Apple Seeds Second Release Candidate Version of macOS Big Sur 11.2 to Developers [Update: Public Beta Available]

Still AirPods don’t auto correct

Did autocorrect incorrectly correct "auto connect" to "auto correct"? 😜

really hope it fixes the spontaneous reboot issue I'm seeing with M1 MBP's

Their primary focus is selling hardware, software is what they sell along with. They have been great at both through time, but so long as people buy the hardware, they are fine taking months to fix issues with their flagship machines, often into the next year by the time the next major release is scheduled. And a sample of people here on this forum find that acceptable. I would say most in the world are okay with it, going by the sales numbers and Apple's refusal to get around this habit.

I wonder how sensible that is in the long term though. It's what happens on Windows and Android, where the old bugs are slow to get fixed and new issues get introduced with every major release. Eventually people do care about it and they switch. Apple benefitted massively from that in recent years. But they need to learn this lesson for themselves. A lot of people became Apple customers because they were tired of buggy software that never got fixed, not because they found it tolerable.

Apple software has always had issues, like you said, but I feel like it started to really rub people the wrong way from Catalina onwards. Combined with the hardware prices, it's a reason why I'm seeing gradually more friends and colleagues switch back to Windows again because they started to question whether they were really getting enough quality for their money. I'm writing this from a 16 inch MBP that's been kind of a horrible experience at times, with not many positives to say about Apple Support on any of the issues I've had with it.

Their primary focus is selling hardware, software is what they sell along with. They have been great at both through time, but so long as people buy the hardware, they are fine taking months to fix issues with their flagship machines, often into the next year by the time the next major release is scheduled. And a sample of people here on this forum find that acceptable. I would say most in the world are okay with it, going by the sales numbers and Apple's refusal to get around this habit.

I'd say that's an accurate summary on where software QA is today at Apple.
Additionally, some clearly recognizable / daily visible bugs seem to persist over years and several generations of macOS, like for example the almost-always-wrong account balance in the lower left corner of App Store App (being persistent without any improvement since at least the first days of Mojave), or the permanent problems with Apple Watch unlock (appearing in most macOS dot revisions since introduction of this feature) or with Handoff - just to name a few.

Looks like they can afford to do so, as most customers don't care / don't even understand what's happening when they are hindered by OS bugs. And the alternatives are even weaker - Windows in terms of stability, Linux in terms of effort and knowledge required for configuration and maintenance. Although I seriously doubt Windows can still be regarded as less stable if just compared to Catalina - there were so many Macs with a multitude of serious problems even up to the latest release of Catalina (including my 2014 iMac) that Windows suddenly looked like the more reliable alternative.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that it will continue that way. Typing this text on a M1 Mac, I cannot ignore that they did an extremely good job setting up the new architecture with all components required for the transition. Rosetta 2 really performs well and this machine is just a pleasure to work with. Of course there are still quite some bugs (especially with peripherals like Bluetooth devices and external Monitors, but also quite a number of other issues), but things are definitely not even nearly as bad as they were in Catalina one year before. This leads me to the assumption that maybe the "Catastrophina" was also caused by focusing most of the energy towards the next-year OS generation in order to ensure a smooth architecture transition.

So, l'm looking forward, optimistic that the remaining issues in Big Sur will be fixed in a reasonable time period (despite having experienced the opposite last year).

I love macOS, I love that it's based on BSD. I've been using it since Panther.

I also love when things work right.

Catalina and Big Sur have been *******.


Two notable serious issues right now:

1) Notes.app see's 65%ish CPU usage burning battery on M1 and other machines, they spend all this time working on great hardware and then blow it. The average user isn't diagnosing like these guys: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-notes-using-cpu.2268511/ - the average user just says my M1 battery sucks.

2) Kernel Panic on reboot. Happens on all 3 Macs I own, I know it came in Catalina around 10.15.5 - have Intel and M1 Macs, from Catalina to Big Sur, all different software stacks (some controlled by work, some just mine), all have the issue. Can't believe it hasn't been addressed.
e.g. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/372183/catalina-crashing-at-shutdown-watchdog-timeout-no-checkins-from-watchdogd


I need these things fixed. It's driving me insane.

How can such basic bugs slip buy and be unfixed for months.

Report them to Apple, speak to a senior support person, etc. If you don't report, they won't fix.

Also out for the Public Beta testers. Here's hoping there is further improvements to Bluetooth.