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macOS Big Sur Features: Everything New in Today's Release

ridgezin said:
Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat all work, but sometimes are a little flaky. I do not rely on these apps for my primary job, so not as big of a deal for me as it may be for some. Honestly, CC has had continuous problems ever since Adobe moved to that model. It feels like a permanent beta.
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yeah they’re clearly not your primary apps otherwise you’d know how well they run and how much improvement there has been in the last 5 years. 😝
 
I am genuinely surprised at the comments of how they love the new look. I think it looks really cheap. Not a fan at all. Not even a little bit. I'll only be updating for the new functionalities. It would be nice if we had an option to retain the look of Catalina, but with the new functionality.

Of course, everyone is different. I just thought this one would have been universally disliked. Happy to report I met my one incorrect assumption for the day!
 
forrie said:
I consider most products Apple releases publicly now as public betas, initially (especially software). The number of iterations and "bug fix" after a general release is increasing, as are the bugs they apparently don't catch in QA. From what I've read, Big Sur has a ways to go still. So if you have the extra time, load it up -- otherwise, I consider it a beta and will likely wait and see how it performs, what "bugs" they didn't catch and that includes the new M1 chip. Jobs is rolling in his grave at warp speed.
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I have it on good information that Jobs took no money from the government to fund his grave rolling. :p
 
forrie said:
I consider most products Apple releases publicly now as public betas, initially (especially software). The number of iterations and "bug fix" after a general release is increasing, as are the bugs they apparently don't catch in QA. From what I've read, Big Sur has a ways to go still. So if you have the extra time, load it up -- otherwise, I consider it a beta and will likely wait and see how it performs, what "bugs" they didn't catch and that includes the new M1 chip. Jobs is rolling in his grave at warp speed.
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Totally agree. iOS 14.0 worked okay for most people but had important bugs that only now with 14.2 are mostly worked out. iOS 13.0 was much worse IMO and the public launch should have been delayed a month; took about 6 months for iOS 13 to became stable, safe, and reliable IMHO. Similar for Catalina, although my experience with Catalina in the early days wasn't nearly as bad as others in the macrumors forums.

I am anxious to try Big Sur, but I'm going to wait and see how it works for others before making the decision to install it on my daily driver.
 
Beta testers, the Mac community appreciate your efforts!

Sane People: Hold Back up at least 6 months!
 
tilleynj said:
I've been downloading for 8 minutes....
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1605203826963.png

That's what I get when I try and download.
 
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CJ Dorschel said:
Not that I saw. I’ve filed reports for Apple to add the ability to enlarge/zoom in emails using the trackpad as you can with iOS/iPadOS for years and nothing. That’s a big UI element I’d love to see especially with my 5K displays. Rule syncing is another. Otherwise Mail is pretty much the same.

I know some experienced bugs with email syncing, etc but I never had that problem. From what I gather it hasn’t been addressed in Big Sur as those experiencing it in Catalina and Big Sur development still had the same issues.
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Thanks for that.

I was interested in what many here considered a minor bug not worth even thinking about, that apparently Apple has known about for several years, ie: delayed notification of new mail. Sometimes no notification, sounds, banners, nothing while Mail is hidden until un-hiding it and checking for mail. Sometimes while hidden the alert will sound after you've seen and read the latest mail to arrive and hidden the app again. Irritating but not serious enough to lose sleep over.

Anyhow, hopefully not long to wait now...
 
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Unsupported said:
Thanks for that.

I was interested in what many here considered a minor bug not worth even thinking about, that apparently Apple has known about for several years, ie: delayed notification of new mail. Sometimes no notification, sounds, banners, nothing while Mail is hidden until un-hiding it and checking for mail. Sometimes while hidden the alert will sound after you've seen and read the latest mail to arrive and hidden the app again. Irritating but not serious enough to lose sleepm over.

Anyhow, hopefully not long to wait now...
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I thought I was going crazy... but my (Catalina) install pings like 10 minutes after I have already READ an email.. At first it was "What is that ping......then I realized it was delayed... APPLE where is QA?"
 
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CJ Dorschel said:
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.
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Unfortunately I don’t think these complaints are all quality issues. Rather things like Time Machine are changes to prepare people for a purely cloud-based future. Apple is becoming increasingly a services company and will push all users into the(ir) cloud-based solutions. Their future is consumer services for which they sell integrated hardware.

I don’t see much of a future for me in the new Apple.
 
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DaveSanDiego said:
I thought I was going crazy... but my (Catalina) install pings like 10 minutes after I have already READ an email.. At first it was "What is that ping......then I realized it was delayed... APPLE where is QA?"
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That's what I mean!

I posted a link about this on another thread a while ago to a post at Apple support from years ago. It was a known bug then. It was there even before Catalina which is why I was interested to know if any work at all had been done to Mail, apart from spiffing up the icon :-/

here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8262026
 
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Well, seems like we need patience for this one...;-)
 

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Val-kyrie said:
Unfortunately I don’t think these complaints are all quality issues. Rather things like Time Machine are changes to prepare people for a purely cloud-based future. Apple is becoming increasingly a services company and will push all users into the(ir) cloud-based solutions. Their future is consumer services for which they sell integrated hardware.

I don’t see much of a future for me in the new Apple.
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That doesn’t help when you need at least one local back up of your data. Cloud-based back ups don’t work especially when you have terabytes.

moreover iCloud and.Mac worked perfectly with Time Machine for years. There is no reason to remove that function.

Agree. I’ve held off buying a new Mac pro as I don’t like where Apple is going.
 
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