Mac Big Sur
The era of Mac OS X is over. Kind of.
- The “10” era of the Mac operating system (Mac OS X and macOS 10) is now over. Apple decided to turn it up to (version) 11 and released macOS Big Sur. With macOS Big Sur, you’ll find that.
- Restart Your Mac. First, restart your computer. The most straightforward way is to hold down the.
For the first time in almost two decades, Apple has decided to bump up the version number of the Mac’s operating system. The change is meant to call attention to both the pending Apple Silicon transition—Big Sur will be the first macOS version to run on Apple’s own chips, even if it’s not the first to require those chips—and to an iPad-flavored redesign that significantly overhauls the look, feel, and sound of the operating system for the first time in a long while. Even the post-iOS-7 Yosemite update took pains to keep most things in the same place as it changed their look.
When you install macOS Big Sur on these Mac models, the installer might say that the update cannot be installed on this computer, or your Mac might start up to a blank screen or circle with a line through it. If your Mac no longer starts up successfully, these steps might help resolve the issue. So when a new version is in the works, you probably want to be aware of any new features, and there are a few coming to Photos in macOS 11 Big Sur. Let’s take a look at the new features in Photos 6.
But unlike the jump from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, where Apple swept away almost every aspect of its previous operating system and built a new one from the foundation up, macOS 11 is still fundamentally macOS 10. Early betas were even labeled as macOS 10.16, and Big Sur can still identify itself as version 10.16 to some older software in order to preserve compatibility. Almost everything will still work the same way—or, at least, Big Sur doesn’t break most software any more than older macOS 10 updates did. It may even be a bit less disruptive than Catalina was. This ought to be a smooth transition, most of the time.
Mac Big Sur Review
Big Sur Public Beta
We won’t be making any major changes to how we approach this review, either. We’ll cover the operating system’s new look and new features—the things that any Big Sur Mac will be able to do, regardless of whether it’s running on an Intel or an Apple Silicon Mac. To the extent that it’s possible to do without final hardware in-hand, we’ll cover the new macOS features that will be native to Apple Silicon Macs and outline how the software side of the transition will go.