by another user in this very f.orum that any APFS or other volume will be tied (and authenticated) based on the CPU, whereas a VM operates in under a serial number that does not change from the original installation, so that would make it not vulnerable to the loss of an auth server years down the road even if the CPU hosting the VM would have changed in that time frame. So I'm not sure having an APFS volume would be the way to go, 

Perhaps. I have five APFS Volumes running on two Macs with the same license and the license server is fine with this. I have more than one Finale license plus Print Music and multiple Macs so I'm not worried at all.

Understood but MM currently will authorize up to two CPUs. The real test would be to have another CPU run an external APFS drive cloned from one of your additional volumes and see if finale runs without authentication.

Actually… the macOS has not allowed true cloning since 10.4 but that’s ok since installing it onto an external is easy. Also, the Finale license manager doesn’t work the way you think it does—but if I reveal that, I would expect MakeMusic to delete this thread..

No big deal. You’ve given me an idea of something that I can test. Although an Apple Silicon Mac can boot from an external drive, many apps will not run if installed due to certain .kxt files being blocked from loading. It’s an Apple issue that developers since the first M1 in 2020 have been crying over and there is no workaround. Finale 27 either runs when booted from an external or it doesn’t. Unfortunately, it takes hours to set up that test and I don’t have that time today. Tomorrow, perhaps.

BTW, cloneware is nothing but APIs for Apple’s Disk Utility and Time Machine. If it worked as advertised, it would be able to create a bootable disk with a recovery partition—it can’t.

macOS no longer allows booting from clones but certainly allows cloning. I have several that are part of carbon copy cloner schedules and they work fine as backups (but as best I’m aware won’t boot but I don’t need that; they are fine as backups for migration assistant). That is not the same as Time Machine.

Sorry, David, that is wrong. CCC, SD! et all let you manage backups using Disk Utility and Time Machine. They are being disingenuous by saying that they are Time Machine friendly... and other such nonsense — that's the only way it can work.  That is all they do but they still charge for the convenience — which is fine as long as one understands that is all that they offer. DU and TM can also schedule backups.

I love when the MacRumors CCC and SD fanboys insist that they will never, ever use Time Machine. Uhhh... got some bad news for you...

I can't vouch for SuperDuper but CCC on my end only makes clones. I have separate drives for TM backups. So I use both and honestly, think that strategy (combined with offsite backups like Backblaze and offline storage like Dropbox) is pretty rational. You may want to reach out to Mike Bombich, who makes CCC, as I'm sure he can allay such concerns. CCC is very different from TM. It has snapshots, has the ability to preview the result, and doesn't flood my drive with every incremental backup on an hourly basis (CCC can be scheduled for as often as you want). A clone and a TM backup are two very different things. You can use CCC to make hourly backups that resemble TM but I've never done that since I have TM for hourly backups and CCC for clones (I don't use CCC's Safety Net feature).

And, of course, you have to ask yourself if the new OS brings enough to the table to outweigh the Finale issue.

I'm not finding any issues so far with Sequoia and Finale, but as with even Sonoma, YMMV. The only thing Sequoia has that I actually find useful is the ability to use my iPhone's apps from my MBA, rather than pick up my phone and open specific apps. Why they couldn't have also done this for the iPad to be used by a desktop/laptop, and also have an iPad be able to view a connected iPhone, is beyond me. 

Also stuck with iOS 18 since the 18.1 dev seed doesn't do anything much for my iPhone 14; Apple is really pushing folks to buy an iPhone 16 (or 15, if available) and as I have little interest in AI, am fine with sticking with my iPhone 14 Pro Max for another year. Battery is down to 83% of capacity so once it hits 79% they will replace it under AppleCare+ so I'll be fine.

I've been gone for awhile and have major projects with serious October deadlines so won't be popping in much. A few things till then:

There is no such thing as cloning a Mac. One of the cloneware vendors gives you step-by-step directions for doing everything manually in Disk Utility & Time Machine — and then offers to sell you his app that automates the process. This is exactly what CCC and SD! and everyone else accomplishes because that's the only thing that Apple allows them to do. 

That said, I have successfully created an external that will boot up any Mac made between 2012–2025 and run Finale 27. I will start a new thread on exactly how to do this yourself when I have the directions written up so that they are easy to follow. It took many hours of trial and error to get it right and there are some important steps not covered in any of Apple's documentation—and a few error screens that I saw over and over till I got it right. 

MM's License Manager is not an issue in doing this. Finale installations do not "phone home" to verify the license once installed. I'll explain a bit more then without posting the little secret that I'm sure MM doesn't want any of us to know.

I know we've had this minor disagreement before, but you can indeed clone a mac. I do it with Carbon Copy Cloner and Mike Bombich, the developer, is anything but trying to provide a valuable and longstanding Mac app. The way to go about it in terms of being able to boot from the clone is to turn off the SIP (system integrity protection). That's how Apple suddenly made cloning less convenient, but it does indeed work.

I'd been told by someone who appeared knowledgeable in this forum that any clones or partitions are tied to the CPU and will indeed phone home if connected or associated with a new CPU. If you know that this is not an issue for some secret reason, then that's great, since my clones would then work, and if I migrate to a new machine via Migration Assistant, then from what you're saying Finale would not phone home. It would then only be an issue if someone installed anew on a new machine rather than migrated. Or is this not what you're implying? Thanks.

I'd been told by someone who appeared knowledgeable in this forum that any clones or partitions are tied to the CPU and will indeed phone home if connected or associated with a new CPU.

It phones home when you register but not after installed and registered. I am not going to explain further on a MakeMusic board.