Apple Seeds Seventh Beta of macOS Big Sur 11.3 to Developers

[SuperCed]

Hi,
I have 2 questions for those who tested the betas:
- is there an improvement with Bluetooth keyboard stability, since I sometimes have issues on my M1 Mac ?
- is there a I2C interface in the IOMobileFramebuffer driver in order to send ddc commands to screen and setup luminosité easily ?

Thanks !

 

[0279317]

blazerunner said:
Where are AMD 6000 series GPU drivers??

In a parallel universe where Apple still plan to use Intel processors in their future computers?

We're not there yet, it's in the "future". And though this future is not far away, there are plenty of people who want to know and who would make good use of the 6000 series AMD GPUs. I'm not selling my Intel based mac tomorrow just because of the future. So, Apple, where are the AMD 6000 series GPU drivers?

 

[Reason077]

I don't usually bother installing the betas for macOS point releases, but in this case I'm tempted due to an infuriating bug in Big Sur 11.2.3 (M1 MacBook Air) where the menu bar stops responding to clicks periodically when using an external thunderbolt monitor?

Thankfully there's a workaround, if you open the MacBook's display so that the menubar moves to the built-in display and then back again, it starts working again. But it's still very annoying and sometimes seems to happen every day or so!

 

[Reason077]

I find notifications to be fundamentally busted.

Never clear when to click on left or right side.

Inline actions bring you to the app afterwards—(then, what’s the point?)

Hidden functionality until mouse over is the type of dumb thinking from the Johnny Ive era where everything was about look and screenshots, not usability.

I find the whole Notification Center experience to be pretty busted. Why squash all those widgets into the edge of the screen, only to require scrolling? Why can't I have multiple widgets side by side? Why I can't I make widgets bigger? Even the large size leaves some widgets so tiny that they're barely usable.

Why can't it be integrated with mission control/spaces so that a simple gesture brings up the Notification Center, like back in the "dashboard" days? Requiring a mouse click or a custom function key (they didn't even bother assigning a default function key for Notification Center?) makes it needlessly annoying to use.

 

[Devnul0]

You can't even click that dismissal X on a notification if you're running an application fullscreen. When you move the mouse up to where you hope the X will appear, the application squishes down to reveal the menu bar and obscures the X. You have to then move the mouse down and back up to be able to dismiss the notification. Incredibly irritating behavior.

What I don't understand is all this focus on "if you have an event in your calendar". How is the battery charging system going to know the difference between a trip, a business appointment, a little league game, a dentist visit, etc? Using the calendar like this is not reliable at all.

 

[star-affinity]

blazerunner said:
Where are AMD 6000 series GPU drivers??

We're not there yet, it's in the "future". And though this future is not far away, there are plenty of people who want to know and who would make good use of the 6000 series AMD GPUs. I'm not selling my Intel based mac tomorrow just because of the future. So, Apple, where are the AMD 6000 series GPU drivers?

I agree with you all the way. I could even make use of an AMD 6000 series GPU in my old Mac Pro from 2010. But I think Apple's focus is elsewhere… Hope I'm wrong.

 

[Hergesheimer]

I hope they will solve the flickering and ghosting issue on M1 Macs when connected to external displays.

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

I appreciate the long beta period, hopefully a sign that they're focusing on stability.

The "glass half-empty" part of me thinks a longer beta (7 at this point) means they have LOTS of issues still, and that means the released product might be more unreliable than a release that had, say, 4 beta builds.

I don't think Apple is doing more beta builds just to squash a few remaining bugs.

 

[AndiG]

Big S - or S is not Sur. Never experienced that many bugs ...

 

[-BigMac-]

just installed public beta on my MBP
20E5229a

Thanks for letting us know.

Please keep us informed of all your future updating progress

 

[Reason077]

Big S - or S is not Sur. Never experienced that many bugs ...

Bug Sir

 

[chucker23n1]

I appreciate the long beta period, hopefully a sign that they're focusing on stability.

The "glass half-empty" part of me thinks a longer beta (7 at this point) means they have LOTS of issues still, and that means the released product might be more unreliable than a release that had, say, 4 beta builds.

I don't think Apple is doing more beta builds just to squash a few remaining bugs.

In this case, I suspect it’s neither; the period is as long as it is because they’re aligning the release with an Apple Event.

 

[kriebe]

Not dragons, bunnies.

No worries. I have the holy hand grenade.

 

[opfor]

Hmm I can no longer disable the startup chime (uncheck the box, close settings, reopen settings and it's back checked, `sudo nvram StartupMute=%01` changes the value but seems to have no effect in the setting and the sound still plays on boot).

Also cannot add cards to Apple Wallet in macOS (same cards work in iOS).

MBA M1

 

[radus]

I hope they will solve the flickering and ghosting issue on M1 Macs when connected to external displays.

these are not the only complaints, random black-outs are as worse as those artifacts.
It may be ok with a 1-Monitor setup using the Pro Display XDR. But many people want to use a 2-Monitor setup and the second one, a hdmi2.0 4k Display should be as operational as the Pro Display XDR.

Is it that difficult to employ competent engineers ?

 

[RumorConsumer]

Is anybody using this beta to counter SMB-related bugs? Has it helped? SMB is such a s*** show for me on 11.2.3. Better than Catalina and still. I really hope they dont deprecate AFP any time soon. My solace is knowing they are using the same SMB code in house and must have the same issues.

 

[opfor]

Is anybody using this beta to counter SMB-related bugs? Has it helped? SMB is such a s*** show for me on 11.2.3. Better than Catalina and still. I really hope they dont deprecate AFP any time soon. My solace is knowing they are using the same SMB code in house and must have the same issues.

I am using 11.3 b7 but SMB is not any better than 11.2.x. At this point I don't have much hope for Big Sur. Maybe the next release will be better 🤷🏻‍♂️

 

[Quinlan1744]

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I find Big Sur to be one of the worst OS releases since starting out with a 128K Mac.
The finder seems unable to write files with the speed you'd expect of the successor to Catalina, drag and drop is equally slow as is backing up files to an external disk.
Whoever is in charge of the beta programme needs to fire the testers and bring in new people with a fresh eye.
I'm surprised people in the production area, film and the like haven't blown a fuse if they are experiencing the same... and this is on the last iMac maxed out. Catalina on a MacAir was better than this travesty of an OS...

 

[srbNYC]

Wow,generally having the opposite experience Combo of Big Sur and M1 is giving me the fastest, most intuitive and seamless MacOS experience ever.

 

[The-Bloke]

Is anybody using this beta to counter SMB-related bugs? Has it helped? SMB is such a s*** show for me on 11.2.3. Better than Catalina and still. I really hope they dont deprecate AFP any time soon. My solace is knowing they are using the same SMB code in house and must have the same issues.

I am using 11.3 b7 but SMB is not any better than 11.2.x. At this point I don't have much hope for Big Sur. Maybe the next release will be better 🤷🏻‍♂️

Out of interest, what SMB issues are you guys seeing in 11.x? I'm still using Catalina day-to-day but planning to upgrade permanently sometime soon.

My SMB experience in 10.15.7, over 10Gbe NIC to my home fileserver running Samba, is pretty good. Speeds are pretty high, up to 800MB/s in sustained reads and writes. There's occasional lag when Path Finder is enumerating large folders that aren't cached. But generally it works OK, and definitely better than it did in Mojave (though I've also upgraded hardware since then which has help speed enormously.)

Should I expect some downgrade in Big Sur?

 

[RumorConsumer]

I am using 11.3 b7 but SMB is not any better than 11.2.x. At this point I don't have much hope for Big Sur. Maybe the next release will be better 🤷🏻‍♂️

Whats your SMB gripes? Mine is

Out of interest, what SMB issues are you guys seeing in 11.x? I'm still using Catalina day-to-day but planning to upgrade permanently sometime soon.

My SMB experience in 10.15.7, over 10Gbe NIC to my home fileserver running Samba, is pretty good. Speeds are pretty high, up to 800MB/s in sustained reads and writes. There's occasional lag when Path Finder is enumerating large folders that aren't cached. But generally it works OK, and definitely better than it did in Mojave (though I've also upgraded hardware since then which has help speed enormously.)

Should I expect some downgrade in Big Sur?

I would not necessarily say downgrade. The throughput is fine. I use 12 drive Synology RAID 6 arrays connected via 10GbE Sonnet adapters and huge file copies sometimes fail inexplicably. AFP works just fine on the same thing. So does copying the file to the mac from server a and then to the destination folder on server b. But trying to go directly from one to the other often results in an odd error. I have each 10GbE adapter (and corresponding Synology) on its own Thunderbolt bus so this thing should be like greased lightning with tons of headroom. Part of me thinks this is an M1 Mac Mini issue as opposed to a OS level SMB issue, or some, interaction thereof. I dont know. I havent tried going back to my Intel machine but the issues began somewhere around the upgrade to m1. I will have to verify that.

 

[opfor]

Out of interest, what SMB issues are you guys seeing in 11.x? I'm still using Catalina day-to-day but planning to upgrade permanently sometime soon.

My SMB experience in 10.15.7, over 10Gbe NIC to my home fileserver running Samba, is pretty good. Speeds are pretty high, up to 800MB/s in sustained reads and writes. There's occasional lag when Path Finder is enumerating large folders that aren't cached. But generally it works OK, and definitely better than it did in Mojave (though I've also upgraded hardware since then which has help speed enormously.)

Should I expect some downgrade in Big Sur?

Catalina:

Big Sur:

 

[RumorConsumer]

Catalina:
View attachment 1756390

Big Sur:
View attachment 1756388

Ouch