for those that have used Big Sur -- what's the verdict?

[donawalt]

I am happy with it so far.

On Thursday I installed it on my backup MacBook Pro and Messages had problems - I eventually got that sorted out through a combination of restarts, turning Messages and iCloud off/on, and it' been fine since.

This weekend I bit the bullet and upgraded my primary MacBook Pro, which has some more apps running on it. Everything is working fine so far, I don't have a single app not working from a limited amount of testing with all and more comprehensive testing with my most important apps. Most importantly for me for me work, Parallels is working fine (I am on 16.1 and I use the Apple hypervisor as they recommend). All the Apple products are fine on both laptops now - Reminders, Contacts, Messages, Calendar, Music, Podcasts are all good. Handoff is working fine for me. Office products, Dropbox, Evernote, Lightroom, Zoom, HP tools are all are fine, and the utility/tech tools work fine. No crashes or spin reports so far. Time Machine backups working fine on both laptops. I have watched some 4K Youtube videos which looked good. WiFi speeds are good. The system seems just a very minor bit zippier to me. I have not heard anything from the fans other than when I knew they should be running due to a hard usage scenario.

I have seen a very few minor aesthetic things I am not thrilled with (like in Safari), but overall it's worked great for me so far.

 

[Conutz]

Much cleaner UI, similar performance. Quite like it. Converted my Mini that I use at home, work MBP 2018 will be done a little further down the road.

 

[Bazza1]

Meh.

It's tweaked the icons, changed the font in drop downs, changed some of the sounds, changed the shape of some of the contents and shape of some windows, the order of some controls in 'right click', a widget library that isn't - you still can't move them onto your desktop, and it takes a while for some 3rd Party apps to open the first time (or whenever they get updated) while Rosetta 2 works at converting them over. Minor dumb things still not cleaned up in their apps (in Mail, you move stuff into 'Trash', yet to clear that, right click asks if you 'erase Deleted Items' - not 'Empty Trash', which would be much clearer), and I'm sure a wealth of other niggles I have yet to discover.

Maybe there is stuff working more efficiently in the background, but if it doesn't directly affect me, should I care?

Meanwhile, some instability issues with it and some 3rd Party apps, along with some unexpected behaviours - and this on apps supposedly written for the new OS. Apple and developers not talking to each other.

So yeah - meh.

 

[dsemf]

Meh.

It's tweaked the icons, changed the font in drop downs, changed some of the sounds, changed the shape of some of the contents and shape of some windows, the order of some controls in 'right click', a widget library that isn't - you still can't move them onto your desktop, and it takes a while for some 3rd Party apps to open the first time (or whenever they get updated) while Rosetta 2 works at converting them over. Minor dumb things still not cleaned up in their apps (in Mail, you move stuff into 'Trash', yet to clear that, right click asks if you 'erase Deleted Items' - not 'Empty Trash', which would be much clearer), and I'm sure a wealth of other niggles I have yet to discover.

Maybe there is stuff working more efficiently in the background, but if it doesn't directly affect me, should I care?

Meanwhile, some instability issues with it and some 3rd Party apps, along with some unexpected behaviours - and this on apps supposedly written for the new OS. Apple and developers not talking to each other.

So yeah - meh.

Rosetta is active only on AS Macs.

DS

 

[zama36]

Big Sur is pathetic. It feels like they were getting the OS ready to run on the M1 chips and feature or function be damned. After two days, I downgraded yesterday back to Catalina 10.15.7 on a 2020 13" 2.3Ghz i7 w/ 16GB.

Sampling of the issues for ya.

• Notification Center missing basics like calculator. Unable to use third party widgets like iStat Mini.
• Password bug. It was in the developer release back in June but apparently never fixed it. While you could log in with your password you couldn't change any system preferences.
• Top auto scroll in Mail and assuming other apps missing.
• HUGE Memory leak in Safari. I had been running the new version of Safari on Catalina and it was never that bad; to the point of not even responding to clicks on submit buttons.
• Random craziness - Drop downs not staying open, fans going crazy for over a minute at a time, trackpad not responding, screen not turning on even though Touch Bar on after waking up.
• Overall fulginess. While I did like some of the stylized desktops, some of the icons could not have followed the style guides like the notifications "Bell" icon in System Prefs. The translucent bar at the top looks ridiculous especially considering the fact Apple didn't upgrade some of the its own icons like the Beats Updater. Wasted screen space.

Save yourself the headache and wait. Even though Apple split the volumes between data and OS you still have to blow away your data portion in order to install Catalina.

 

[Blowback]

For those that have used Big Sur, please answer the simple poll.

I'm in two minds on whether to install given that whatever I have seen of the UI seems ugly. I'm normally the kind of person that installs the latest OS on day 1, but this time I'm reluctant.

You'll get used to the parts you don't like....as always. There are some cosmetics I don't care for but so far no major software issues and a re-vamped iMessage is worth it on its own. Do hate the cosmetics of the Mail app though!

 

[CTHarrryH]

It runs fine for me - some quirks. Do I think the new look is better - no but I'm sure I'll get used to it. There are things that I think are "harder" than before. So why vote yea - well it isn't a problem for me and getting security and other function updates is important

 

[hakuryuu]

yay, but with some caveats.

• Apple Watch unlock doesn't seem to work (tried disabling the option, restarting and then enabling).
• Little things like the X's on Safari tabs not always appearing.
• Notification Center isn't 100% responsive and I've had it lockup on me a few times which definitely didn't happen on Catalina. Not sure the iOS style widgets are working for me vs the old design I had been accustomed to. I also don't like the access method with a mouse being the Date/Time in the menu bar.
• I hate the spacing of items on the menu bar. Clearly they're prepping MacOS to be touch compatible at some point and I don't like it. The amount of wasted space is shared on the UI of some apps that works better for some than others.
• Some of the icons, as has been repeated ad nauseam by others, are awful. But to be honest thats relatively minor as I don't spend all day looking at icons. I do hope most of the third party apps don't adopt the new style from Apple.
• I've had issues with Bitdefender, but I suspect thats because they haven't updated to support the new APIs and are still attempting to load unsupported kexts (logs appear to confirm this and I've opened a support case). This is also causing cpu spikes from kernelmanagerd and syspolicyd.
• Keychain Access app updates aren't necessarily for the better, but I hope they've improved it under the covers. Items in search results within the app can't be deleted for instance.
• I've had a lot of beach balling of various apps such as Messages

Otherwise I'm pretty happy with it, though I will not be updating my work MBP for a while. Battery Management was a win for my personal MBP as the battery was/is aging faster than I'd like (77% after 2 years).

 

[StellarVixen]

Updated about hour ago. First impressions are good so far. Not satisfied with how fonts look on non Retina displays, but it’s clear Apple thinks HiDPI is the future, and doesn’t care about non Retina monitors anymore.

But I found the workaround for that, so, everything else seems ok.

Maybe slight objection is the apparent waste of space. UI elements are unnecessarily large for mouse, which probably means Macs will be getting touchscreens sooner or later.

 

[ghanwani]

Big Sur is pathetic. It feels like they were getting the OS ready to run on the M1 chips and feature or function be damned. After two days, I downgraded yesterday back to Catalina 10.15.7 on a 2020 13" 2.3Ghz i7 w/ 16GB.

Sampling of the issues for ya.

• Notification Center missing basics like calculator. Unable to use third party widgets like iStat Mini.
• Password bug. It was in the developer release back in June but apparently never fixed it. While you could log in with your password you couldn't change any system preferences.
• Top auto scroll in Mail and assuming other apps missing.
• HUGE Memory leak in Safari. I had been running the new version of Safari on Catalina and it was never that bad; to the point of not even responding to clicks on submit buttons.
• Random craziness - Drop downs not staying open, fans going crazy for over a minute at a time, trackpad not responding, screen not turning on even though Touch Bar on after waking up.
• Overall fulginess. While I did like some of the stylized desktops, some of the icons could not have followed the style guides like the notifications "Bell" icon in System Prefs. The translucent bar at the top looks ridiculous especially considering the fact Apple didn't upgrade some of the its own icons like the Beats Updater. Wasted screen space.

Save yourself the headache and wait. Even though Apple split the volumes between data and OS you still have to blow away your data portion in order to install Catalina.

Waiting won't fix the ugliness though.

 

[VineRider]

yay, but with some caveats.

• Apple Watch unlock doesn't seem to work (tried disabling the option, restarting and then enabling).
• Little things like the X's on Safari tabs not always appearing.
• Notification Center isn't 100% responsive and I've had it lockup on me a few times which definitely didn't happen on Catalina. Not sure the iOS style widgets are working for me vs the old design I had been accustomed to. I also don't like the access method with a mouse being the Date/Time in the menu bar.
• I hate the spacing of items on the menu bar. Clearly they're prepping MacOS to be touch compatible at some point and I don't like it. The amount of wasted space is shared on the UI of some apps that works better for some than others.
• Some of the icons, as has been repeated ad nauseam by others, are awful. But to be honest thats relatively minor as I don't spend all day looking at icons. I do hope most of the third party apps don't adopt the new style from Apple.
• I've had issues with Bitdefender, but I suspect thats because they haven't updated to support the new APIs and are still attempting to load unsupported kexts (logs appear to confirm this and I've opened a support case). This is also causing cpu spikes from kernelmanagerd and syspolicyd.
• Keychain Access app updates aren't necessarily for the better, but I hope they've improved it under the covers. Items in search results within the app can't be deleted for instance.
• I've had a lot of beach balling of various apps such as Messages

Otherwise I'm pretty happy with it, though I will not be updating my work MBP for a while. Battery Management was a win for my personal MBP as the battery was/is aging faster than I'd like (77% after 2 years).

I had the issue with watch unlock. Unpair and re-pair the watch from my iPhone fixed it

 

[CTHarrryH]

do a time machine backup and the icon in the bar "disappears" -it is there but not enough contrast to easily see - do something with it - change screen contrast, re-start, etc and it comes back.

 

[ebika]

I did a clean install on Nov 12 on my non-work-machine, non-critical MBP. It's responsive enough on my mid-2014 MBP. I like the clean rounded edges of the windows. The stock app icons are hideous, but meh, not that big of a deal. The control center is nice since it's a familiar experience to iPadOS and iOS.

The new notification center is just terrible. Huge amounts of wasted space between and within widgets, can't see multi-city weather at a glance, only 3 stocks show up on the stocks widget. It's basically the same terrible style as the widgets on iPadOS and iOS 14, where very little fits on the screen without having to scroll, and doesn't show enough. iOS and iPadOS have always skewed toward wasting screen real estate, but on a MacBook Pro, I want information density to get things done/see a lot at once. It's the same reason I don't use macos Launchpad, it's just silly.

I'd probably just lament loss of functionality and move on, but the recent news that Big Sur bypasses firewalls and VPNs for phone home traffic is just unacceptable. I'm going to install Catalina on my MBP tonight.

 

[drmeatball]

Transition to Big Sur is much smoother than it was to Catalina.

 

[Bazza1]

Transition to Big Sur is much smoother than it was to Catalina.

...if the crashing of delivery servers, the 'phoning home' of Gatekeeper causing even those Macs not getting the update to become unstable, and the bricking of some Big Sur-capable Macs is considered to be a 'much smoother' transition, then yeah - all's good. 🙄

For a company that builds it's own OS very specifically for a limited number of hardware products that they also design and build - and then make a big deal of when that OS is available for download and installation - their delivery and implementation of a stable product is often...lacking.
Heck, they couldn't even get a clean MacOS 11 out the door - we ended up with a patch - 11.0.1. And that's been problematic for some.

 

[colourfastt]

I installed it a couple of days ago, and my thoughts are:

1. It's faster on my 2013 MBA than Catalina, and so far no "beachballs" except for one app that freezes.
2. No application problems, except Maps keeps freezing (reported) and I had to fudge an install for my WD My Home external drive.
3. The extra space taken up by the UI elements is quite unnecessary, especially on a 13" screen like my Air.
4. The lack of contrast between the UI elements makes differentiating difficult, especially which window is "active" and folder icons (see my previous post for that discussion).

 

[tkwolf]

I like the look! I think they just need to refine the spaces. For some reason it all feels like they've unnecessarily expanded spaces on certain areas like the menu bar and the the gap in the floating dock for example.

 

[SRLMJ23]

I like it. Definitely feels like a bit of an improvement over versions I have tried of macOS the last few years. Seems faster and more stable and I like the new design language.

I agree with you.

100% faster and more stable. I have not had one bug pop up yet, I hope it stays that way.

I like the new UI, it does grow on you...obviously you may not like it it all.

I would say this is the most stable release in many years!

Edit: Just to let everyone know, I performed a clean install.

 

[SRLMJ23]

Big Sur is pathetic. It feels like they were getting the OS ready to run on the M1 chips and feature or function be damned. After two days, I downgraded yesterday back to Catalina 10.15.7 on a 2020 13" 2.3Ghz i7 w/ 16GB.

Sampling of the issues for ya.

• Notification Center missing basics like calculator. Unable to use third party widgets like iStat Mini.
• Password bug. It was in the developer release back in June but apparently never fixed it. While you could log in with your password you couldn't change any system preferences.
• Top auto scroll in Mail and assuming other apps missing.
• HUGE Memory leak in Safari. I had been running the new version of Safari on Catalina and it was never that bad; to the point of not even responding to clicks on submit buttons.
• Random craziness - Drop downs not staying open, fans going crazy for over a minute at a time, trackpad not responding, screen not turning on even though Touch Bar on after waking up.
• Overall fulginess. While I did like some of the stylized desktops, some of the icons could not have followed the style guides like the notifications "Bell" icon in System Prefs. The translucent bar at the top looks ridiculous especially considering the fact Apple didn't upgrade some of the its own icons like the Beats Updater. Wasted screen space.

Save yourself the headache and wait. Even though Apple split the volumes between data and OS you still have to blow away your data portion in order to install Catalina.

I have experienced none of these issues, though I have not tested iStatMini, however, maybe iStatMini is not updated for Big Sur?

Safari is running amazing for me. I literally have 19 tabs open and Safari is running fine as well as the system itself.

May I ask, did you upgrade or do a clean install?

I did a clean install (always do with new macOS releases) and like I said in my other post, in my experience Big Sur has the best performance and stability in many, many years of OS X/macOS releases.

Obviously whether you like the new UI is personal opinion, however, I will say during the first few betas I hated it and now it has grown on me and I love it.

Anyway, I would recommend trying a clean install (if you didn't already) and see how it works out for you. Hell, even if you did a clean install and all these things happened, I would try one more clean install as not every clean install comes out perfect!

Edit: *By the way, I am not saying that you are not experiencing these issues, did not want you to think I am saying you are a liar or anything.*

 

[ghanwani]

So far, less than 75% saying yay. IMO, that's pretty bad.

Things seem to be trending in the right direction--over 75% saying yay now. If it gets to 80%, I'll update!

 

[MayaTlab]

I like most of the fundamentals that Apple has laid down with iOS 14 and Big Sur (such as the unified widgets). With Big Sur more specifically, I really like overall the general feeling of the UI which I find a lot more relaxing and helps me focus on my content more. I might be one of the few here who like the spacing.
The execution on these big picture ideas remains unfinished and unpolished to me however. For example, while BS makes some operations faster to me, it also makes some others slower (or at least let's say that I haven't found workarounds). Some apps' layout leaves a lot to be desired in terms of hierarchy and actionable elements location and there are still a lot of UI and design inconsistencies between apps even ones with a similar fundamental layout. Control Centre is a good first step but makes some operations slower (for example I haven't found a way yet to display the bluetooth audio codec that's in use by alt-clicking the BT icon).
I would expect the upcoming patches and yearly release to slowly but surely address these issues, until Apple finds the needs for yet another UI overall, as it's always been the case every time they happened.

 

[Kipfi]

For those that have used Big Sur, please answer the simple poll.

I'm in two minds on whether to install given that whatever I have seen of the UI seems ugly. I'm normally the kind of person that installs the latest OS on day 1, but this time I'm reluctant.

I always have the latest system, there is no use in running an old one for a long time, and Big Sur actually gives some new and useful features, and so I grumpily (veeery grumpily) put up with these horrible icons. The flat look was really a graphical revolution, wonderful in their simplicity and utility. Now it goes back to what it was before, very strange.

 

[tomtad]

only 3 stocks show up on the stocks widget

Agree the new widgets aren't the best, but if you right click on the stocks widget and choose large it will display 6 stocks

 

[krell100]

Clean install on 2014 6,1 Mac Pro. So far so good, is solid and so far no bugs. I quite like the fresh look, I use it in dark mode. Pity some of the icons etc don't stick with a flat look, some are plain ugly. Apple Mail is a bit odd, seems to be more steps to do anything so, yeah.. Photoshop, Logic, Ableton Live all working fine. No calculator widget which seems like an oversight. Overall pretty solid update.

 

[Mr.PT]

From long experience, those who say a new update suddenly slowed down their computer noticeably are practising bad system housekeeping. They have done upgrade after upgrade every year without doing a clean install, their apps can be very out of date (sometimes because they pirate them), their caches and other library folders are full of old files that the system doesn’t need anymore, they haven’t reset their PRAM and NVRAM for a while, they may even have download bad software or malware that they don’t want to publicly admit to because of embarrassment.

When you upgrade always always always do the following:

Back up your data.

Reset NVRAM and PRAM.

Do a clean install.

Download and install the latest versions of your software and keep them up to date.

Periodically clear your caches, logs and other temp folders.

If you have a massive amount of files on your computer that you never open, back them up and delete them from your computer. The emptier your drive is the faster it performs.

Disable background apps and daemons that don’t need to run all the time. For example, Adobe’s app management software ‘Creative Cloud app’ can be quit instead of hidden so that it doesn’t chew processor time.

Could please tell the best way to clear caches, logs and other temp folders?
Thanks