2020 OS upgrades: iOS 14, iPadOS 14, WatchOS 7, Big Sur (1 Viewer)

[dpippel]

Four times now while attempting to download the update. This IS the 21st century, isn't it? And Apple is still the most valued company (or in the top 5) on Earth, right? Lame.

 

[dpippel]

Major issues at Apple:

Apple confirms widespread outages affecting downloads, more - 9to5Mac

macOS Big Sur downloads are very slow as the next generation Mac software has just launched, at the same time, Apple's dev site appears to be down.

9to5mac.com

 

[dpippel]

Well, I finally got Big Sur to download and I attempted to install it last night. All went well until the last reboot, when instead of starting macOS my MBP booted into my Windows 10 Bootcamp partition. The Big Sur install had bricked my macOS partition. Didn't even show as a boot device in Recovery Mode. So, I did a manual reinstall from RM, which seems to have worked. All my data was there and I'm running Big Sur now.

All is not well, however. The Messages app sometimes refuses to start. The icon just bounces in the Dock forever and I have to Force Quit the app. Most apps, particularly my startup apps, take forever to load. Fan sometimes runs non-stop, and I even got a beachball trying to send a problem report to Apple that the system itself had generated for the Messages issue. It finally went after 45 seconds of spinning.

In all my years of using Apple products, this has got to be the worst OS rollout I've ever experienced. A complete shitshow. Way to go, Apple!

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Big Sur has been working pretty well for the first 12 hours of use.

Right now my trash can won't open (I want to retrieve a file) so there is one issue.

I did get a kernel panic in the first 15 minutes. That harkened me back to all the issues I had with the Developers Preview. However, something interesting happened: a little later, Little Snitch asked for permission for Mac OS Kernel to communicate with the server. Once I granted it permission the kernel panics completely stopped...at least thus far.

Otherwise, it's running well for the moment.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Big Sur has been working okay for the first 12 hours of use.

Right now my trash can won't open (I want to retrieve a file) so there is one issue.

I did get a kernel panic in the first 15 minutes. That harkened me back to all the issues I had with the Developers Preview. However, something interesting happened: a little later, Little Snitch asked for permission for Mac OS Kernel to communicate with the server. Once I granted it permission the kernel panics completely stopped...at least thus far.

Otherwise, it's running well for the moment.

 

[DaveF]

About to upgrade my iMac.

Updated my iMac last night to the latest Catalina patch. Huge problems. Went to bed with a potentially dead iMac...



I gave up. Did a hard power off (the fifth for the night) and let it be. Rebooted in the morning and it was back to normal.

I downloaded the Big Sur and left for work...

I’m doing a Smart Update to my SuperDuper, and will kick off Big Sur in a few minutes.

 

[dpippel]

Good luck, Dave.

 

[DaveF]

Oops, forgot I wasn’t supposed to upgrade yet. Ah well.

I'm going to keep this short and to the point.

It's never a good idea to update to a just-released major OS version unless you have to. Nobody knows how reliable Big Sur is going to be for regular users. Let someone else find out before you take the jump.

On our end, SuperDuper! will not be compatible with Big Sur on day of release.

As I indicated on twitter, the first time we were able to make a successful bootable copy of Big Sur at all was November 5th. As of this writing, that was six days ago.

Until that point, it wasn't possible.

So, it's going to be a while. Until then, if you must move to Big Sur, use Time Machine.

Shirt Pocket Watch

www.shirtpocket.com

 

[DaveF]

Big Sur upgrade no problem! Weird, Catalina upgrades have been hell, frankly. This is encouraging!

 

[DaveF]

Gave the Ars review a skim, since I don’t remember anything about v11 from WWDC. From playing a short bit and this review, there’s a few nice tweaks, notably to Messages finally catching up with four years of features.

But otherwise, there’s really no new features and major improvements to Big Sur? It looks different. But not finding a lot that’s functionally different. It doesn’t seem bad. But it doesn’t seem...beneficial?

Have to look for feature round ups this weekend, find what I’m missing.

macOS 11.0 Big Sur: The Ars Technica review

Yes, you read that right—Mac OS X (or macOS 10?) is no more.

arstechnica.com

 

[Thomas Newton]

But otherwise, there’s really no new features and major improvements to Big Sur? It looks different. But not finding a lot that’s functionally different. It doesn’t seem bad. But it doesn’t seem...beneficial?

It looks like there might be more privacy features ("intelligent tracking prevention", "monitoring" of passwords that have been compromised in a data breach, App Store privacy practices summaries).

Some of the changes seem to be aimed at making the Mac GUI look a bit more like the iPad and iPhone one. Maybe for the benefit of ARM-based Mac users who might be mixing and matching Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps?