Big Sur requires a significant amount of undeveloped land.

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2021-05-17 09:29:11

Many of us have just installed the largest macOS update ever released by Apple (as far as I can tell), and there’s a few Macs which haven’t fared well.

My iMac died while making a copy of the macOS 11.3 installer, before I actually installed it. The spinning beachball showed up, and the Mac became completely unresponsive except for being able to move the cursor. I couldn’t even ssh in. After a few minutes, the display went black. I eventually had to power it off and start it up again, but it got stuck halfway through the boot progress bar, the one that shows the desktop picture. I assume the CPU use was high because the fan got very loud. Eventually it seemed to kernel panic and stopped. Several more attempts at booting all failed in the same way.

Safe Mode, resetting the PRAM, Apple Diagnostics—none of the normal stuff helped. I was able to boot from macOS Recovery as well as a clone. What if this were an M1 Mac that couldn’t boot from a clone? Would I be able to easily sync my files to another Mac while booted from Recovery? Of course, git is not available, so I couldn’t push my work in progress. It turns out that rsync is not available in Recovery, either, although the slower scp is. Unfortunately, despite the network activity, the Mac will fall asleep after about 15 minutes of copying, and scp—unlike rsync—cannot resume a copy.

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