Upgrading from Mojave to Big Sur

[sunnyjohn2]

Advice please! I'm running Mojave 10.14.8 on an iMac 21.5" 2019.

I've received an offer for Office 365 for Mac with a full licence for $50 but it will only run on Catalina and above.

Would I have any problems updating to Big Sur, so I could take advantage of this offer?

 

[iAssimilated]

You shouldn't have any issues. Big Sur runs great on my 2018 and 2014 minis. Big Sur also ran great on my 2013 Pro (before I upgraded it to Monterey). I went straight to Big Sur from Mojave on my 2014 mini and my wife's 2015 MacBook Pro without any issues.

 

[MisterSavage]

My iMac is a few years older than yours and I was able to upgrade to Big Sur without issue. It does get sluggish when I'm doing too many things at once, but not surprising on an old system.

 

[BigBlur]

32-bit apps aren’t supported on Big Sur (and Catalina). You will want to make sure you don’t have any of those before you upgrade.

 

[sunnyjohn2]

Many thanks. I've no 32 bit apps as I changed them earlier. I've now bought Office 365, found Big Sur (You can't download it from the Apple Store, presumably because they want you to install Catalina first) and put it on a pen drive and will do a clean install later.

Thanks for your help.

 

[SalisburySam]

I upgraded my 2017 iMac running very well on Mojave v10.14.6 for the same reason: new Office 365 (or whatever it is called today) required something newer, as does TurboTax. So I finally relented and upgraded: to Monterey, skipping both Catalina and Big Sur. Took the normal precautions of a full Time Machine backup, cloned the internal SSD to an external hard drive, then let the machine do its update. Took about 25 minutes, had no issues, and my 2017 iMac is still working very, very well just on Monterey. I then updated Office and downloaded TurboTax, also worked very well. You might want to consider going all the way instead of a side trip to Big Sur. My update was to v12.1 of Monterey, but I believe 12.2 is current now.

 

[sunnyjohn2]

Many thanks. It would certainly be easier because I can upgrade straight from Software update. I'll think about it.

 

[bogdanw]

Big Sur can be downloaded directly from Apple as InstallAssistant.pkg, that unpacks as Install macOS Big Sur.app in /Applications/
Link for 11.6.3

http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/01/43/002-57023-A_L5XMA854F3/nqk4ne8vdfnmj3r119qwc9yjt31ek5dn1t/InstallAssistant.pkg

Other links
https://mrmacintosh.com/macos-big-sur-full-installer-database-download-directly-from-apple/

 

[sunnyjohn2]

Many thanks. In fact I found it on https://www.techspot.com/downloads/1928-macos-big-sur.html#google_vignette
It did, however, take four hours to download! It's now in one piece on my desktop ready to go.

 

[BigBlur]

Big Sur (and other previous versions) can be downloaded through the App Store. You just have to go through Apple’s support page to get the links.

How to download and install macOS - Apple Support

Download and install current or previous versions of the Mac operating system on compatible Mac computers.

support.apple.com

 

[sunnyjohn2]

Ah, well - I did it the long way round! Thanks anyway.