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ylluminate

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 28, 2017
133
144
Well folks, just wanted to relate some experiences I've had in my small foray into Ventura and am done with this iteration of the OS it appears. A few major halting / critical points on an M1 Max system (also, just to be clear, I'm not a novice user - I've been a goto guy that has helped Apple "Geniuses" over the years when they can't figure things out) :

  1. Be aware that the upgrade can seriously fail. I tried both 13.0 and 13.1 beta. The system, while performing an upgrade, had an infinite Apple logo reboot loop that went into recovery mode after several reboot attempts. I went through several troubleshooting steps that I won't document here. USB backups don't boot so the recovery process is HORRIFIC now for Apple. Removing the ability to boot to USB drives is a nightmare level mistake by Apple. I do not trust Apple whatsoever anymore, even though their brand of OS is still the lesser of the proverbial "poisons" yet still (not a compliment, just an observation).
  2. Installed from scratch, but restore of previous system settings failed for some various obscure/unclear reasons. This situation descended into chaos when I found that the Recovery tool no longer worked and no associated tools work. This mode also incorrectly detected my system volume as being encrypted and no usernames or passwords that are system admins/owners would actually authenticate with the actually correct password. Things are seriously broken when they break with the recovery situation.
  3. My Time Machine backup did not work properly. It was detected and all seemed well with it, but the system, again, for some obscure and non-clear reason, failed to use it. I had to use a secondary backup made with Super Duper, BUT that was a ridiculous process. It took 30 hours to restore the 7tb+ of data.
  4. APFS Snapshots are a steaming mess. Apple is not using APFS snapshots properly / appropriately; I could not rollback on the upgrade system to to Monterey. This is an enormous problem and oversight / missed opportunity by Apple and is truly baffling. I've had some people who know the internal goings on at Apple express extreme frustration for not only the missed opportunity with ZFS, but now the problems of APFS not being used properly. A truly incredible situation.
  5. When I played with the fresh install I found that some things were really screwed up. For example:
    • Stage Manager is trash for anyone with more than one display. The only useful way to use macOS is still with extended displays and WITHOUT separate Spaces for each display. Apple does not allow Stage Manager to even work with the extended displays situation and frankly Stage Manager simply has little to no value even if you intend to use it for focused mode when you require any other monitors.
    • The new system Settings is enormously impotent and foreign. They really didn't think this through fully and are missing a lot of functionality. They should have, at the very least, provided BOTH methods of configuration since the new Settings app also feels enormously disorganized and even searching for features is not immediately fruitful. It's simply not ready for primetime usage - not to mention that it just doesn't fit UX parameters for non-iPhone/iPad usage.
    • An Asus monitor that works perfectly on Monterey and is identical to a second monitor on the system does not allow for recognition of full resolution at the correct refresh rate when used with a DisplayPort adapter. HDMI works, but then macOS continues to have the monitor schizophrenia problem where it can't determine which monitor is which when they have the same model number (no fault of Apple per se), but the resolution + refresh situation IS faultable to Apple.
I could go on about various other points and problems, but I just don't have any more time and my frustration level is over 9,000.

Full recovery to Monterey was a painful process. Due to some fashion in which Ventura screwed up the recovery partition and so forth, reinstallation required erasure of the ENTIRE drive, network access (sadly I had to authenticate my machine with Apple, which is ridiculous and scary in and of itself and should not be required), and then downloading of Monterey again... Plus a 30 hour Migration step.

I will not be moving this machine to Ventura and Apple has very much dropped a significant level in terms of trust for our company. We have several Apple Silicon machines now that we are worried about in terms of the future and Apple's clear inability to make good decisions and lacking of actual quality assurance processes.

To boot, their Feedback / RADAR system has been very poor over the last couple years too. Apple's support/engineering department has been abysmal in responding to many and various reports. Someone needs to pull them out of the swirling toilet basin desperately before they are simply no different than Microsoft.
 

ylluminate

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 28, 2017
133
144
Sadly this does not work @KoolAid-Drink on my MacBookPro18,2. Intels still work it appears and given this insanity my old MacPro5,1 had to be my primary driver for three days with Monterey via OCLP. So grateful for the ongoing OCLP effort saving the Intel space for now!
 

profdraper

macrumors 6502
Jan 14, 2017
388
290
Brisbane, Australia
Well folks, just wanted to relate some experiences I've had in my small foray into Ventura and am done with this iteration of the OS it appears.
Agreed, is mostly rubbish & Apple-sharholder /walled garden centric; far less so about customers or existing long term users. Another element you didn't mention: support for existing 3rd party pro applications (film, audio etc), plug-ins, drivers, VIs etc. Dreadful, Apple clearly only care for their own BS & certainly not for those who do professional work (with other than theit own somewhat odd Logic, FCPX etc).
 

casperes1996

macrumors 604
Jan 26, 2014
7,593
5,764
Horsens, Denmark
Sadly this does not work @KoolAid-Drink on my MacBookPro18,2. Intels still work it appears and given this insanity my old MacPro5,1 had to be my primary driver for three days with Monterey via OCLP. So grateful for the ongoing OCLP effort saving the Intel space for now!

This works just fine on my M1 Max 16" MacBook Pro. Reduced Security + Allow Booting external drives can be enabled from Recovery on it
 

ylluminate

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 28, 2017
133
144
@chabig you're correct - I wanted to offer a word of warning to those who care and may not have the time to futz around with a very, very bad release from Apple. Fwiw, my bg is CS and I've done systems level / OS dev (even some kernel work on a toy from back in the day), so I suppose you could say that I do know a thing or two. I definitely am not happy whatsoever with MS's ideals and Linux is a schizo nightmare sadly and thanks to Microshaft's tampering in the UI department in the early days to keep it fragmented. Simply put: macOS is the lesser of the evils - but make no mistake, it is still not actually good.

@casperes1996 I do run with SIP disabled and so forth, but still that would not function as it used to. Not sure how you've been able to enable this, but I've completely relaxed everything that can be relaxed as far as I can find and tell. Super Duper should be able to do the job for Monterey as well from my discussions with the dev, etc. but nope - it simply will not boot.
 

casperes1996

macrumors 604
Jan 26, 2014
7,593
5,764
Horsens, Denmark
@casperes1996 I do run with SIP disabled and so forth, but still that would not function as it used to. Not sure how you've been able to enable this, but I've completely relaxed everything that can be relaxed as far as I can find and tell. Super Duper should be able to do the job for Monterey as well from my discussions with the dev, etc. but nope - it simply will not boot.

Weird. I didn't do anything special as far as I can recall. Just had the option in Recovery to enable booting from external drives, and my SanDisk shows up both in System Settings' Startup Disk pane as well as if you hold down the power button until it loads startup options

I will say though, while I've not really had any issues with Ventura on my M1 Max personally (aside from disliking the new Settings), my iMac went through nightmares throughout the beta program. Even on very late betas like beta 6 it could only stay booted for minutes before kernel panicking. After several clean installs. I think I located the culprit as being a Cisco kext that didn't play well with Ventura, but it panicking due to a dynamically loaded kext that works perfectly under Monterey is also a bit concerning. While obviously things running in kernel space are tricky to prevent from crashing the system if they are improperly programmed, it working fine under Monterey suggests changes on Apple's end and clearly changes that did not allow for the system to just unload said kext. But it seems like the release version of Ventura at least doesn't have that bug anymore anyway. It just was one that rendered my iMac unusable with most of the betas (obviously had a backup Monterey partition, didn't put all my eggs in a beta basket).
 

ylluminate

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 28, 2017
133
144
@casperes1996 I should qualify: the drives do show up, but neither of the drives I generated (one from Super Duper and one from ChronoSync) would actually boot. These are APFS platter/rotary drives, but traditionally even though they're slow, they have always worked out on all Intel Macs. I'm just making the foray into Apple Silicon and have bought a few now... and of course this gives me serious pause and regret. The "ancient" Mac Pros still work and offer a solid backup, but this experience with Ventura has taken an already bad taste in my mouth and amplified it considerably in terms of Apple's increasingly poor choices for people who expect robust flexibility of their hardware.

I will have to test this out further with various configs and tools, but I'm not hopeful and - frankly - I'm pretty much at a 100% sureness level that I'm going to just pause the update process until, at least, macOS 14. I have to believe there will be enough kickback from the community that Apple will have no choice but to revise their approach and fortify the situation before going further into their hardcore-mobile mode.
 

casperes1996

macrumors 604
Jan 26, 2014
7,593
5,764
Horsens, Denmark
@casperes1996 I should qualify: the drives do show up, but neither of the drives I generated (one from Super Duper and one from ChronoSync) would actually boot. These are APFS platter/rotary drives, but traditionally even though they're slow, they have always worked out on all Intel Macs. I'm just making the foray into Apple Silicon and have bought a few now... and of course this gives me serious pause and regret. The "ancient" Mac Pros still work and offer a solid backup, but this experience with Ventura has taken an already bad taste in my mouth and amplified it considerably in terms of Apple's increasingly poor choices for people who expect robust flexibility of their hardware.

I will have to test this out further with various configs and tools, but I'm not hopeful and - frankly - I'm pretty much at a 100% sureness level that I'm going to just pause the update process until, at least, macOS 14. I have to believe there will be enough kickback from the community that Apple will have no choice but to revise their approach and fortify the situation before going further into their hardcore-mobile mode.

Oh that's very weird. - I've never tried with a spinning HDD but I find it off if that's a determining factor here.
For completeness; My external drive is a SanDisk Extreme Portable 510, I use it with USB-C and it is not a backup/clone, but I installed macOS directly onto the drive from the MacBook Pro
 
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tekboi

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2006
731
145
EasŦcoast
I guess I'm in the lucky minority who was able to upgrade to Ventura with no problem. With that being said, it's been pretty buggy and I don't like some of the choices made in design.

I don't want my desktop to feel like iOS. I just don't. I have two ultra-wides that I work on and prefer that my Operating System behave like a proper desktop os instead of an oversized version of iOS.

There are some great features with the OS and hopefully the engineers fix this **** before they go on holiday vacation. It's pretty obvious that this should have been delayed until next year. It's kind of half-baked.
 

ccdsap

macrumors newbie
Nov 16, 2020
6
8
Well folks, just wanted to relate some experiences I've had in my small foray into Ventura and am done with this iteration of the OS it appears. A few major halting / critical points on an M1 Max system (also, just to be clear, I'm not a novice user - I've been a goto guy that has helped Apple "Geniuses" over the years when they can't figure things out) :

  1. Be aware that the upgrade can seriously fail. I tried both 13.0 and 13.1 beta. The system, while performing an upgrade, had an infinite Apple logo reboot loop that went into recovery mode after several reboot attempts. I went through several troubleshooting steps that I won't document here. USB backups don't boot so the recovery process is HORRIFIC now for Apple. Removing the ability to boot to USB drives is a nightmare level mistake by Apple. I do not trust Apple whatsoever anymore, even though their brand of OS is still the lesser of the proverbial "poisons" yet still (not a compliment, just an observation).
  2. Installed from scratch, but restore of previous system settings failed for some various obscure/unclear reasons. This situation descended into chaos when I found that the Recovery tool no longer worked and no associated tools work. This mode also incorrectly detected my system volume as being encrypted and no usernames or passwords that are system admins/owners would actually authenticate with the actually correct password. Things are seriously broken when they break with the recovery situation.
  3. My Time Machine backup did not work properly. It was detected and all seemed well with it, but the system, again, for some obscure and non-clear reason, failed to use it. I had to use a secondary backup made with Super Duper, BUT that was a ridiculous process. It took 30 hours to restore the 7tb+ of data.
  4. APFS Snapshots are a steaming mess. Apple is not using APFS snapshots properly / appropriately; I could not rollback on the upgrade system to to Monterey. This is an enormous problem and oversight / missed opportunity by Apple and is truly baffling. I've had some people who know the internal goings on at Apple express extreme frustration for not only the missed opportunity with ZFS, but now the problems of APFS not being used properly. A truly incredible situation.
  5. When I played with the fresh install I found that some things were really screwed up. For example:
    • Stage Manager is trash for anyone with more than one display. The only useful way to use macOS is still with extended displays and WITHOUT separate Spaces for each display. Apple does not allow Stage Manager to even work with the extended displays situation and frankly Stage Manager simply has little to no value even if you intend to use it for focused mode when you require any other monitors.
    • The new system Settings is enormously impotent and foreign. They really didn't think this through fully and are missing a lot of functionality. They should have, at the very least, provided BOTH methods of configuration since the new Settings app also feels enormously disorganized and even searching for features is not immediately fruitful. It's simply not ready for primetime usage - not to mention that it just doesn't fit UX parameters for non-iPhone/iPad usage.
    • An Asus monitor that works perfectly on Monterey and is identical to a second monitor on the system does not allow for recognition of full resolution at the correct refresh rate when used with a DisplayPort adapter. HDMI works, but then macOS continues to have the monitor schizophrenia problem where it can't determine which monitor is which when they have the same model number (no fault of Apple per se), but the resolution + refresh situation IS faultable to Apple.
I could go on about various other points and problems, but I just don't have any more time and my frustration level is over 9,000.

Full recovery to Monterey was a painful process. Due to some fashion in which Ventura screwed up the recovery partition and so forth, reinstallation required erasure of the ENTIRE drive, network access (sadly I had to authenticate my machine with Apple, which is ridiculous and scary in and of itself and should not be required), and then downloading of Monterey again... Plus a 30 hour Migration step.

I will not be moving this machine to Ventura and Apple has very much dropped a significant level in terms of trust for our company. We have several Apple Silicon machines now that we are worried about in terms of the future and Apple's clear inability to make good decisions and lacking of actual quality assurance processes.

To boot, their Feedback / RADAR system has been very poor over the last couple years too. Apple's support/engineering department has been abysmal in responding to many and various reports. Someone needs to pull them out of the swirling toilet basin desperately before they are simply no different than Microsoft.
I’ve been missing the “ No new features” announcement in Snow Leopard days since Yosemite. The macOS is not elegant as silk, not smooth as butter, nor even visually professional as a desktop operating system. But there is no other choice though.
 

ssmed

macrumors 6502a
Sep 28, 2009
885
423
UK
they are simply no different than Microsoft.
Microsoft have been rather better recently. We have been considering putting more people on Windows 10/11. The thing that just drives me mad is that you cannot buy a new machine with the last OS on it, making it impossible to use a number of business software packages. We need a year or two of Apple just perfecting an OS with any newer OS being developed in parallel. They have enough money!
 

ylluminate

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 28, 2017
133
144
I'm sorry @ssmed, but I also work on Windows systems daily and maintain some rather large installation bases. I have to say that this is not my experience. I cannot AT ALL trust Microsoft Windows 10 or 11. They blow up regularly and are entirely unreliable. We simply have no reasonable options in relation to Microsoft being possible to move to.

Apple needs to step back and get to its roots. Their leadership has been just garbage for the past decade now - total garbage. I have heard horror stories of CoreOS (kernel) devs that wander the hallways aimlessly due to lack of direction and focus in the kernel and core areas of the OS. Internally folks at Apple are not even happy with Apple leadership, but they can't say anything publicly of course. It's very sad. They get paid enough to just suck it up and realize that macOS is completely lacking and simply getting no real proper attention compared to iOS/iPadOS (which again are just investor motivated).
 

jgbr

macrumors 6502a
Sep 14, 2007
954
1,178
We are still back to the old, "they should NOT be doing yearly releases of OS". There isn't much in Ventura that a patch or service pack or whatever they were called in the OSX days that could bring in new features.
 
Last edited:

Feek

macrumors 65816
Nov 9, 2009
1,379
2,041
JO01
I’ve not actually had much chance to do lots in Ventura due to limited time so far but one thing I will comment on. On the two Macs I’ve updated so far (M1 MBA and MSU), the process was painless. Probably the quickest and smoothest OS update I’ve ever done on a Mac in fifteen years.
 
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edubfromktown

macrumors 6502a
Sep 14, 2010
837
711
East Coast, USA
Uneventful upgrade on my Base Max Studio. Only complaint so far is that the macOS' newer than Catalina still cannot figure out how to print some PDF's reliably LOL (Adobe development definitely sucks worse than Apple imo).

Granted, it is an old Ethernet-connected HP 4200 workhorse. Happened again last night- print job of selected PDF pages from a work benefits guide got hung in limbo "printing". I can print the same selected pages from my i5 MBP 13" running Catalina with no issues.
 

chevyboy60013

macrumors 6502
Sep 18, 2021
457
242
I'm sorry @ssmed, but I also work on Windows systems daily and maintain some rather large installation bases. I have to say that this is not my experience. I cannot AT ALL trust Microsoft Windows 10 or 11. They blow up regularly and are entirely unreliable. We simply have no reasonable options in relation to Microsoft being possible to move to.

Apple needs to step back and get to its roots. Their leadership has been just garbage for the past decade now - total garbage. I have heard horror stories of CoreOS (kernel) devs that wander the hallways aimlessly due to lack of direction and focus in the kernel and core areas of the OS. Internally folks at Apple are not even happy with Apple leadership, but they can't say anything publicly of course. It's very sad. They get paid enough to just suck it up and realize that macOS is completely lacking and simply getting no real proper attention compared to iOS/iPadOS (which again are just investor motivated).
you are absolutely correct about micros*** constantly blowing up and severe mass destruction. Apple is far superior to ANYTHING MICROS*** PRODUCES EVER.
 

chevyboy60013

macrumors 6502
Sep 18, 2021
457
242
I'm running Ventura on an early 2015 13 inch MacBook Air via the OCLP patch, and it installed so easily, and works absolutely perfect. The only issue I had with it was my own fault for not reading thru the steps completely and not doing the post install patch for the display, and then found it wouldn't put the screen to sleep when closing the lid. After figuring that out.... it is absolutely perfect, and I love stage manager. Actually think I get better battery life on the unsupported version of macOS on it than I did with Monterey .
 

cfm56d7b

macrumors regular
Aug 14, 2020
140
51
I am monitoring all Ventura related threads. I upgraded to Big Sur when this version of MacOS reached 11.5 release.

Big Sur 11.7.1 is very stable; no issues with devices, monitors, or key apps.

I plan to wait until Ventura reaches 13.5 release level at the very least.
 

Zshrc

macrumors newbie
Jun 26, 2022
11
21
Updated to Ventura and suddenly my Samsung S80UA stopped working. Called Apple and they told me it's because "Samsung is falling behind and needs a firmware update to work with Ventura." Ridiculous...
 
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