Slowly does it

It’s macOS Big Sur (11.0.1) release day as well as general availability of iPhone 12 mini / Pro Max. No matter which, a lot are sitting at home for one reason or another, though some may likely be glued to their windows and refreshing Safari for delivery times. Sadly, the rest of us poor souls were updating ourselves to Big Sur today and met the process with utter frustration.

It seems Apple forgot to tell the server room to power up server no.2 last night, sure enough upon release the proverbial hit the fan and services came crashing down. My own attempts to download and install to seven progressive attempts before success was had. Thankfully, the entire 12.18GB download was not needing to be downloaded each attempt or I may not be entirely bald.

The download was reaching a certain point before jumping to its full download size, then ultimately reporting having failed. Installation was reported to take only 38 (Apple) minutes though in truth the actual time taken approximated an hour on my late-2016 MacBook Pro.

Post-install Big Sur did have issues with my Magic Mouse 2, not wanting to discover it when I clicked to activate per normal, though when selecting via my trackpad all was rectified. I did have to activate via Security & Privacy two system-level extensions for apps I had installed, neither’s instructions I felt were perfect and could do with refining for less technical users who’d likely struggle.

The updated interface does feel somewhat refreshed over there now familiar interface introduced and refined all those years ago with OS X in 2001. I think Apple has certainly got a few bugs in the matrix to iron out with Big Sur as the screen seemed to blip a few times after logging in, I guess though it’s early days and to be expected with a freshly minted operating system. I was expecting to see the odd application nuked with this release, oddly nothing was wearing a crossed or circle that I hadn’t expected.

Been a long morning, off to re-check the iPhone order status (for the fiftieth time!)