macOS 11.4 brought major changes to the way M1 Macs handle external bootable disks. This explains how this works during the boot process.
Apple silicon
There’s 1 True Recovery, Fallback Recovery and one other recovery mode. Disambiguation, explanation and how this changed in macOS 11.4.
Soon after Apple started delivering M1 Macs, users found that they couldn’t boot them from external disks. Six months later, this has largely been fixed. What went wrong?
For some, inability to clone to the internal SSD of an M1 Mac seems disastrous. In reality, it could achieve little, and there are better solutions.
macOS 11.4 has finally fixed all the problems with installing current and older macOS on external disks, and booting an M1 Mac from them.
What are a new kernel extension and a private framework doing in macOS 11.4? Here are some details, and suggestions for further research.
Cloning has been a popular way of creating external bootable disks. Now that CCC 6 can make full clones of disks for M1 Macs, is it a solution?
We commonly suffer failures of the psychology of Mac performance, when system background tasks overwhelm the processor and bring the interface to a grinding halt
One command in Terminal which instantly disables any support, and why you can’t (yet) boot your M1 Mac in Linux.
It has been years coming, but I’ve finally got a Thunderbolt hub/dock which lets me connect more TB3 disks. Was it worth the wait and cost?
The Eclectic Light Company 