Most of the silence was due to Apple disabling the installer for those models affected. Silence over the last four or five days indicate that those who were brave enough to have installed 11.1 (20C69) have not been bricked. I’m not sure what other confirmation you expect at this point. If you need more, all you can do is wait until you are comfortable that you know enough to either update or stick with what you have.
Apple Releases Apple Fitness+, macOS 11.1 Big Sur, iOS 14.3, iPadOS 14.3, watchOS 7.2, and tvOS 14.3
Here’s the confirmation I’d like: “With this update, Apple has fixed the issue that was causing Big Sur to brick Late-2013 MacBook Pros.” Doesn’t seem too much to ask! 
My computer is my livelihood, I can’t afford to take risks with it.
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As I said before, they are not going to do that. It would open them up to a big class action suit if it turned out to be wrong.
There is no such thing as a zero risk update. Way too many variables. If you honestly cannot afford to take any risk then disconnect yourself from the Internet and never apply another update to anything. We all take risk when we update. Just a matter of how much risk are we comfortable taking and what we can afford to replace with a catastrophic event.
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We saw this in the release notes, but couldn’t get it to work in our testing. Everything looked the same whether the setting was on or off. So we decided to punt on mentioning it for now.
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As with so many of the rest of us, you need to take this into consideration.
I would recommend waiting until you have enough time to deal with any possible problems, which may (in a worst-case scenario) involve a trip to an Apple Store. If this means you have to wait a month or two, then so be it.
When you’re ready to move forward, make one or two full bootable backups before the upgrade. If something goes wrong, be prepared to do what it takes to roll-back the upgrade. This may mean booting from (and restoring from) your backup. It might mean running Configurator on another Mac. Or (if catastrophe strikes) visiting an Apple Store.
You can minimize the odds of catastrophy by waiting a few weeks to see if others report problems and make sure you’re connected to a UPS during the upgrade (to protect against a power outage during the upgrade, which could create a real mess if it happens at the wrong time).
All this having been said, I don’t recall any reports of a Big Sur upgrade bricking a computer. The reports I saw describe someone using the Recovery mechanism to wipe a brand new M1 Mac and this bug was (as far as I know) fixed in the 11.0.1 release that shipped soon afterward.
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Several reports related to older MBPs, 2013/14 and such. Caught my attention because I still run a 2013 MBP (on Catalina) on the side.
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Updating to 14.3 on iOS devices, Homepods and Apple TV has not fixed the issue where the Apple TV prevents other devices from Airplaying directly to the Homepods when its default audio output is those Homepods. I suppose this could be considered a desirable feature by some but for me it defeats the advantages of Airplay.
With ATV default to Homepods off:
With ATV default to Homepods on:
To that great advice I would like to add performing a disk repair on the drive the OS is installed on with Disk Utility, before backing up. Then do the same on the backup(s) you created. Disk errors can seriously affect any process that reads and writes to disk, especially upgrades, which do a lot of that.
I also recommend making sure you can actually boot from the backup(s) you created, before proceeding with the upgrade.
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It did work for me.
doug
I wanted the updates to Photos to support Apple Pro Raw - so did the Big Sur 11.1 update from Catalina. Update process went fine but I am experiencing bugs. I need to approve a Parallels extension in Security and Privacy, but it refuses to accept my account password (which does work fine to boot the system). Half my mailboxes in Mail disappeared and had to be restored. This is on a MBP16 (late 2019). I also have an iMac Pro which is still on Catalina and, it seems, will stay that way for a while. I was hoping that 11.1 would have the major glitches fixed…
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According to an Apple Newsroom page of September, 2020, Apple says:
- At launch, Apple Fitness+ will be available in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.
But the newer Apple Newsroom page of December 14, 2020 doesn’t mention anything about that kind of availability. I wonder how Japanese users could think of it.
About the TVos… So I had shelved my AppleTV4K because YouTube channel 4K content was not in 4K. Something about Apple and Google not working together on that YouTube has its own codec for 4K (I think, but that was last I read).
Well, I was going to sell my AppleTV4K on Monday, so I dusted it off, connected it to reset to factory and noticed it there was update from 12.2 to 14.3. Ok. After the update, for some odd whim, I launched Youtube, pulled up a 4K content (Japanese city in 4K) and how about that, it was in 4K! Since I hadn’t reset it, I went to my channels I sub to, and those 4K content were also now in 4K! Maybe this changed after 12.2 OS but whenever, it now seems to me, a reason not to part with it. Too bad I bought a roku Ultra (cyber Monday deal) two weeks ago. Oh well.
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Had to reset the SMC to fix the Security and Privacy password problem. I got touchID back so I don’t need to enter the password any more. (I also updated a iMac Pro with no problems so there was something specific to the MBP16.)
David
Quite enjoying the Fitness+ videos, jumped on the Apple One subscription, the top tier represents a savings for us. Gentle enough beginner material which suits me.
Put the Roku on another TV…
iOS 14.3 update complete. No joy. Still getting the two pop-ups when plugging in the iphone. I notice that the Finder iPhone page still shows iOS version 14.2 and the sync is stuck in step 4. This leads me to believe that the finder is not getting access to some files on the iPhone that it needs.
Updated the iPhone backup password. Manually backed up iPhone to iMAC disk. Sync now completes normally. Replugged the USB connection. Got the two error pop-ups again. Got message that the automatic sync could not be done as the previous sync had not completed (even though it appeared to have). Clicked the sync button and the sync seemed to complete normally.
Tried to cycle the USB cable again. Again 2 pop-ups then a different error " The iPhone "Bill’s iPhone cannot be synced. An unknown error occurred (-50).
I’m stumped, but something seems not right with iPhone to Finder integration.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Apple support advisor today after an hour 15 minutes on the phone elevated my case and was told it was a “known bug that several Apple employees had also experienced.” I can’t understand why lowest level advisors don’t seem to know about known bugs. I was advised to wait for the next big Sur update.
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Just came across another “feature” of Homepod 14.3 that is causing confusion/irritation.
An infinity icon 
is for “play more like this”. When it is on (by default after installing 14.2 or 14.3) then music is played at random after the current selected playlist is finished. Several people have complained that they have set up music for their kids and then the feature started to play inappropriate songs for kids.
There is more about it here, including how to turn it off (I hope) via the iOS Home app (the Mac Home app does not seem to have this option):
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Updated both the iphone and Big Sur and my bug still happens when I plug in the phone. However, another bug I reported in Preview resolution stuck at 72 dpi on resize is fixed.
Well, upon further testing, the Preview 72 dpi bug is acting differently, but is still not fixed properly. I’m sticking with PhotoShop Elements for production image size manipulation for the time being even though it makes my process longer.