macOS Sonoma 14.5 Issues Emerge After Release

As we push away from Apple’s macOS Sonoma 14.5 release, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air users are starting to complain about a variety of frustrating bugs and performance issues.

Earlier this month, after a lengthy stint in beta, Apple pulled its macOS Sonoma 14.5 update out of testing and pushed it to millions of MacBook users around the world.

The milestone release is fairly small, but it delivers new features and important security patches to compatible Mac devices.

macOS Sonoma 14.5’s performance on our MacBook’s has been fine in the early going, but some users have run into issues. This doesn’t come as too much of a surprise given that issue plague every version of macOS.

It’s early, so we expect the list to grow, but here are some of the macOS Sonoma 14.5 problems MacBook users have run into thus far:

• Issues with Messages
• Crashes
• Abnormal battery drain
• Extreme lag
• Remote Desktop issues
• Bluetooth problems
• Issues with dictation
• Apple Music problems
• Freezes
• Overheating
• Installation issues
• Finder unresponsive
• Problems with external devices

These complaints are from Apple’s Community forums, but there are plenty of others on social media sites like Reddit and Twitter/X.

The good news is thus far, we haven’t seen any widespread problems with the software. The same can’t be said for Apple’s iOS 17.5 update for iPhone.

MacBook users who haven’t made the move to macOS Sonoma 14.5 yet should dig into feedback about the update’s performance before upgrading.

We’ve released a quick macOS Sonoma 14.5 review that goes over our early experience with the software and we’ll update that guide once we’ve spent more time with the firmware.

Apple’s likely working on a new version of macOS Sonoma and we expect macOS Sonoma 14.6 to enter beta in the near future. The public release will likely come in July.

Milestone upgrades typically bring a mix of new features and under-the-hood improvements so macOS Sonoma 14.6 should deliver fixes for lingering issues.

For users with problems that can’t wait, head over to our fixes for the most common macOS Sonoma issues and see if there’s a solution that works.