macOS 11 - Big Sur

The next few years will be interesting for the Mac. There was such a struggle when Apple dropped 32-bit apps it will be interesting to see how difficult the transition to ARM will be. The redesign will take some time to get used to, I like the new design of a lot of the apps. They feel a lot more modern and lightweight/consistent. But the iOS style elements seem a little alien on macOS. The sliders and buttons look more suited to touch rather than mouse.

PropJoe10

My MBP 2012 is dropped in this update anyway, but I'll keep an eye out for any efforts to get this running on unsupported Macs. The new user interface looks nice. Bit like KDE with transparency.

Doodah7

End of the road for my mid-2012 MBP also. A good run lasting 8 years. With two internal SSD’s and 16GB of RAM it still flies!

PropJoe10

Doodah7 wrote: »

End of the road for my mid-2012 MBP also. A good run lasting 8 years. With two internal SSD’s and 16GB of RAM it still flies!

Well, we'll have another 2 years of security updates in Catalina anyway. Plus, there's always the chance that Big Sur will work on these machines with a little persuasion! I see work is already underway over on MacRumors to patch this OS to run on older machines.

calum

fjon wrote: »

So they've finally finished with Mac v10/X. It's been around since I started using Macs (I started on Panther) and has had a good run.

Rumour has it the major version bump could be due to some legal disentanglement with Intel as much as anything, but who knows. There doesn't seem to be any other compelling reason to do it at this stage, especially as they didn't even bump it to 14 to sync up with iOS/iPadOS. (Yes, it's kind of the start of a new era, but so was PPC->x86 and they didn't bother doing it then.)

Shn99

Installed dev beta on my 2019 MBA, avoid avoid avoid!!!

Royale with Cheese

I switched from Windows to Mac nearly four years ago. Well actually I bought the MacBook originally for music production/performance but after a few months I loved it and realised I hadn't turned my Windows desktop on at all so just gave it to my parents. I think the switch to arm will see me going back to Windows. I'm a .net developer so need to able to use Windows and bootcamp gave me the best of both world's, and I don't fancy trying to do anything professional on an arm version of Windows 10. This has been rumoured for a long time but I'd heard they would be creating a new arm based MacBook and leaving the pros with Intel chips, apparently not.

Sad Professor

I haven't used Bootcamp in years. It was useful back when the switch to Intel first happened, but Macs are pretty well supported now.

My early 2016 MacBook should be safe for a while but I badly need a new desktop and the transition to ARM is only going to make me dither even further.

iniall

Yeah had intended to replace my ageing MacBook Air this year, but I can't see a new Intel Mac being supported for more than three or four years, should I should probably wait for the ARM Macs before buying. On the other hand, will the first generation of ARM Macs be as good as they could be...? It's a confusing time for ditherers...!

whippet

almost 20 years of Mac OSX - I was working with an Apple reseller when it was launched. Really weird at the time. I remember installing it on an G4 Cube and the OS couldn't recognise the optical drive.

The amount of resistance to traditional mac users to the new OS was hard to understand.

PropJoe10

iniall wrote: »

Yeah had intended to replace my ageing MacBook Air this year, but I can't see a new Intel Mac being supported for more than three or four years, should I should probably wait for the ARM Macs before buying. On the other hand, will the first generation of ARM Macs be as good as they could be...? It's a confusing time for ditherers...!

It's very hard to know what to do. There's a YouTuber called Luke Miani that has a half-decent channel, all based on Mac-related news, that did an episode there with a few thoughts for people in your situation. Worth a watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbGLXpMb8qM

Well, the last day of July and still no sign of the public beta. Still time left in the day on Cupertino time I guess :pac:

Public Beta just went out.

fjon

Downloaded it, and very few issues noticed. A few odd app crashes, but nothing too serious. Everything I have installed works on it, except for two VPNs I have - neither work.

fjon wrote: »

Downloaded it, and very few issues noticed. A few odd app crashes, but nothing too serious. Everything I have installed works on it, except for two VPNs I have - neither work.

Firefox was crashing, but a new install solved it. My PIA VPN is working without issue, actually, an update was available straight after the install, probably coincidental.

Simon201

Just loaded the beta onto a clone of my main HD to be able to test some stuff. Really like the look of the icons and general style change. This is much more of a visual change than we've seen for a good few years. Even some skeuomorphism back which I like.

Simon201 wrote: »

Just loaded the beta onto a clone of my main HD to be able to test some stuff. Really like the look of the icons and general style change. This is much more of a visual change than we've seen for a good few years. Even some skeuomorphism back which I like.

It seems to be a split on how it looks, I too am a fan.

And there's my word for the day that I learned!

I think that they're referring to the new UI elements as neumorphism, like a blend between the two. I haven't tried macOS 11 yet but I am looking forward to it. Looks like there will be a lot of users who will take time to get used to the new look overall.

Hopefully we won't be waiting much longer.

The new services are launching today, if Apple don’t intend of waiting for the rumoured event in Nov then maybe macOS 11 could also be released today. With 11.0.01 already out it seems imminent.

FourFourRED

Out this Thursday

Presumably 6pm Irish time?

FourFourRED

The Black Oil wrote: »

Presumably 6pm Irish time?

Typically follows that release time but iOS 14 arrived around 3 or 4 hours later than the norm this year so it could be anytime

Out now. It's saying 12.18GB for me.

Same 12.18GB for me. About 17 hours remaining for the download

Must be getting hit hard, normally downloads fly for me. This is the worst it's been in years.

Said 5 hours, then 1 day, now 3 days.

Sad Professor

3 days as well. Screw this!

Gregor Samsa

On a 500mb fibre connection here, connected to the router via Ethernet. 3 hours then 5, then 9 then 15, suddenly down to 6. Now down to 2. All within the space of 2 minutes. It’s still saying 2 hours even though the MB count hasn’t updated in 5 minutes. There’s no point in me keeping an eye on it, it’s obviously going to fluctuate wildly.