After considerable research, I've learned that I can not upgrade to Sierra or High Sierra because I have a Fusion Drive in my iMac, and there was no support for APFS on Fusion drives until Mojave. So if people are considering upgrading from El Capitan, be aware that you'll need to go to Mojave if you have this drive. Regular hard drives will work, but run more slowly on the newer APFS file system, but if you have an SSD drive, it'll run fine. In fact, if you're considering buying a new Mac, you should get an SSD hard drive. They're more expensive, but your machine will run better and it will last much longer.
Also, I found a Last Crash file in my Sims 4 folder from the other night when I was trying different things with my game. I've been plagued by gallery crashes since a patch last summer. If I try to get into the gallery from Manage Worlds, or on an unplayed lot, it instantly crashes my game. The only way I've been able to get the gallery to open (and hence my own library) is to actually have a sim buy a lot, THEN open gallery, and most of the time it works. So I've just been dealing with that. I took a look at the latest lastCrash text and found a bunch of references to Metal in it. It mentions "AMDMTLBronzeDriver", which I think refers to my video card, with probably metal 1 running on it. Metal 2 is what's in Mojave and probably High Sierra. So I was curious and googled the bronze driver. I found numerous pages talking about metal crashing when trying to load various actions in several apps. So I think that's what's actually happening with our Sims games. Metal is crashing due to whatever code changes were installed with the last few patches. And since it's affecting our video cards, it's taking out the whole computer when it hangs.
You'd think they would have tested on the systems STILL listed on Origin & Apple as supported. But apparently they haven't. Can they walk this back in another patch? WILL they? Who knows?
