Last week, with the release of Big Sur 11.4, Apple finally addressed most of the problems users had been experiencing getting external boot disks to w

Last Week on My Mac: How it took 6 months for M1 Macs to work properly

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2021-05-30 17:00:05

Last week, with the release of Big Sur 11.4, Apple finally addressed most of the problems users had been experiencing getting external boot disks to work properly with their M1 Macs. Today I’m going to look back over the last six months, since the first M1 models shipped, and ask what went wrong.

Being able to boot a Mac from an external disk is a fundamental feature on which many Mac users have relied since the release of Mac OS X and well before. It’s widely used by software engineers, for example, to enable a single Mac to be run using several versions of macOS, and with the imminent release of the first betas of macOS 12 will soon assume even greater importance. Some rely on it so that they can work in an identical environment across two or more different Macs. It has also been a mainstay for many system administrators and advanced users to maintain or repair Macs which have developed soft problems. It may not be the most popular configuration, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

Within a month of the first new M1 Macs being delivered to users, there were several reports of problems getting them to work with bootable external disks. Tim Standing of OWC reported some of these, and a few days later I described them here. At this stage, trying to create a bootable external disk often failed, with a variety of different problems, whether in macOS 11.0.1 or 11.1, which had been released on 14 December.