I posted this comment in the other Big Sur announcement earlier. Just my two cents.
In roughly 20 years using Mac’s I’ve always updated to the latest OS. Catalina was the first time I never updated my Mac Pro’s. Being a developer I needed to run Big Sur on my MacBook Pro.
I loathe it. The UI is terrible. No matter how much I adjusted the contrast and brightness of my displays it always looked washed out and more difficult to navigate. I know Apple wants more unification between the operating systems of their devices yet this is a desktop OS and iOS/iPadOS UI elements just don’t work for me. Add in further extending security measures that make access to root difficult for third-party apps such as TotalSpaces (a great utility I’ve used since Apple ditched ”Spaces” but requires root access - normally I always disable SIP and GateKeeper yet I take other precautions and average consumers should not do so unless they are aware of the risks, etc), Catalina and Big Sur are just headaches.
I may roll back my Mac Pro’s to Mojave as it seems Apple has even dropped “Time Machine” features that have been around since day one such as retrieving individually deleted emails and contacts. When I updated to Catalina I noticed I could not open Mail and Contacts and retrieve lost items. I spent weeks reading forums and working with Apple engineers and it seems this is a feature, not a bug. Apple only allows recovering lost items in their core apps by fully restoring an entire Mail or Contacts backup point which defeats a big advantage to “Time Machine” and you lose any current data.
During Big Sur development I filed bug reports on “Time Machine” and none of them were addressed. Many of us did. I’ve used .Mac/MobileMe/iCloud and Time Machine together for years yet Apple claims iCloud syncing and local Time Machine backups of iCloud services won’t be working moving forward. Meaning restoring individual emails, contacts, etc from Time Machine backups won’t work anymore.
I found a work around for Contacts.
- Open Contacts on your Mac
- Export them in a VCF file
- Disable iCloud Contacts syncing
- Import the VCF file into Contacts
- On My Mac should show in Contacts
- Turn Contacts back on in iCloud
Now you’ll have iCloud and local contacts. I had to select each contact and link it to the other as two of each will show as doubles. If I delete a contact by mistake or I lose my iCloud contacts I can restore the local one on my Mac simply by dragging it to the iCloud group. If I delete both iCloud and local contacts I can also open up Contacts then click on “Time Machine” and restore it as before.
This decision and the others above and more have made Big Sur a Big Mess.
Apple should return to 2 year OS release cycles as they did before making OS X a free annual release. OS X 10.4 - 10.6 when Bertrand Serlet was the head of engineering were by far the best OS’s Apple released. We had to wipe down our drives every two weeks when a new beta was released to ensure third party apps and plugins weren’t causing problems with debugging the core OS and it allowed developers to better update their apps. Now it’s a rushed release cycle to match iOS and iPadOS development only meant to entice more into macOS and increase mac App Store revenue while producing lackluster and much buggier releases. I’d rather pay $129 for a solid OS every 2-3 years than a free OS that is a shadow of former versions.
