After a second disaster (PROBABLY USER INDUCED) my mini is back from the Genius Bar fully reloaded and running macOS 12 (Monterey) on an internal drive labeled "untitled". It is not fully reloaded because I am once again having to trudge through upgrading and reinstalling the same kernel extensions that gave so much aggravation in Big Sur. There are only a few, but although they were working in macOS 11 none of them survived the upgrade to macOS 12. Fortunately the developers already have Monterey compatible beta versions, but the upgrade process is proving annoying.

Utility applications are notoriously finicky about working with early beta OS versions and that is proving true with Monterey. Surprisingly even Apple's own Software Technology Preview had to be updated to be fully compatible with Monterey and although I can't verify this, it appears the Monterey version (STP Release 127 (Safari 15.0, WebKit 17612.1.18.11.3) is won't run on Big Sur. The implication of course being there are significant {i]under the hood[/i] changes that are not readily apparent at the GUI level. I was also surprised that Rosetta did not survive the update and had to be reinstalled (instead I elected to replace the single app that does not have either universal code or an ARM only version.)

So far the third party app issues I have encountered are:
  • Gemini 2: still running with Rosetta and on my list to be replaced (Suggestions welcome)
  • SoftRAID: there is compatible 6.1 beta but the kernel extensions are proving troublesome to upgrade/install
  • SoundSource; there is a kernel extension update, but it reported compatibility issues. (Monterey has built-in support for at least a portion of SoundSource's functionality)
  • BarTender: There is a Bartender 4 beta that is Monterey compatible
  • MacCleanse: Version not tested with Monterey and won't run
  • Carbon Copy Cloner: Version 6.0.2 beta is compatible
  • SpamSieve upgrade to 2.9.44 required for Mail 15 compatibility

I have not checked every one of the 214 apps on my system so there my well be other hidden surprises, but that is the lot as of 20210705 16:38 CDT.
Not bad at all for an initial public beta.

Last edited by joemikeb; 07/05/21 09:38 PM.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

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