CanuckMac

Apple keeps riding that shark it jumped on in 2016 with its godawful butterfly keyboard MacBook Pros. Next, they soldered everything, making upgrades or component replacement impossible: effectively making their computers disposable and much more expensive to add RAM and larger storage, as that has to be preconfigured. Apple upgrade components can cost 3 times the price of buying the stuff separately and later when upgrading as needed on Retina and previous laptops.

Now, the company is effectively killing bootable backups, which have saved my bacon many, many times, most recently when Big Sur hosed FileVault, preventing OS updates. So, I thought "erase and restore" from CCC or SuperDuper. But, no, that does not work under Big Sur.

I actually had to use Windows (!!) to retrieve my critical user files after restoring an old Mojave backup, including my up-to-date Outlook mail, from the (thankfully unencypted) Carbon Copy Cloner backup; Apple hides the user volume Library when Big Sur is backed up, even if the drive is opened by Mojave or Catalina. But I can see and recover these files with Windows and MacDrive. (Huh?)

Apple is obviously thinking: "with a failed soldered SSD, people can't restore stuff, so why bother with a bootable backup?" But what if the OS just gets corrupted, as mine did? It took me a week to recover.

And, no, clunky all-or-nothing TimeMachine is not the answer.

I'm back on Mojave, and both my now-no-fan-noise MBPro (unlike it was under Big Sur) and I are as happy as clams.

I just ordered a mint refurbed mid-2015 MacBook Pro for $800, the best Apple laptop of all time & the final one with Jobs' fingerprints all over it. I'll be using that and Mojave (or Catalina if forced to) until the wheels fall off. The M1 mini I tried out has already been sent back.

"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." - Scotty on Star Trek III after disabling a more advanced pursuit ship.