An annoying issue for me is the appearance of keyboard shortcuts in the menu bar. Whether active or not, all keyboard shortcuts appear dimmed. When I first saw it, I thought it was a setting I had inadvertently triggered. I even reinstalled Big Sur to “fix” it. Nope, it’s a new “feature” which I can’t stand. 
Like others, I don’t like the reduced handle size for window dragging either.
Norm in Portland, Oregon
Agree about 2. And I use Reminders and Calendar items and don’t have them sorted out with Big Sur on MBP, Catalina on iMac and iOS.
I find the flattening of the title areas in Finder, Mail and Safari annoying. Especially seeing which tab is active in Safari. Was already a bit difficult, now more so.
I can’t think of any interface improvements I’ve noticed. I’m using both Big Sur and Catalina and don’t have any wow moments using Big Sur. But I’m pretty much only using Big Sur for reading newspaper and blogs. Real work such as it is is on Catalina. Not rushing to change since it still works and I’m using apps that may be slow to update. But when the next round of Silicon comes out I’ll be there.
Not sure if mentioned elsewhere:
Biggest annoyance for me is the failure of app validation for third party applications. When I first launch a third party appliacation, there is no response for quite a few seconds, then a failure dialog, along with a crash report. Subsequent launches of the applicartion will work, until you reboot. This occurs on most of my third party software.
I’m running MacOS 11.1 and iOS 14.2. I skipped Catalina. Now that iPhone is managed through Finder rather than iTunes, when I plug my phone into USB I twice get the mandatory finder pop-up message attached. The sync then proceeds without me clicking OK, but seems to bog down and stop. Clicking OK in the pop-ups seems to have no effect. I am now updating to iOS 14.3 to see if it clears the issue.
Clicking on the “?” mark in the pop-up message just gives me a blank help window.
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 told to wait for the next Big Sur update.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Apple Releases Apple Fitness+, macOS 11.1 Big Sur, iOS 14.3, iPadOS 14.3, watchOS 7.2, and tvOS 14.3
That’s definitely not typical, though I have no idea why it might be happening on your Mac. :-(
I think Simon mentioned this*, but please don’t just gripe here. Feedback - macOS - Apple will let Apple know directly that people are annoyed.
*And good on the forum software for confirming this!
Big Sur EMAIL has icons that one cannot see without a magnifying glass & other places in OS the fonts keep getting smaller and smaller. What do we have to do to get Apple from making things so small?
• Can’t get rid of (or reposition) filter icon in Mail toolbar. WTH?
• Translucent menu bar. Yes, you can get rid of translucency, but only by a) making menu bar ugly and b) also affecting Dock
• Active/inactive window changed color. Used to be darker window bar meant active, inactive windows were lighter. Now it’s exactly the other way around. Is there any added benefit to justify having to retrain my muscle memory to the opposite?
BTW, for those who prefer a path at the top of their Finder windows rather than having it displayed at the bottom, this still works:
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES
Another one, although I believe this one might be related to newer Safari versions rather than Big Sur itself.
• The “Bookmarks” button for the Safari toolbar does not as you would assume go to the bookmarks page (as in cmd-opt-b), it toggles the favorite bar (as in shift-cmd-b). If that’s the desired behavior, the button never should have been labeled “Bookmarks”, but rather “Show/Hide Favorites”, the same wording used for the Tab Overview button.
Hello Alan,
Additions to this thread seem to have stopped coming. Anyway to encourage folks to keep adding items?
I’m getting ready to update from macOS 10 to 11 and I’m interested in learning from the wisdom of the crowd.
I think you’ve done it 
Small annoyances in Big Sur: Playing music to my headphone jack, the first couple/few seconds are louder than they should be, then it returns to the correct volume. I had hoped 11.2 would fix, but no luck. Dragging windows is a drag. I’ve found some consistent draggable spots but they’re far smaller than in Mojave. The hide-and-seek stuff is annoying but you find them eventually. Ally-ally-in-free. Photos: when I try to add a face it can’t find the existing faces for most of my high frequency People.
I searched for “contrast” and “brightness” but found nothing, so I’ll mention it. I have an external display, and when I connect the new MBA (necessarily running Big Sur), the screen is significantly dimmer and has much less contrast that when I connect the old MB running Mojave. Since I go switch the computers, I don’t want to adjust any setting on the external display. Am I correct that I could calibrate (System Preferences > Displays > Color > Calibrate) one or both Macs to get them to look more similar on the external display?
Perhaps related to this, the MBA seems to have less contrast on the internal display, too, and I had assumed that Big Sur is intended to have less contrast. Can anyone confirm or deny this assumption? (I have turned on System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Display > Increase contrast, but I have not moved the slider Display contrast, because that gets ugly fast.)
Upgraded from Mojave.
The active window and passive windows are similar colours.
Find My app used to work as a widget in Mojave, but has to be launched as an app in Big Sur (maybe also Catalina).
The OS doesn’t seem slower. But activating 1Password using command-\ is noticeably slower. Sometimes I catch myself pressing command-\ again as if the first press didn’t work. Default Folder X is very slow to activate, which is most annoying.
Shared iCloud Drive folders is OK, but just not as good as Dropbox.
2017 MacBook Pro
Check for apps doing lots of I/O or using lots of CPU. My 2016 MBP activating 1Password using command-\ is much less than a second and your machine should probably be as fast or faster.
For me it’s my command option P shortcut that goes directly to the Print to PDF key shortcut I added. The print to pdf button in the print dialog that gives you the pop up menu works quickly but the shortcut is slow…no idea why. Worked fine up through Catalina.
My solution to add a ‘⌘-P’ keyboard shortcut under All Applications pointing to ‘Save as PDF’ in the print dialog. Some macOS version ago, Apple had ‘Save as PDF…’ in the print dialog so I had to edit the shortcut to match the new changed dialog. So far in Big Sur, I have not noticed any significant delay. The best part is not having to scroll a list and hope to land on the desired choice. Caveat - this may not always work if the document being printed is in Full Screen view.
‘⌘-P’, wait for print dialog, ‘⌘-P’ is only a minor addition to muscle memory use and requires no hand motion to other keys.
