No question—when you have a schedule that you have to hit, you have to make tradeoffs. But Apple has created a situation where new operating system versions are deemed necessary for marketing reasons, especially since the tight integration between all of Apple’s operating systems means that new features for one often require support from all.
On a lighter note, if I may indulge … on a sort of 90’s take on Brooke’s Law…
sort of depends on what the definition of adding is
ok, sorry, I’ll stop that now 
But software QA is one of the few aspects where you CAN throw people at the problem, it does support massive parallelization of effort. And good design should localize bugs.
I worked on some large (mostly military C2, but also air traffic control) systems, the best ones had strong modularity so few bugs had significant impacts across boundaries. The ones that did usually came from a change to an interface between the modules.
Apple too often adds glitzy features instead of getting core functionality to work. When my new laptop gets here (tomorrow), I’ll be interested to see if Mail and particularly Calendar are better on Monterey. Calendar on Mojave and earlier versions is a hot mess, ill-thought-through use cases, bad interfaces/information exchanges, and the kind of behavior I’d expect from a Microsoft product.
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Hi again,
Has anyone come across notable details with regard to Monterey installation issues
on systems having third party SSD drives installed, instead of OEM Apple SSD drives?
See the article linked at the top of this thread.
For some reason that nobody has been able to satisfactorily explain, Apple won’t install firmware updates if you have a third party SSD installed.
Monterey requires a firmware update (I think it was actually released as a part of a Big Sur update) in order to install. You may be forced to install the original Apple SSD, then install the firmware update (probably by installing Monterey on it).
Once that is done, you can go back to your original third-party SSD and install Monterey there. Once the firmware is installed on your motherboard, it should work.
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Whoops, yes I missed that.
I do recall there was the similar issue with High Sierra and some version of OWC ssd drives way back when…
It is always best to retain the original SSD drives when upgrading to a third party drive for such cases
I notice that it is not that easy to navigate to, or find, an Apple support page that specifies details on what firmware version is needed before upgrading to Mac OS versions.
Although, so far, I can confirm Big Sur and Monterey systems can be installed on the same Apple SSD, I would hope the same for third party drives, despite the need for the initial set up workaround.
According to the small print of Apples web site: Live Text is currently supported in English, Chinese, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
So the single most interesting feature of Monterey does not work in most languages it otherwise supports. hmm, F for Fail is the note I would think of. On the other hand this is a very common Apple issue, so nobody expects anything on the software side anymore. Those were the days!
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They always add more countries to their services eventually.
I caught whiff of Monterey “bricking” older macs and even Intel models with T2 chip, just as Apple announced an update to fix the Intel w/T2 chip issues. Apple’s “revival procedure” makes it clear, this isn’t as simple as thought to be.
Apple’s statement:
We have identified and fixed an issue with the firmware on the Apple T2 security chip that prevented a very small number of users from booting up their Mac after updating (sic Monterey) macOS. The updated firmware is now included with the existing macOS updates. Any users impacted by this issue can contact Apple Support for assistance.
I’ve updated a late 2016 MacBook Pro, a 2019 Mac Mini and a 2017 27" iMac (running an external drive as the boot drive) and didn’t have an issue with any of them. Shortly thereafter, I upgraded to 12.01 and had the same experience.
In general, I find the OS more fluid and surprisingly faster than Big Sur. My advice would be to go for it.
Not sure if this is a dumb question, despite the fact I know it’s a bit over my head even asking the question.
Browsing through recent articles leads me to believe that with the advent of the proliferation of the
SSD drive in Macs that firmware is now embedded in the SSD drive itself …?
… Raises the query: why else would a firmware update fail, and subsequently a failed system update, and a “bricked” Mac be the result, due to having a third party SSD installed?
… used to be that firmware data chip resided as a separate non-volatile memory chip, not beholden, so to speak, to a particular storage drive … just wondering
There are no dumb questions…just dumb answers sometimes. The firmware isn’t actually on the SSD…it’s in essentially the boot ROM of the computer. Monterey requires an update…but that update actually shipped with one of the Bog Sur releases. The problem is that the firmware won’t update unless an original Apple SSD is in the machine…so the update doesn’t get done if you’ve upgraded to a larger 3rd party SSD. The solution is to temporarily reinstall the Apple SSD…and it has to be the internal drive…an Apple SSD in an external enclosure won’t update the firmware even if you’ve booted from the external Apple SSD when running the update.
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I think part of the confusion here might be due to changes from Intel to Apple Silicon.
Intel MBPs have actual firmware implemented as flash memory on the board. It can get flashed (overwritten) via firmware update. The OS can be updated independent of the firmware. And often OS updates will not affect the firmware when small OS changes don’t require any firmware changes.
OTOH, the new M1 MBA/MBP have their firmware on one partition (or rather on one APFS container) on their internal SSD. If you flash the firmware of an M1 Mac you are effectively writing to that part of the SSD. Even when you boot an M1 Mac from an external disk, it is still getting its firmware from the internal SSD. If that SSD gets hosed, it’s lights out no matter what you try to boot from. In the M1 Mac world OS updates are linked to a certain firmware version so when you update the OS, you will also be updating the firmware. It’s a separate part of the update, but it all comes in one common ispw. Just like on iPhones.
There’s many more differences between these two approaches, but this is the main difference. And essentially the whole thing about firmware on the internal disk comes from this transition to Apple Silicon world.
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now that is “Different” … like paradigm shift-level
Like no external boot repair-jobs-wise
Looks like in the coming years I’ll finally be delving into Time Machine
Well it’s really only that different if your internal SSD gets hosed to the point where the firmware container becomes corrupted/unavailable. I think it’s safe to say, considering all Apple’s experience with this same approach for many years on iPhone, they know it’s such a rare occurrence that it’s not something most users will ever have to worry about.
Of course if you are that one unlucky user, it’s likely a trip to the Apple Store for you. In the best case, you just need to restore the firmware (SSD otherwise ok hardware wise), which means if you have access to another Mac you can get it done on your own using Configurator2.
If the internal SSD is working, but has a trashed container, then Configurator 2 can be used to recover it.
If that SSD is no longer functioning (which should be a very rare occurrence), then the computer will pretty much be dead. Maybe a third-party repair shop could replace the soldered down flash chips, but I wouldn’t count on it, at least not until I read about someone successfully doing it. (If the chips are cryptographically bound to the SoC, like storage on T2-based Macs, then you won’t be able to use replacement chips without a proprietary Apple installation tool that repair shops won’t have.)
I think the expectation is that this APFS container won’t get trashed. You need to jump through many hoops in order to delete it, so it shouldn’t happen by accident. And I doubt that part of the SSD will get modified very often - probably no more often than the BootROM firmware gets updated on Intel Macs - so that storage space should last a long time.
Of course, I could envision a system where the SSD is close to its write-cycle limit and then a firmware update tries to rewrite this container, causing the SSD to fall over the edge with a halfway-updated container and no way to roll it back (because the SSD hit its write limit).
That would definitely be a worst-case scenario. I suspect that if the SSD hits its write limit at any other time, it will become a read-only device, leaving that APFS container available. So you’ll be able to boot external devices, at least until some OS update forces a firmware upgrade (which will fail). But if the SSD is in read-only mode, that failure shouldn’t produce a bricked computer.
Right now, it’s far too early to know what will really happen, since M1 systems are all less than a year old. I hope Apple did some accelerated-wear testing to make sure that this scenario doesn’t brick customer computers, but if they have, they haven’t said anything to us about it.
To digress, slightly. News is out, of course regarding Apple’s T2 chip re: Monterey OS install.
Does this carry a version change, i.e. 12.1.x?
My system is running Monterey 12.1 Beta which I updated from 12.01 using the beta version that was available in the App Store (not via software update) just a day or two before Apple relabelled it, simply, Monterey.
I am writing this from my Monterey testing installation on a separate partition, which I quite easily also installed user account from my Big Sur partition, thanks Migration Assistant.
Software Update declares my Mac “is up to date – Mac OS Monterey beta 12.1”
If your Mac is configured for beta-track updates, Software Update will try to install the latest beta releases. This will continue until you explicitly choose to exit the beta program.
See: Beta program: Unenroll Your Devices
This won’t revert any beta software that’s already been installed, but you will no longer receive Beta updates. Instead, you’ll get the normal released updates, once they progress beyond what you already have installed.
With regard to the hub issue, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my old USB hub that I was using with my late 2013 MBP seems to work just fine in Monterey with my new MBP Pro M1 Pro (awkward to write Pro twice - what’s a good acronym?) using an inexpensive Thunderbolt-Ethernet adapter that includes 3 USB ports also. Ethernet also works fine.