Why macOS Big Sur Isn’t the ‘Big’ Upgrade You Might Be Expecting

Image courtesy of author

Apple’s operating system updates fascinate me.

Just like their hardware, they come with a huge amount of furore, super-smart marketing and promises of significant leaps forward.

Only, strip back all of that surface layer stuff, and the updates are rarely anything more than gentle-yet-important steps forward.

macOS Big Sur is no different.

You can watch my macOS Big Sur first impressions video, here:

Here are my initial thoughts.

The upgrade

Like seemingly millions of others, I chose launch day (or night, my time) to upgrade to Big Sur.

That was a mistake. Two things happened:

• my 16" MacBook Pro failed to download the update and proceeded to act rather unusually for a good hour afterwards, right when I needed to edit and publish my latest video; and
• my iMac flat out refused to even start the download.