On working Mojave, skipped Catalina, any reason to get Big Sur?

[pshufd]

Not sure if this is too late to help or means much, but...

It was definitely not worth it for me. I liked Mojave very much. When Catalina was 9 months old, I thought it would be solid. I had no clue about the separation of the data and system volumes. The Catalina firmware on my late 2012 MacBook Pro 10,2 (best computer I've ever owned), prevents CCC & SuperDuper from encrypting bootable clones. Eh, not an issue for most people--if you have a newer Mac it's no issue (unless you have Big Sur*). But my laptop contains private data for work, so any clone I have with me for an emergency must be encrypted as well. I'm sure there are many in the medical community in the same boat. It was a warm, fuzzy feeling of security to have 2 Time Machine backups and 2 bootable clones in 2 different places, all encrypted.

When I wanted to then move "down" to Mojave, that's when I found out you can't migrate your data down from a clone made on Catalina, so I was stuck (I should have kept a Mojave clone for longer than 2 months).

*Big Sur is even more of a problem with bootable clones. They're difficult to create, and if your internal SSD (hardware) dies, it's a prime situation to boot from your clone, but you can't, because that process is dependent on the internal SSD being alive. It is POSSIBLE Apple repairs this issue, but I'm not holding my breath.

Shirt Pocket Watch

I should say: if you want to clone your data as a backup with CCC or SuperDuper to restore from, you still can. And I've never had an Apple internal SSD die on me.

I will try Big Sur regularly on a Virtual Machine and I hope that it gets better but I don't consider it a good choice for my old hardware at this time. I am on the fence about an Air/M1 and wouldn't have any choice but the performance problems on my older hardware wouldn't be an issue on the M1.

 

[rocketmanblamb]

I will try Big Sur regularly on a Virtual Machine and I hope that it gets better but I don't consider it a good choice for my old hardware at this time. I am on the fence about an Air/M1 and wouldn't have any choice but the performance problems on my older hardware wouldn't be an issue on the M1.

I don't always appreciate how many freaking macs I have accumulated over the years.

Still have a Blackbook with 10.7.5 with SSD so it's tolerable.
A silver macbook 2009 with hacked High Sierra on it.

My current working stable that includes both 2015 13" and 15" MBPros that I run Mojave on. These are my workhorse machines that I haven't been interested in upgrading at all from Mojave. At first because of 32 bit support (Aperture) although I have settled on moving to Capture One 21 now as the successor to that, but just as much because it all 'just works' fine and I hate "upgrading" an OS so it will usually be a clean install.

I have a desktop that I have Catalina on and ran a few things here and there it was almost like a testing machine, My goal is to migrate all my Final Cut Pro libraries there and begin using it more regularly - it sits right next to the 15" MBP which is starting to struggle with things like HEVC video.

Had Catalina running with it for the last 10 months or so (which I don't have any particular gripes with) I just did a clean install with Big Sur 11.2.3. Eventually it's just for the support of stuff like Apple Apps like Final Cut Pro that I'll be forced in to this upgrade path.

Other than the platform support for M1 I can not for the life of me understand how this is macOS 11 vs 10.16. That to me is a failure of vision and ambition. If the move from PowerPC to Intel took from 10.4.4 to 10.6 there is no way this current shift is macOS 11 (bring out the trumpets and fanfare)

Unless the versioning now starts going11, 12, 13,14 every other year...

That's my biggest gripe so far - all of the OP's comments I agree with - what is happening with this that is making me say OMG macOS 11!!! My biggest fear is that we will be pushed further into the dystopian world like iOS where you can't even downgrade if you want to... I just tried to go back to 13.3 iOS and realized it was going to be near impossible or at least very challenging once I had updated to the battery killer that is 14.5.1 (but I digress!!!!!!)

Here's to the front runners who get in early and report all the problems to us late comers and slow updaters! Cheers.

 

[pshufd]

I don't always appreciate how many freaking macs I have accumulated over the years.

Still have a Blackbook with 10.7.5 with SSD so it's tolerable.
A silver macbook 2009 with hacked High Sierra on it.

My current working stable that includes both 2015 13" and 15" MBPros that I run Mojave on. These are my workhorse machines that I haven't been interested in upgrading at all from Mojave. At first because of 32 bit support (Aperture) although I have settled on moving to Capture One 21 now as the successor to that, but just as much because it all 'just works' fine and I hate "upgrading" an OS so it will usually be a clean install.

I have a desktop that I have Catalina on and ran a few things here and there it was almost like a testing machine, My goal is to migrate all my Final Cut Pro libraries there and begin using it more regularly - it sits right next to the 15" MBP which is starting to struggle with things like HEVC video.

Had Catalina running with it for the last 10 months or so (which I don't have any particular gripes with) I just did a clean install with Big Sur 11.2.3. Eventually it's just for the support of stuff like Apple Apps like Final Cut Pro that I'll be forced in to this upgrade path.

Other than the platform support for M1 I can not for the life of me understand how this is macOS 11 vs 10.16. That to me is a failure of vision and ambition. If the move from PowerPC to Intel took from 10.4.4 to 10.6 there is no way this current shift is macOS 11 (bring out the trumpets and fanfare)

Unless the versioning now starts going11, 12, 13,14 every other year...

That's my biggest gripe so far - all of the OP's comments I agree with - what is happening with this that is making me say OMG macOS 11!!! My biggest fear is that we will be pushed further into the dystopian world like iOS where you can't even downgrade if you want to... I just tried to go back to 13.3 iOS and realized it was going to be near impossible or at least very challenging once I had updated to the battery killer that is 14.5.1 (but I digress!!!!!!)

Here's to the front runners who get in early and report all the problems to us late comers and slow updaters! Cheers.

I built a sosumi Catalina build on my 2008 Dell XPS Studio so it's gotten to the point where it is bog easy to run Intel macOS on just about anything these days. I plan to try a WSL KVM macOS build one of these days. The reason for KVM is GPU performance. VirtualBox GPU performance is awful but good enough for office stuff.

I wrote up an ad for my 2014 and 2015 MacBook Pros. I plan to sell one of them as I only really need one laptop. I will then get an M1X when they come out. I'm expecting November this year. Maybe it's this summer but who really knows with the component shortages out there. My 2009 iMac is still running High Sierra so I'm comfortable running old versions, as long as I have good backups. I only need two systems that will run my old software.

I do wish that Apple would provide support for Mojave for another five years or so. But I don't think they have an incentive to do that unless maybe Corporate Support Contracts will require them to. So I'll keep one Intel MacBook Pros (just replaced the battery on both so both are good for another six years) and have a VM on my big Windows box and then an M1X system. Could get a Mini and a MacBook Pro. I can just run macOS on the VM for desktop stuff and on the Intel MacBook Pro for when I want to be mobile. Or I could sell the other Intel as well.

It is nice to have a lot of hardware hanging around.