Its a double edge sword. If nobody upgrades, none of these bugs are discovered.
I just updated my mid-2013 MacBook Air and I haven't found any bugs so far (which is surprising, since macOS is usually the buggiest of all of Apple's OS platforms). It didn't brick the machine either, as it did with the MacBook pros from the same year. The only headache for me was that, since I inherited the machine from a relative, it had a boot camp windows partition and I finally had to kill it because I needed some of that space for the update (unfortunately, Apple doesn't support resizing the boot camp partition and I didn't want to risk messing up the macOS partition if I tried to resize the boot camp partition from within windows). The person who set up boot camp had assigned too much space to the windows partition and too little to the main macOS partition, and since the Big Sur update was a huge file (just over 12 GB) and it required even more free space to install (about another 28 GB), I had no choice but to kill the windows partition. Not a painful loss since I really hadn't used it in the two years I've had the Mac, and no data loss since my relatives had left no personal data there either (I did boot into windows back in its day a couple of times to be sure of that) but it was still something of a headache.
You didn't actually because the age of a computer is irrelevant. If a computer is officially supported, it should not have issues.
You can still run professional software on these, it's just run in emulation and compiled on first launch, about 20 sec. Then after that it runs at same speed as it did before on the Intel machines. But, most developers will bring updates soon, as they have been working on this since the summer.
Likewise on my mid-2013 MacBook Air. I had to kill the boot camp windows partition, though, because it can't be resized easily (at least Apple doesn't support resizing it), and there was no way I could free 12 GB of space for the update file and another 28 GB required for the update installation in a macOS partition that only had 57 GB assigned to it, while the rest of the hard drive, nearly 200 GB, was assigned to the boot camp windows partition. I didn't do that, that was how I got the machine from my sister in law when she upgraded, but this time it left me no choice. No problem since I have really never used windows in the two years I've had the MacBook and I have another windows PC of my own should I need to use windows.
I did actually and this will be the last time I state this because you're obviously not interested in going back to read the part where I said that it's common for people with very old computers (2013/2014) to have a lot of old files as it's often people with machines this old tend to not clean out their Macs so they may have corrupted files causing the bricking. Furthermore machines of this age also have a higher component failure rate such as logic boards and hard drives and when installing a major OS upgrade these failed/failing components don't rear the ugly heads until an OS upgrade.
You shouldn't be surprised. Big Sur works fine even on a mid 2013 MacBook Air (mine). And having killed the windows partition it even became a lot snappier than it used to be.
From CNBC article January 2020 “Microsoft says you should buy a new computer if yours is more than 3 years old, since Windows 10 might run slowly on older hardware and won’t offer all the new features. If you have a computer that’s still running Windows 7 but is still fairly new, then you should upgrade it.”
So is my mid-2013 MacBook Air. Had to kill a windows partition due to disk space issues, but it was certainly worth it.
Are there any Macbook Pros 2013 and after still using hard-drives? I thought Apple moved to SSD when they introduced retina screen.
No it’s not. Apple pushes it’s major updates onto users starting from around day 1 and those who are not tech savvy can easily accidentally update.
You also spent a lot of time blaming people with old computers for expecting OS updates and/or being excited enough about new features to update right away. If corrupt files can cause that major of an issue then the update needs to be robust enough to scan and either decline the update or sandbox those files.
Relax, I never implied that.
Actually, macOS is usually the worst of Apple's platforms when it comes to updates. I'm surprised this year, because I have found no bugs so far and I'm using an old mid 2013 MacBook Air, one of the oldest models supported.Ah, the usual cycle. Whenever Apple releases a new OS version, best to wait for one or two dot patches. Seems like the same thing for all their OS, macOS and iOS. So much for that "hardware and software" thing.
