As the summer wore on, I also installed Big Sur on the internal SSD of my 13” 2016 MacBook Pro to get a sense of how the update performs on an older laptop and try the new battery management functionality in System Preferences. I switched back and forth between Catalina and Big Sur on my 2018 Mac mini with a 3.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7 and 32GB of RAM using an external Samsung T7 1TB SSD.

I’m very cautious about recording and editing on a new OS until I’m sure the apps I rely on are stable. As in past years, the primary reason for the setup was podcast recording and editing. As a result, I spent most of my summer after WWDC straddling Catalina and Big Sur.įor a lot of the summer, I spent about half of my week using Big Sur and the other half with Catalina.

Also, third-party apps distributed outside the Mac App Store aren’t prevented from using private Apple APIs that are more likely to break with beta releases. Macs interface with a wider variety of peripherals than iPhones and iPads, which sometimes conflict with macOS betas. Although I have had good luck historically with macOS betas, there’s inherently more that can go wrong than with iOS or iPadOS. Every year, testing a new version of macOS is a balancing act.

Plex server mac mini