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Good to hear a lot of positives with MacBook 12 and Big Sur. I was gonna wait until maybe 11.4 to update but maybe I'm make the jump at 11.2
 
I'm thinking about doing a standard "dirty" upgrade on my 2017 i5 Macbook 12 from Catalina to whatever is current, Big Sur I guess. I'm concerned about, of course, battery life and performance. I do NOT want to do a clean install. I'm too old for that stuff any more, and don't feel like spending a day or two of my life putting everything back into place.

Maybe I should just stay where I am. After all, my 2011 MBA is running fine on whatever the last update was for that, and after all these years I think security updates are overrated, especially since whenever a truly serious security issue comes to light Apple typically releases a security update even for "unsupported" devices anyway.

Any opinions?
 
I'm thinking about doing a standard "dirty" upgrade on my 2017 i5 Macbook 12 from Catalina to whatever is current, Big Sur I guess. I'm concerned about, of course, battery life and performance. I do NOT want to do a clean install. I'm too old for that stuff any more, and don't feel like spending a day or two of my life putting everything back into place.

Maybe I should just stay where I am. After all, my 2011 MBA is running fine on whatever the last update was for that, and after all these years I think security updates are overrated, especially since whenever a truly serious security issue comes to light Apple typically releases a security update even for "unsupported" devices anyway.

Any opinions?
I did an update from Mojave to Big Sur 11.0.1 on my 2015 base MacBook. No clean install for me as I also did not want to spend a few days getting all content and settings back to the way I like it. No noticeable issues, however my system did feel slightly more responsive after a few days of use.

Thinking about it, I have never done a clean install on this machine since I bought it (I believe it had Yosemite). No problems to date with only doing upgrades.
 
I did an update from Mojave to Big Sur 11.0.1 on my 2015 base MacBook. No clean install for me as I also did not want to spend a few days getting all content and settings back to the way I like it. No noticeable issues, however my system did feel slightly more responsive after a few days of use.

Thinking about it, I have never done a clean install on this machine since I bought it (I believe it had Yosemite). No problems to date with only doing upgrades.

My mid-w2011 MBA I never clean installed, upgraded with each new release until Apple stopped updating, and it is a little bit laggy, but the LOUD FAN runs more or less continuously now.

I don't know if it's just whatever the last version of OSX is doing, crud left over in the background from so many different softwares being added and deleted, or maybe even a dirty fan and bad heat paste on the sink... maybe one of these days I'll crack it open, but I mostly just use it as a synth addition for my keyboard through garageband and it works fine for that.

But thanks for the data point. I'm still undecided. I don't even know what benefits BigSur would bring me - I haven't been following OS updates much lately.
 
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I was not using VMware fusion on my MacBook, only my mbp 16, to run Mojave (for 32-bit apps). Yesterday, I installed the newest VMware on my 2017 MacBook (16-i7-512), and it seemed to run as fast as on the mbp 16. It was quite surprising. Perhaps it was the newest VMware + Big Sur.
 
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