From killing a process, through a regular restart, to Recovery and a bootable external recovery disk, all you need to know about fixing your Mac in macOS 11 and 12.
SSV
in Mac OS 8 and 9, you could patch the system direct. OS X was harder, and became sprawling and interdependent, encouraging users to reinstall macOS. That has now ended with the introduction of the SSV.
In Monterey, these haven’t changed much since Big Sur. However, those small differences are significant, particularly on M1 Macs.
How APFS, the boot volume group, hashes, and Secure Boot all combine to guarantee the integrity of your system, and save you trouble and work.
A great advance in APFS which enables Big Sur’s Sealed System Volume, and backups being made to APFS. Here they’re fully explained.
The macOS 11.5.1 update fixes a serious vulnerability, but does it really take 2.2 GB (Intel) or 3.1 GB (M1) to fix what could only have been a few MB at most?
macOS 11.5 will be available in a few days. Should you risk upgrading? Here are some of the major issues which you need to consider when deciding and planning any upgrade.
Snapshots are designed to make it easy to roll back to a previous state. Why then can’t you use a snapshot to roll back to an earlier version of Big Sur?
macOS 11.2, 11.2.1 and 11.2.2 have come in quick succession. What do they tell us about how difficult it is to update Big Sur’s sealed System volume? Is this the way to go?
Although updating each M1 Mac requires 1 GB of direct download from Apple, there are great economies in running your own Content Caching Server. And why Apple doesn’t want to offer standalone Big Sur updates.
The Eclectic Light Company 