Well folks, just wanted to relate some experiences I've had in my small foray into Ventura and am done with this iteration of the OS it appears. A few major halting / critical points on an M1 Max system (also, just to be clear, I'm not a novice user - I've been a goto guy that has helped Apple "Geniuses" over the years when they can't figure things out) :
Full recovery to Monterey was a painful process. Due to some fashion in which Ventura screwed up the recovery partition and so forth, reinstallation required erasure of the ENTIRE drive, network access (sadly I had to authenticate my machine with Apple, which is ridiculous and scary in and of itself and should not be required), and then downloading of Monterey again... Plus a 30 hour Migration step.
I will not be moving this machine to Ventura and Apple has very much dropped a significant level in terms of trust for our company. We have several Apple Silicon machines now that we are worried about in terms of the future and Apple's clear inability to make good decisions and lacking of actual quality assurance processes.
To boot, their Feedback / RADAR system has been very poor over the last couple years too. Apple's support/engineering department has been abysmal in responding to many and various reports. Someone needs to pull them out of the swirling toilet basin desperately before they are simply no different than Microsoft.
- Be aware that the upgrade can seriously fail. I tried both 13.0 and 13.1 beta. The system, while performing an upgrade, had an infinite Apple logo reboot loop that went into recovery mode after several reboot attempts. I went through several troubleshooting steps that I won't document here. USB backups don't boot so the recovery process is HORRIFIC now for Apple. Removing the ability to boot to USB drives is a nightmare level mistake by Apple. I do not trust Apple whatsoever anymore, even though their brand of OS is still the lesser of the proverbial "poisons" yet still (not a compliment, just an observation).
- Installed from scratch, but restore of previous system settings failed for some various obscure/unclear reasons. This situation descended into chaos when I found that the Recovery tool no longer worked and no associated tools work. This mode also incorrectly detected my system volume as being encrypted and no usernames or passwords that are system admins/owners would actually authenticate with the actually correct password. Things are seriously broken when they break with the recovery situation.
- My Time Machine backup did not work properly. It was detected and all seemed well with it, but the system, again, for some obscure and non-clear reason, failed to use it. I had to use a secondary backup made with Super Duper, BUT that was a ridiculous process. It took 30 hours to restore the 7tb+ of data.
- APFS Snapshots are a steaming mess. Apple is not using APFS snapshots properly / appropriately; I could not rollback on the upgrade system to to Monterey. This is an enormous problem and oversight / missed opportunity by Apple and is truly baffling. I've had some people who know the internal goings on at Apple express extreme frustration for not only the missed opportunity with ZFS, but now the problems of APFS not being used properly. A truly incredible situation.
- When I played with the fresh install I found that some things were really screwed up. For example:
- Stage Manager is trash for anyone with more than one display. The only useful way to use macOS is still with extended displays and WITHOUT separate Spaces for each display. Apple does not allow Stage Manager to even work with the extended displays situation and frankly Stage Manager simply has little to no value even if you intend to use it for focused mode when you require any other monitors.
- The new system Settings is enormously impotent and foreign. They really didn't think this through fully and are missing a lot of functionality. They should have, at the very least, provided BOTH methods of configuration since the new Settings app also feels enormously disorganized and even searching for features is not immediately fruitful. It's simply not ready for primetime usage - not to mention that it just doesn't fit UX parameters for non-iPhone/iPad usage.
- An Asus monitor that works perfectly on Monterey and is identical to a second monitor on the system does not allow for recognition of full resolution at the correct refresh rate when used with a DisplayPort adapter. HDMI works, but then macOS continues to have the monitor schizophrenia problem where it can't determine which monitor is which when they have the same model number (no fault of Apple per se), but the resolution + refresh situation IS faultable to Apple.
Full recovery to Monterey was a painful process. Due to some fashion in which Ventura screwed up the recovery partition and so forth, reinstallation required erasure of the ENTIRE drive, network access (sadly I had to authenticate my machine with Apple, which is ridiculous and scary in and of itself and should not be required), and then downloading of Monterey again... Plus a 30 hour Migration step.
I will not be moving this machine to Ventura and Apple has very much dropped a significant level in terms of trust for our company. We have several Apple Silicon machines now that we are worried about in terms of the future and Apple's clear inability to make good decisions and lacking of actual quality assurance processes.
To boot, their Feedback / RADAR system has been very poor over the last couple years too. Apple's support/engineering department has been abysmal in responding to many and various reports. Someone needs to pull them out of the swirling toilet basin desperately before they are simply no different than Microsoft.
