macOS 11.4 brought major changes to the way M1 Macs handle external bootable disks. This explains how this works during the boot process.
Big Sur
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?
The Big Sur update to 11.4 is significantly smaller than that to 11.3, and its lists of changes […]
Apple has just released the update to bring Big Sur to version 11.4. This appears more modest in […]
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
The Eclectic Light Company 