The era of Mac OS X is over. Kind of.
For the first time in almost two decades, Apple has decided to bump up the version number of the Mac’s operating system. The change is meant to call attention to both the pending Apple Silicon transition—Big Sur will be the first macOS version to run on Apple’s own chips, even if it’s not the first to require those chips—and to an iPad-flavored redesign that significantly overhauls the look, feel, and sound of the operating system for the first time in a long while. Even the post-iOS-7 Yosemite update took pains to keep most things in the same place as it changed their look.
But unlike the jump from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, where Apple swept away almost every aspect of its previous operating system and built a new one from the foundation up, macOS 11 is still fundamentally macOS 10. Early betas were even labeled as macOS 10.16, and Big Sur can still identify itself as version 10.16 to some older software in order to preserve compatibility. Almost everything will still work the same way—or, at least, Big Sur doesn’t break most software any more than older macOS 10 updates did. It may even be a bit less disruptive than Catalina was. This ought to be a smooth transition, most of the time.
We won’t be making any major changes to how we approach this review, either. We’ll cover the operating system’s new look and new features—the things that any Big Sur Mac will be able to do, regardless of whether it’s running on an Intel or an Apple Silicon Mac. To the extent that it’s possible to do without final hardware in-hand, we’ll cover the new macOS features that will be native to Apple Silicon Macs and outline how the software side of the transition will go.
Table of Contents
- System requirements and compatibility
- What should I do with my unsupported Mac?
- Other system requirements
- Branding, installation, and free space
- Big Sur needs bigger disk space
- A funeral for Mac OS X
- Only mostly dead: macOS 10.16 lives on
- What numbers are next?
- A new look
- The basics: App windows
- Buttons and controls
- Dialog boxes and alerts
- New icons (or: it’s hip to be square)
- Control Center and Menu Bar
- Notification Center and widgets
- That new sound you’re looking for
- System Preferences iconography
- New wallpapers, plus wallpaper and screen saver UI changes
- New login window
- A new look for Recovery mode
- Other odds and ends
- Apps: Safari 14
- New tabs, new Start page
- Safari Web Extensions: Porting extensions from other browsers
- The Privacy Report and Intelligent Tracking Prevention
- Password monitoring
- No more Flash
- Translating pages
- WebP image support
- VP9 video codec and HDR support
- Other apps: Messages
- Photos
- Maps
- Calendars
- Reminders
- Notes
- Time Machine switches to APFS
- About networked backups
- Speed testing Time Machine
- macOS on Apple Silicon Macs
- Booting and recovery
- Goodbye Target Disk Mode, hello “Mac Sharing Mode”
- The return of universal binaries
- Rosetta 2
- How long will Intel Macs stick around?
- Security: Big Sur’s signed system volume
- SHA-256 and cryptographic hashing, explained
- How Big Sur installs system updates
- Catalyst changes
- Grab bag
- Battery preference pane
- General preference pane and the “font smoothing” toggle
- The startup chime is back
- Progress bar for managing iDevices
- No more AFP file sharing
- No Network Utility
- OpenGL and OpenCL are still here, even on Apple Silicon Macs
- Build numbers in Disk Utility
- DriverKit support for PCI Express and SCSI
- Encrypted DNS support
- Self-reported app privacy practices
- Upgrade now, or wait?
- Conclusions
- The Good
- The Bad
- The Ugly
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