Upgrading our laptops and desktop now.
Looks like Apple is pushing for convergence, so that iPadOS and iOS apps are able to run on macOS.
Thoughts from others?
Haven’t upgraded yet.
This seems like a major change to the OS and upgrading at the bleeding edge just seems an unneeded risk to me.
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I upgraded immediately. The main thing I was looking forward to?
The messages app. The old one was not great. Overall though I’m liking the aesthetic of the update, looks clean. Notification centre looks good, so does control centre. No regrets on updating.
I’m probably not even eligible for upgrade… 2012 mac mini? I’ still on Mojave.
In my old age, I have become a cautious up grader. I also use Pro Tools to produce podcasts commercially and its never a good idea to upgrade your production machine until the good folks over at Avid give you the nod.
Does look good though.
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Yeah, it’s 2014 and later for the Mini. I’m still running all Mojave or earlier on the machines I look after. I have some 32 bit apps I’m not ready to let go of just yet and Mojave works pretty well. Mail is buggy, but it seems to have always been this way.
I’m sure OS 11 is good and everything, but the look and feel does nothing for me. I still miss the coherence of OS 9 sometimes. Current MacOS still doesn’t have the designed-with-a-singular-vision vibe that the MacOS did. It’s far better in almost every other way of course, but the UX seems messy to me.
Can’t upgrade since Apple has placed an arbitrary limit on 2012 and 2013 Macs that are fully capable of running it.
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There’s always Dosdude1 when he makes a patch.
Late 2013 MacBook Pro, still on High Sierra. Meant to update but it rarely gets used. Might wait for a few point updates before updating as it seems some are getting bricked, although it’s 15” not 13”:
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Sadly not this year, but someone else has made a rudimentary patch. Surprise surprise, all the 2012 and 2013 Macs that they dropped are perfectly capable of running running it…
Have you had success with the Dosdude patches?
No, I havent really wanted to, I failed in getting HS to Mojave… but after insttalling it on my Mac Mini, decided that the Macbook is fine as it is. @kionon has had some success.
I haven’t tried Big Sur patches. I beta tested Big Sur and I just don’t like it. I’m staying on Catalina and when the time comes, moving the 2015 MBP to Linux. If Dosdude1 thinks it isn’t worth his while to patch, that says a lot…
I think it was more a case of Dosdude1 is too busy to make a patch
Source? I only remember the initial discussion months ago, I didn’t keep up.
Dosdude1 didn’t even fix the glitch that won’t allow Japanese input on Catalina. I’m trying not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I have tremendous gratitude for what he accomplished and how it has helped give these machines longer lives within the Apple ecosystem, but in Japan, that’s really a breaker. So Mojave it is, and once Mojave starts having security issues, it will definitely be time to move over to Linux.
That said, I am beta testing Linux Mint XFCE 20.1 and it is a huge improvement over 20. I was able to start theming it/modding the workflow in the live test environment extremely quickly and it now has Web App integration built in for web apps that don’t have stand alone packages on linux as they do in macOS or Windows (Microsoft 365, I am looking at you, but also LINE).
I shouldn’t drift too far off topic, but as far as Big Sur, I just… I don’t like the mimicry of iOS. I liked the change from Skeuomorphic to the flat design of the last few releases, especially with the dark mode. Catalina is okay, but I think Mojave was better. If I wanted an iOS device, I would buy one. I’d get an iPad Pro or something… But I don’t. I got rid of my iPad 1 2010 a few years ago and as soon as I had let it go realised I didn’t need it. The irony of how far Big Sur went with its design elements is there were a lot of jokes about it looking like KDE Plasma. I particularly don’t like the redesign of the dock and the menu bar. Which considering that is a huge part of the moment to moment user experience… No thanks.
Catalina had some weird choices and some apps were inconsistent in presentation, but I can deal with that. I think Mojave is the ideal, and the closest I can get to keeping that design the better:
Of course I have switched out as many of the icons for fully round ones as I can. But I do not like the rounded edges of the SmartPhone Apps.
This is something I just can’t handle. It’s uncanny valley. It makes me uncomfortable and agitated. Why are there smartphone apps on my computer? Why are those windows even more rounded than they need to be? Why is there so much space between notification center icons in the top menu bar and so much space between menus? Why does the notification center look like an iPhone, this is not a phone!? WHY IS THE DOCK FLOATING?!
Big Sur as a whole gives me the heebie jeebies. Compare the previous two desktops to how I have arranged my desktop with Linux Mint/XFCE4:
I quite literally think I wouldn’t be able to work with Big Sur for any amount of time. Unlike the incremental changes from what, Mavericks to Catalina, I don’t think I would get used to this.
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I’m certain it got discussed on Macrumours a few months ago.
Mojave was much better. Catalina has been useless from the start and still is.
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So, @Oldmacs, I went down the rabbit hole on Big Sur on unsupported Macs, and the long and the short of it is: Metal GPU or it’s just torture. Basically 2012 MBPs or 2008 and up Mac Pros–so yes, since I have a Mac EFI GTX 680, in theory, I could use one of the patchers (with dosdude1 bowing out, there are actually a couple of different pathways being developed), but I don’t like Big Sur anyway, so…
Basically, if one of the pathways manages to get acceleration pre-Metal managed, it might still happen, but at this point, we’ve hit diminished returns. Once Mojave and Catalina truly hit end of life, Linux is where it is at for these old machines.
For myself, I’m going to stay on Catalina, and I will ONLY go to Big Sur on my 2015 if linux continues to struggle with fractional scaling (Almost certainly a lot of this and other issues has to do with X, and I can’t wait until everyone successfully moves over to Wayland). This 2015 is simply to new and too powerful–now more than ever with half of it having been replaced–to be thinking about thinking about changing to something else.
I’ve got Mojave on my 2012 Mini and have no intention of upgrading to Catalina no matter how much the system NAGS me. And on my 2010 Macbook, am happ to stay on High Sierra… or go Linux, which I am looking at again now I can get the software to read my CPAP machine’s SD card info (It was always there for mac, but Linux is a recent addition).