My thoughts on macOS Big Sur

macOS Big Sur is the most important and the best macOS update to happen in over 20 years.

It’s the first time in over a decade that I have been positive and optimistic about upgrading my Mac. Beginning with macOS 10.12 Sierra in 2016, macOS upgrades felt like a necessary evil, promising to bring new features and power, but instead they felt like massive bug fixes that weighed down the computer’s performance.

The final straw for me was macOS Catalina 10.15, which made my MacBook Pro 2019 nearly unusable for my tech consulting. It was so bad that I found myself taking a scorched-earth approach to switching: Erasing my Mac, install macOS fresh, and manually migrate all my apps, settings and data. I ultimately decided to reverse course, and left my Mac on macOS 10.14 Mojave.

Coincidentally, at about this time my fellow technologist Nathan and I were doing a six-month deep-dive into Google G-Suite, and we each purchased a Google PixelBook Go. Using the PixelBook Go for the first time gave me flashbacks to what I used to feel opening up a brand new Mac. It was magical. Fast. Fluid. Stable. Something about Google’s approach to ChromeOS reminded me what Steve Jobs to as the goal of any technology; To become “the thinnest veil” between an artist and her canvas, or the glass lens between a photographer and her subject. I could work for hours — and I still do — on my PixelBook Go, uninterrupted and undistracted. My MacBook Pro became my a permanent fixture on my desk.

What the Mac does that others can’t.

I have a pretty big crush on my PixelBook Go. The battery seems to last forever. It’s immune to crashes, and it never slows down. Since I started writing in Google Docs, I have never lost any of my writing due to a crash, a glitch or a save-gone-wrong. It’s perfectly purposeful, but it has two downsides.

First, it doesn’t have the macOS Finder interface. ChromeOS has come a long way, but the apps still feel like separate apps when you’re trying to launch something or find something. Google search is vastly superior to Apple’s search, but it’s still not as intuitively obvious how to find search to use search in ChromeOS as it is on a Mac. And that’s the beauty of a PixelBook Go or a ChromeBook: it’s the best single-tasker in the kitchen of creativity and productivity. The Mac is not that. The Mac is a beautiful multi-tasker in a creator’s kitchen. Moving between tools (apps) is as fluid and elegant a process as watching a master chef coordinating an entire kitchen under pressure to produce.

The second thing a Mac presently does that the PixelBook Go cannot is empower me with certain tools, like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere. Or even the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Maybe someday it will, but even then, I can’t see the current PixelBook Go form factor reaching for the class of performance it needs to be effective in the medium of video.

All of this put me in limbo for the last year. If I wanted stability or any decent battery life, I grabbed my PixelBook Go. If I wanted to create anything beyond works of writing, I would sit down at my desk with my Mac, and tolerate speed and stability that was nowhere near commensurate for the price of my MacBook Pro.

Then comes Big Sur.

I don’t care about redesigned icons. It started getting almost comical when Apple bragged about the “new, flat interface” with various updates. I do care about confusion in design, because visual and mental friction resulting from either bad design or unnecessary complexity costs our brains processing time. We need to think about using a tool, versus just using it. This defeats the “the thinnest veil” principle. When was the last time you had to check if you were holding a pencil the correct way before you started drawing on a piece of paper? That’s the beauty of paper and pencil. You don’t think about it. You just do.

“The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

- Steve Jobs

There is a certain gestalt with Big Sur that I think most people won’t immediately appreciate, but will come to love. It does begin to feel like you’re using an iPhone in a number of ways.

Many of the visual elements come from iOS now. Control center, and even Do Not Disturb are somewhat difficult to find at first because we’re adjusting from the old Mac platform to the new iOS-esque platform. This hit me when the first customer I migrated to Big Sur couldn’t find the icon she previously clicked to enable Do Not Disturb and we looked it up together. A new way of doing something, but somewhat familiar once you do it.

What I immediately noticed about Big Sur was a big improvement in stability. I had started to hate my 2019 MacBook Pro despite all its great hardware. After Big Sur, my fans stopped running all the time. The computer didn’t radiate heat through the top case like it did continuously since purchase. WiFi connected better and faster than before. Applications crashed less, and the almost untenable slow-down that required a reboot every 1-2 days was no longer present. Apple, you fixed my Mac with macOS!

This is a great step in the right direction.

The verdict: Big Sur proves that Apple is demonstrating their commitment to Mac again

I was very worried over the past several years that Apple’s management team would focus so intensely on mobile that they would forget what got them here in the first place. Businesses are nothing more than just groups of people, and it’s easy for people to lose sight of what matters, especially with product success at the level of the iPhone. I wrote about a similar and interesting oversight here that is still a potential problem for Apple. When you consider all the market mishaps and disappointment with previous Mac Pros, it’s really difficult to not be cynical about Apple’s commitment to the Mac.

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

- Steve Jobs

Since upgrading to macOS Big Sur, I am using my Mac more, and my PixelBook Go less. That’s just an interesting observation. That doesn’t mean the Mac is better. They’re just different, but the Mac is no longer a pain to use. I think the PixelBook Go still has some serious advantages that Apple could learn from, and it will be interesting to see if Apple’s product line starts to set new standards of excellence the result of their current direction. (seriously though, why no 1080P web cam in the new M1 Macs? PixelBook Go has had it for over a year).

I am going to recommend that everyone who has a Mac capable of upgrading to macOS Big Sur consider upgrading. Of course, there are a lot of prerequisites beyond Apple’s hardware requirements: Will your applications run? How old is your computer and should you really be trying to use it longer? Do you have the right kind of backup before you begin? In my next post, I’ll talk about the upgrade safety basics that are even more important now than ever, and I’ll go into the benefits of doing a manual migration versus a straight upgrade. All of this is advice designed to save you time and get you the best possible results.