My efforts to solve a problem with the electrical wiring in my home, where outputting a document on my laser printer would sometimes trigger the circuit breaker for that room, has taken on some curious twists and turns. When it first happened, the landlord agreed to have an electrician install a more robust circuit breaker, from 15 amps to 20 amps. Yes, the wiring is capable of handling the larger current load.

After the installation, the problem continued to occur, only not as often. So I did a little online checking, and found that other owners of the low-cost Brother HL-5450DN printer had encountered similar problems, as did owners of other Brother lasers. So I contacted tech support, and talked with a supervisor who seemed very aware of the problem. He promised to offer a solution.

The first attempted resolution to circuit breaker tripping was to install a special version of the printer’s firmware. Only it cannot be installed using the Java installer available on Macs. Instead, I needed to use Brother’s admin utility for Windows. I ended up downloading the firmware via Windows 10 on a Parallels Desktop 12 virtual machine.

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So as regular readers know, I updated my work iMac to macOS Sierra (the first Golden Master) last week, ahead of recording an interview for The Tech Night Owl LIVE. As I wrote at the time, I was foolhardy enough to do something that I might have avoided were I not in the tech business. I always recommend that my readers be careful about new operating systems, to take the process seriously.

At least I had taken precautions, with three full backups (one online) and a second Mac on hand to manage the radio show if something went wrong.

It didn’t, but I wouldn’t assume that Sierra is going to be the perfect experience for everyone. There are far too many variables, so it’s best to prepare for something to go wrong and have a backup. It is also a good idea to check online and see what sort of problems others are reporting. While almost anything can happen to someone, if you see a number of Mac users describing a specific problem, it has to be taken seriously, even if it may not impact your setup.

So I read one article suggesting the onset of Wi-Fi connection glitches. This takes us back to OS X Yosemite, which produced similar problems for many people until it was finally resolved not long before its successor, El Capitan arrived. I wouldn’t assume the causes are the same, or how many people are affected. I don’t generally use Wi-Fi on my Mac, since it is connected via a cable to an Ethernet switch, but I did switch to Wi-Fi, temporarily, to see if anything might go wrong. But I didn’t have any problems, nor did I encounter any issues of that sort with Yosemite.

Now if you were a public beta tester and installed the GM Candidate earlier this month, well, the final version is several builds newer, so you’ll want to download a copy and install it. No doubt stuff had to be fixed, which made it necessary for Apple to seed another Golden Master candidate, which is the one that was actually released to the public on Tuesday.

On the very next day, developers were able to download beta one of 10.12.1, the first Sierra maintenance release. It became available to public beta testers the next day. If there’s a normal beta cycle, this release will go public before mid-October. So far, there are no reports of what has been changed, but if there are any serious issues to be addressed, perhaps some Mac sites will have updates.

Since installing the release version of Sierra, I did run into some glitches. As reported earlier this week, first was a third-party Facebook Messenger app, FreeChat, which failed to launch. I haven’t heard about a new version. The second problem involved an interaction between the popular Open/Save dialog enhancer, Default Folder X, with one of the audio apps I work with, Amadeus Pro. It’s a two-stage issue, one being an incomplete open dialog, and the second involving the inability to paste another audio file into a waveform. I add the opening and closing themes to my radio shows that way. Disabling Default Folder X resolved the problem. No doubt just excluding Amadeus Pro would accomplish the same result but still keep the utility running in other apps.

The third? Well, the default toolbar set in yet another audio app, Sound Studio, all of a sudden split apart, with the three icons at the right thrust to the corner of the screen. I basically crafted a fix by bringing up the Customize Toolbar window and moving the icons back to their normal position. A curious symptom indeed.

In case you’re wondering, I’m using the current versions of all these apps. Checking for updates confirmed it.

But nothing is crashing. The inconveniences are minor, and I’m able to accomplish my work otherwise without any other problems— at least so far.

I may be lucky, of course. I have a select number of apps that I use from day to day. Others I might not touch for weeks on end, so it’s quite possible I’ll run into something in the next few weeks that I overlooked, or do something to draw attention to themselves. This is to be expected. Even though Sierra doesn’t have that many new or changed features compared to previous releases, there are enough under-the-hood alterations to cause trouble. So it doesn’t hurt to check the App Store or the sites run by the developers of your work-critical apps to see whether there are any problems with Sierra.

Overall, my impressions are positive. Performance on my iMac remains good, but I haven’t installed Sierra on my 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro, which is listed as compatible. One reason has been to make sure I could do my work in case something went wrong with the installation on my iMac. But I will update it soon, so I can see how an older Mac notebook manages the upgrade.

It started out simply enough. Apple established a Project Titan with the purported intention to build an electric car with self-driving capabilities. Well, the actual goal might not be at all simple to accomplish, but the facts appeared to be correct, along with hiring of up to 1,000 people, plus setting up a test facility near the corporate campus with which to design the new vehicles.

But over time the stories, understandably lacking any confirmation from Apple, underwent a few twists and turns. First came the report that the presumed project lead, Steve Zadesky, a former Ford engineer, had left the company. Not that he actually made any announcement, but the rumors had it that the project allegedly lacked a clear vision, and changes were necessary.

This summer, it was reported that the project had been delayed by a year and that dozens of people were being laid off. Originally it was expected that the alleged Apple Car might arrive by 2020, but now it appeared that 2021 was the modified target date. In addition, a new project leader took control in the person of former Apple hardware chief Bob Mansfield, who had actually retired from the company before returning to do special projects, or consulting chores, for Tim Cook.

The goals were also narrowed, according to some reports, to focus mainly on self-driving technology rather than designing a whole new vehicle. Supposedly Apple ran into a problem similar to the one faced when it considered building a smart TV a few years back. With so many auto makers busy focusing on self-driving and electric vehicle technology, how would Apple make a difference? Indeed, some regard Tesla Motors, and its unique approach to marketing and selling its vehicles, as the company that operated in the spirit of Apple.

Again nothing has been confirmed, although the existence of Project Titan, the fact that hundreds of former employees at major car companies, and the presence of Bob Mansfield in the leadership role, appeared credible. Certainly potential test vehicles might be spotted if it’s about designing a car, and if Apple actually submitted prototypes to government agencies for testing, the cat — or the car — would be out of the bag.

This week, the presumably secret Apple automotive project is once again in the news, with stories that Apple has been talking with McLaren Automotive, a UK-based manufacturer of high-end sports cars with prices soaring past a quarter of a million dollars, about buying a stake or the entire company. McLaren, famous for its Formula One race cars, also has high-end technology potentially related to autonomous driving, such as using a single device to manage the operations of the engine, transmission and electrical system. That might serve as the core of an advanced self-driving system if it can be perfected for mass production.

Now I hardly i think Apple wants to sell a few exotic sports cars per year for the well-heeled. Such an acquisition, should it occur, would be all about technology and manufacturing expertise. If Apple could manage to filter that expertise down to products that you could actually afford to buy, it might help jumpstart the project. As most of you know, Apple often acquires other companies strictly for technology, and many of the exclusive advantages of the iPhone and the iPad are due to those acquisitions. Remember that Siri and Touch ID are just two examples of features that arrived from such acquisitions, along with the A-series processors.

There are also published reports that Apple is also looking at a San Francisco startup, Lit Motors, which invented what is described as an electric self-balancing motorcycle. So could it be an Apple Cycle rather than an Apple Car? Regardless officials for all the companies involved are not commenting on whether or not they are having interactions with Apple of one sort or another. One expects such negotiations would be done under ironclad, legally defensible NDAs, and that official announcements of a purchase would be free of any incriminating details.

Even if the stories about McLaren and Lit Motors are essentially as reported, that still doesn’t necessarily reveal Apple’s end game. Apple didn’t buy Beats to sell fancy bass-heavy headphones either. But such acquisitions would definitely demonstrate Apple’s deep commitment to make something out of Project Titan. It would also serve to disprove the occasional rumor that Apple really wants to acquire Tesla Motors. Obviously it’s moving in a different direction, and it may well be that other companies will be acquired as needed over the next few years to bring project Title to fruition.

Even if the McLaren purchase occurs, Apple will probably continue to market the fancy cars and participate in racing to keep up the company’s tradition. But the end game would be something that Apple customers might actually be able to buy — or lease. If it’s still about autonomous driving technology, it would possibly be licensed to auto makers that agree to build vehicles that fit Apple’s design profile. I’m thinking something akin to Intel’s UltraBook designs for slim and light notebooks, but that doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. As soon as Apple licenses technology to other companies, it looses control, which is very much against the company’s DNA. With CarPlay, it’s just presenting a subset of your iPhone’s interface in your car’s infotainment system, which merely conveniences Apple customers and provides a showcase for potential customers who might be along for the ride.

Then again, maybe it’s really about building a worldwide network of self-driving taxi cabs, an uber version of Uber.

So, as promised, the newly minted macOS, Sierra, launched on Tuesday. With heavy loads on Apple’s servers, you may have had to wait a while for it to arrive. The downside of the free Internet service I’m getting in this place is that it’s not super-fast. So it took a grand total of six hours for it to arrive. But it’s not that I wasn’t using it already, having installed the first Golden Master candidate. Apple has released two for developers, one for public beta testers, who now have to download a full installer to be up to date.

I had hopes that that some of the minor glitches I found in Sierra might be resolved with the release version, which bears the same build number as the second Golden Master, 16A323, but that’s not quite true. So I still have that occasional temporary freeze with Mail, in which it becomes unresponsive for 30 seconds or so, before it resumes normal operation. I had the identical problem in El Capitan from the earliest betas through the final maintenance update, 10.11.6.

But now that Sierra is officially released, I’ll take this up with Apple support and see what they suggest.

Now as regular readers know, I am not above taking a few chances, not because I want to damage my data or make my Macs unstable. I want to be up to date as much as possible for the radio show and this blog. But I take my chances with a backup plan, or rather three of them.

So I first installed Sierra on a second partition on my iMac’s internal drive. With the ability to create “live” partitions, this is no big deal. It’s just a matter of waiting till the resizing process is complete.

Now in the past, I’ve moved the new OS to my main partition after a month or so. Usually it was stable enough, but not so with Sierra. I waited until the first Golden Master to install it on my work partition. But, as I said, I have backups that consist of a clone backup and a Time Machine backup on a pair of external drives, plus a cloud backup via CrashPlan. So I might have been foolhardy, but I knew I could return to my previous configuration in a couple of hours or so. In the meantime, I had my MacBook Pro at hand to manage the radio shows and writing and editing chores — just in case.

Indeed, this is the most important caution when it comes to doing a major OS upgrade. You want to have a full backup. While most installations ought to proceed satisfactorily, a tiny percentage of users will encounter troubles. They will blame Apple, usually, even if the cause is some form of corruption in their own setup. But the blame game doesn’t resolve the problem. Having a full backup may be the best solution. But you have to allow enough time for things to settle down.

At the very start, indexing in Mail and for Spotlight will make the new system seem slow for a while. So give it a day before you test for possible performance issues.

Now if you really want to be cautious, you might prefer to hold off for a few days or a few weeks before you consider installing Sierra. No doubt there are early so-called version point-zero defects that may require fixing, and if you check the online chatter to see what loads of users report, you can decide if it’s a deal breaker or not. But it’s also true that recent OS X versions haven’t received such great reviews from Mac users at the App Store. Both El Capitan and Yosemite garnered three stars. Let’s see how Sierra fares.

In any case, the installation was, to me, a non-issue. Just about everything worked, although I had to switch Facebook messaging apps. So FreeChat for Facebook Messenger wouldn’t load messages. I found another app, Chatty, for $1.99 at the App Store, which seems perfectly functional. Everything else I’ve tried so far, including my Brother and Epson printers, appears to function normally, but I haven’t put all my apps through their paces yet.

That said, a tentpole feature of Sierra is the desktop version of Siri. As you know, I have expressed my skepticism about it on a number of occasions. I find little in the release version to change my tune. It doesn’t work effectively in my workflow, which includes recording and editing audio files for my radio shows. When I’m not editing, I keep the radio on in the background, and I don’t want to compete with other voices to ask Siri to do something. So it’s just not for me.

Siri is also not suited to an office environment where you have people sitting in cubicles. Can you imagine the din as dozens fight to order Siri to do one thing or another? That said, it should work well enough for people at home or in a private office, so I’m not going to say it was a waste of time for Apple to add Siri. At the very least, they need to keep up with Microsoft, who added the Cortana virtual assistant to Windows 10 last year.

And, no, I haven’t used Cortana either on a Parallels virtual machine after briefly putting it through its paces.

There are a modest number of other Sierra improvements, including the Universal Clipboard, the ability to store your Desktop and Documents folders in the cloud, and the Optimized Storage feature that will help those with space-challenged drives to maximize space. I suspect my son, Grayson, will cherish that one, since he just bought a new MacBook Air that has a drive that’s a fraction of the size of the one in his now-dead 2008 MacBook.

Other features include fancy formatting enhancements to Messages, similar to iOS 10, which will largely appeal to younger users, the ability to use Apple Pay via the web, and support for auto unlocking your Mac via an Apple Watch. But the latter is no reason, by itself, to buy Apple’s smartwatch.

Overall, Sierra is a decent though not essential upgrade. But observe the usual cautions before you decide to go for it.