For years, I owned Canon cameras. When Sony introduced the first professional mirrorless cameras, I switched brands wholesale and have never looked back. I own both a Sony Alpha 1 and an A7R4, which are currently meeting my needs in every way. The former is ideal for sports and wildlife photography, while the latter excels in landscapes, portraiture, and product photography. For all of Sony’s hardware prowess, they truly suck at software and user interface. The entirety of my day was consumed performing a software update to my Alpha’s firmware and then restoring the infinite number of settings in the menu system.

Step 1: Download Sony Driver system extension for Mac. (10m)

Step 2: Restart my MacBook in Safe mode, disable a security feature that prevents malicious software from being installed, reboot, install the Sony extension, reboot, reboot again in Safe mode, renable security settings, reboot. (20m)

Step 3: Download and install Ver. 1.31 → Ver. 1.35 updater. (40m)

Step 4: Download and install Ver. 1.35 → Ver. 2.01 updater. (40m)

Step 5: Download and install Ver. 2.01 → Ver. 3.01 updater. (10m)

<I should mention that if any of the prior three steps get interrupted for any reason, it is possible to render the camera a total brick>

Step 6: Program several hundred settings, recustomize the controls and menus to restore the camera to its last configured state (half of the time is spent looking up and deciphering what many of the menu items do). (180m)

Suffice it to say that this was not a very enjoyable day, save for the fact that Jeanine returned from Vermont.