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                        macOS 12 Monterey Upgrade Issues

   Adam Engst

   When it comes to upgrading to macOS 12 Monterey, we seem to be in a
   'best of times, worst of times' situation. Overall, early impressions
   suggest that Monterey is more of a refinement release rather than a
   major architectural leap on Apple's part. A quick look back at the
   significant changes unavoidable in previous versions of macOS:
     * macOS 10.14 Mojave: Automatically converted boot hard drives and
       Fusion drives to APFS
     * macOS 10.15 Catalina: Stopped supporting 32-bit apps and introduced
       a read-only System volume
     * macOS 11 Big Sur: Redesigned much of the interface, moved to a
       signed System volume, added support for Apple silicon, and moved
       Time Machine drives to APFS

   In contrast, Monterey offers quite a few compelling features'including
   Shortcuts, Live Text, AirPlay reception, live location updating in Find
   My, Universal Control (soon), and FaceTime screen sharing
   (soon)'without the kind of foundational changes that caused
   consternation in previous macOS versions. There are also smaller
   improvements that may be welcome, such as an improved interface in the
   Finder when copying large files and [1]AppleScript being reportedly
   much faster in Monterey. Plus, [2]as Howard Oakley notes, Apple seems
   to be focusing its bug fix and security attention on Monterey over Big
   Sur and Catalina.

   All that falls into the 'best of times' category and would suggest that
   you could contemplate an upgrade sooner rather than later. I've been
   running Monterey on my M1-based MacBook Air for months now, and I'm
   planning to move my 2020 27-inch iMac to Monterey as soon as I have a
   free weekend afternoon to fuss with it.

   However, in the 'worst of times' category, there have been some
   significant failures during the upgrade process, the most serious of
   which have resulted in stuck Macs. That happens when Spotlight's
   mdworker process has, for an as-yet-unknown reason, left tens of
   thousands of files in a temporary folder. The Monterey installer chokes
   when it hits that folder and can leave the Mac in an unusable state.
   Happily, [3]Mr. Macintosh has published instructions on how to check
   your Mac to see if it will suffer from the problem, fix it before
   upgrading, and recover from a stuck upgrade. Kudos to Mr. Macintosh,
   those on the MacAdmins Slack who helped gather information, and Apple
   engineering for tracking down the problem. It will likely go away as an
   issue once Apple can release new installers.

   Reports have also been coming in of [4]USB hubs having trouble under
   Monterey. Symptoms vary somewhat, with some hubs failing entirely while
   others have trouble only with certain ports. Reportedly, Apple is aware
   of the problem, so the next update to Monterey will likely include a
   fix. In the meantime, if you rely on a USB hub, it's worth delaying
   your upgrade.

   Lastly, Howard Oakley bought a new MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip. It
   came with macOS 12.0, but he wanted to update it to the current macOS
   12.0.1 immediately. That proved to be [5]a time-consuming and
   error-prone process that succeeded after he manually reconfigured his
   networking settings to use the public OpenDNS and Cloudflare DNS
   servers. That seems like an odd solution because it's hard to imagine
   Apple relying on update servers that wouldn't have well-advertised DNS
   names. Still, it's easy to try and has no downside.

   Neither the good nor the bad about Monterey changes our general upgrade
   advice, which is that it's worth waiting a bit longer unless you're an
   early adopter who is happy to puzzle through unexpected problems. We
   don't subscribe to rigid formulas that claim to specify exactly which
   update is ideal, instead preferring to get a feel for the quantity,
   severity, and prevalence of the bugs that Apple fixes with each update.
   With luck, we'll be able to give the go-ahead to upgrade sooner rather
   than later.

References

   1. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2021/11/01/applescript-much-faster-in-monterey/
   2. https://eclecticlight.co/2021/10/31/last-week-on-my-mac-the-pioneers-are-winning/
   3. https://mrmacintosh.com/macos-upgrade-to-big-sur-failed-stuck-progress-bar-fix-prevention/
   4. https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/29/monterey-usb-hub-issues-reported/
   5. https://eclecticlight.co/2021/11/03/m1-pro-first-impressions-1-setting-up/

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