Anyone installed Big Sur on 2014 Retina iMac?

[willed]

If anyone has experience of Big Sur on an original 27" Retina iMac I'd love to hear how it runs.

My late 2014 Retina iMac purrs along on High Sierra, but I'm considering upgrading to Big Sur to maintain compatibility with new apps.

I've had bad experiences upgrading previous Macs as far as they would go, finding everything is much slower (as well as the usual bits and pieces not working as they should). Is that still the case or has Apple improved the situation as they have with iOS?

Thanks!

Will

3.5 GHz Core i5, 16 GB RAM, Radeon R9 M290X 2GB, 3TB Fusion Drive

 

[Phil77354]

I installed Big Sur on my iMac Retina 5K 27-inch late 2014 model. Same processor and graphics card as you have. I have a 500 GB internal SSD and 32 GB of RAM.

No issues, works great. I installed on first day Big Sur war released, did have some delays before it finally was fully downloaded and installed due to the overload on that particular day.

I upgraded my wife's MacBook yesterday to Big Sur and it was much quicker in downloading, now that it has been out for a couple of weeks.

 

[willed]

I installed Big Sur on my iMac Retina 5K 27-inch late 2014 model. Same processor and graphics card as you have. I have a 500 GB internal SSD and 32 GB of RAM.

No issues, works great. I installed on first day Big Sur war released, did have some delays before it finally was fully downloaded and installed due to the overload on that particular day.

I upgraded my wife's MacBook yesterday to Big Sur and it was much quicker in downloading, now that it has been out for a couple of weeks.

Good to know, thanks! Think I'll take the plunge.

 

[robertandrews]

Good to know, thanks! Think I'll take the plunge.

How did it go? How does it perform now?

 

[Peer1108]

If anyone has experience of Big Sur on an original 27" Retina iMac I'd love to hear how it runs.

My late 2014 Retina iMac purrs along on High Sierra, but I'm considering upgrading to Big Sur to maintain compatibility with new apps.

I've had bad experiences upgrading previous Macs as far as they would go, finding everything is much slower (as well as the usual bits and pieces not working as they should). Is that still the case or has Apple improved the situation as they have with iOS?

Thanks!

Will

3.5 GHz Core i5, 16 GB RAM, Radeon R9 M290X 2GB, 3TB Fusion Drive

Hi, I’m running Big Sur on the iMac Retina 5K 27inch late 2014 too with 4,0 GHz Core i7, AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4GB, 32 GB RAM, 3TB Fusion Drive. (Pretty much the best specifications you can get for this iMac) I’ve switched from Catalina to Big Sur a month ago, there is a really small drop in overall performance, it is noticeable when doing heavy tasks. I’m not really a gamer but every now and then I play some, noticing a drop of around 1 frame per second compared to Catalina when playing games, the frame drop isn’t noticeable because it’s so little. When downloading files I have actually seen improvements in speed. Large files download faster than on previous MacOS versions I’ve used. (Yosemite, High Sierra, Catalina) Overall, if you like the new Big Sur theme and functions I recommend upgrading, you may notice little performance drops now and then, but not really big enough to bother you. (I know I am late replying to this but might be useful for others)

 

[ewu]

don't use Fusion Drive, it is too slow for Big Sur

try to use external SSD drive or upgrade Fusion Drive to SSD