As announced during this week’s Apple event, macOS Big Sur will be released today. I haven’t been using the betas this year since I really don’t have a need to develop for the Mac at the moment, but everything I hear about it doesn’t sound like it’s ready.

I’m a very slow upgrader of Mac operating systems. I wait as long as I possibly can, and usually until Xcode doesn’t work any longer with the previous operating system. The past 5 or so years of Mac upgrades have been increasingly buggy and always have an interruption to my productivity. I understand that the Mac isn’t as big or important as iOS, and that the system is much older, but I really wish Apple would take the care to make things stable before releasing them.

Why do we need new operating systems each year for the Mac? I think most people would be just fine with slower, more stable releases. This is especially true for a computing system that many people rely on for their work. This is a mature platform and doesn’t need near the iterations that the phones or tablets do.

That being said, Big Sur does look very nice. I like the design refresh from the screenshots I’ve seen and I think it’ll be a nice improvement when I upgrade next year.