I needed to reset my MacBook Air, this wasn’t going to anyone else so didn’t worry about a complete data format like I would do if I was selling it. I didn’t even realise this but in macOS (I’m on Ventura) you can now erase all content and settings just like you do on an iPhone or iPad.
This is a big win for this sort of task.
That’s it, took about 5 minutes on my M1 MacBook Air.
Starting to mess around with YouTube shorts as a way to learn some new skills and not worry too much about production value.
I’ve caved in and installed the macOS Monterey Beta, for one reason – an updated Safari with the old style tabs
I’m not one to get on Apple’s back about this one, if you don’t try something how do you know if it’ll work. I’m glad to see they listened to the feedback from the community on this one and reverted back to something that is easier to use.
I’ve been playing with the macOS Monterey Beta for a couple of weeks and when my Photo library stopped syncing with it I decided to go back to Big Sur. This is a little more complicated with an M1 Mac and you can’t use the same method as you would with an Intel Mac.
In playing around with this I’ve got a working way to remove the Monterey Beta and go back to the latest public release of Big Sur.
Note: You’ll need two Mac’s and a USB-C cable for this method to work.
First off it goes without saying that you shouldn’t really be putting a beta on your main device anyway but make sure you have a back up of your most important data. I’m all in with iCloud Photo Library and drive so all of my stuff is either on our main iMac or in the cloud somewhere.
For my MacBook Air to restore it took about 30 minutes as it needs to download all of the system software and reapply it.
May the force be with you…
I’m liking the changes to macOS, I’ll have my thoughts up this week but here’s what you need to run it.
I’m finishing up my thoughts on WWDC with macOS. The last update was a big one with sweeping UI changes and some bold choices making some of macOS look like it’s almost ready for a touch screen.
On the whole I enjoy using macOS Big Sur and for me this I want a bug fix and performance improvement kind of year.
macOS does everything I need it to in terms of letting me do my job searching and be creative. I’m not using the OS and wishing for more functionality like I do on iPad. It’s not obvious to me what needs to change.
The core of the OS is great and like I say, hoping for bug fixes and performance improvements.
It’s in the apps like Reminders and Mail that need some work, not macOS itself.
It’s time for Apple to decouple it’s own apps from macOS (and iOS) and put them in the store to stand on their own with their own dedicated teams giving us regular updates.
This’ll be the ideal for me. No major macOS changes but the apps get useful updates.
I don’t typically write these sorts of posts but I wanted to put out this public service announcement to anyone that like me owns a 2015/6 12″ MacBook. It’s been running fine (broken keyboard aside…) but the latest version of macOS Big Sur, 11.3 has made it unusable for me.
As soon as the update had installed and I had restarted I noticed that I was getting the dreaded beachball in a lot of apps I wouldn’t typically see it in. The main offender was Safari but also Notes and Mail. When I am doing anything now as the day has gone on it’s like walking through treacle. I’m writing up this post with a 10 second delay on each keystroke for example, fun.
I’ll do what I can to report this issue to Apple but it might be that they have moved this machine to the end of the road.
Whilst using my MacBook this morning I realised that I had never actually shared my macOS setup, only every my iOS one. I’m not sure if many will find this interesting but I thought I’d share my Mac workflow.
So, my desktop is pretty clean just quick access to my drive. I use a lot of Finder Favourites to get my to certain places quickly so I don’t need a desktop full of links.
In terms of my most used apps, you can see them all in the dock here. Some are duplicates from my iPhone (Henry habits, iA Writer, Todoist and Tot). I have a VPN enabled all of the time (you can see I’m using ExpressVPN for this). I use a lot of Apple apps, including Calendar, Mail and Notes. Mindnode gets some use but not so much lately. I’m on the old version of Pixelmator, I think you can only get the Pro version now.
I have Garageband there for the podcast and lastly Tweetbot for my social networking.
If you want to know anything please let me know, it’s the first time I’ve shared my Mac setup.
I’ve been using my MacBook a lot more over the last few months and to be honest I resisted Big Sur for a while but when the machine was running really slowly I thought, what have I got to lose.
After using it for a good few weeks now I wanted to share a few thoughts on using it.
Overall I’m pleased with Big Sur, it’s a nice upgrade. I’m hoping that Apple move to a two year cycle now and just refine Big Sur this year as I’m finding it nice and stable.
Seems an odd thing to post as someone that has predominantly lived on iOS but in the last few months with my job searching, interviews and working with agencies I’ve been using macOS a lot more and I’ve really grown to appreciate the 12″ MacBook that I have and I’m glad I kept it around. It’s a 2016 model with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD and whilst it isn’t the fastest ship in the galaxy it’s doing a great job. It’s lighter than my iPad Pro 11″ with a keyboard and seems the perfect size to chuck an M1 processor in and call it a day. If Apple released this exact machine (with a more reliable keyboard!) and an M1 processor than I would be buying one day one. Now I’ve updated to macOS Big Sur and the latest versions of pages etc I can do everything I need to on this machine.
The main reason for falling back on macOS is mainly around updating my CV based on templates I’m given, a more reliable Zoom experience and ability to easily hook up my MIC setup without faffing around with anything. This isn’t me leaving the iPad behind at all I love it, but I do have a new appreciation for this MacBook and if you found one (and could deal with the flat keyboard) then as a portable it’s still great (especially if you grab one with 16GB RAM). Having one USB-C is a pain sometimes but I can manage with it given Zoom calls tend to be less than an hour and at four years old it still holds a charge fine for me. I do have a concern that now I’m using it for hours a day the well reported keyboard issues are going to hit me but at the moment (touching wood) it’s holding up fine.
I’ll continue to hold out hope we’ll see this smaller form factor with an M1 at some point…
In a previous post I said that in beta I found that my base 12″ MacBook with 8GB wasn’t up to the task of running macOS Big Sur.
Well in my current job hunting I found that I couldn’t run a couple apps that I wanted to so I took the plunge.
I’m pleased to report that it’s now running quicker than Catalina did! I have no idea how but in my experience the whole experience of running this machine has been improved. It’s not a miracle cure for my lack of 16GB of RAM but it’s a definite improvement over Catalina, I can switch between apps quickly now and Safari is a lot more responsive.
So, contrary to what I said before, if you’re on a 12″ MacBook then you should see performance gains from upgrading to Big Sur.
So I updated to Big Sur on the 8GB 2016 12″ MacBook to test the final public release performance and whilst it does run a bit faster than the beta I’d not recommend it.
It looks fantastic but there is a lot of lag in the experience on this little machine and I’ll be reverting it back to Catalina.
It’s a shame but this little machine with it’s slow intel to keep cool just didn’t stand a chance. I’d love an M1 12″ because the form factor (keyboard aside) is one of my favourite Mac models.
So, if you’re on an 8GB base model 12″ I wouldn’t recommend using Big Sur.
Source: Apple
Big Sur launches to the public today, here’s the Apple page on what’s new. Personally I’d hold off for the next patch before installing and if you have 8GB RAM I’d carefully consider giving it a miss for now.
I’m testing it again on a 12″ MacBook and it’s not that great in terms of performance on 8GB but it really does look great from an interface perspective.
Give it a week and see how it settles down.
I’m currently running with two different MAC setups in our house a late 2015 5k iMac and a 2016 MacBook, both have 8GB RAM. I’ve also been doing a lot with photos lately and been running into memory limitations and slow performance using the app to manage a large library (>30,000 photos). This already had me thinking about moving the iMac to 16GB RAM but with the impending Big Sur update I’ve done a little testing to see what it runs like on 8GB RAM and the MacBook to see it it’ll be a required upgrade before the software comes to us in November (my best guess).
I’ve had Big Sur running on the MacBook that has a 1.1 Core M3 processor and 8GB RAM and whilst I’m surprised that it doesn’t run much slower than the current latest Catalina build (10.15.6) I am seeing lag in using Photos, Notes and Mail that has me thinking that the UI changes are heavier on the CPU and GPU than before. Given my iMac is much more powerful than this little MacBook it gives me some confidence it’ll run but with the UI changing all over the place I’m hesitant to upgrade any of my setups software wise. It does seem to be more graphics intensive than Catalina so the graphics card will have a big say in this but adding more memory will mean that with multiple applications in use and photo sync in the background the experience will be a lot nicer.
Unfortunately I don’t have a choice with the MacBook as I can’t upgrade it but anything where you can add RAM I’d recommend adding some and making sure you have at least 16GB RAM to run Big Sur.
With this in mind I’ll be ordering more memory for my iMac before release to make sure I am getting the best performance I can in day to day use, especially in these times of more working from home.
LJPUK 