Installing macOS 12 Monterey
I figured this would be an interesting post to quickly throw together after the train wreck that was installing Windows 11. Having been busy lately, I actually didn’t even realize when Monterey released on October 25th; instead, I happened to get a notice on the following Wednesday informing me that it was available. That in itself is a nice leap forward from Windows 11; my device actually just told me that the update was available rather than forcing me to be aware and go hunting for it.
The process of installing the update continued the same trend of being significantly better than Microsoft’s rollout considering that Monterey was available for download within the same Preferences UI that I normally use for installing macOS updates.
While the download itself didn’t actually take 5 hours like the screenshot estimates, it did take about an hour. An hour to download 12 GB of content is pretty terrible and well below my 200 Mbps connection speed. Kind of like how Apple’s online store always seems to collapse under the weight of the traffic when new devices go up for sale, you’d think they could spend some of their $600 billion in value on spinning up some additional update servers or something when a new OS becomes available. It’s also worth mentioning that while this did take longer to download than Windows 11 — only looking from the time once I finally got Windows 11 to start downloading — I have no idea how large the Windows 11 download was. I’d guess it’s larger than the 12 GB for Monterey, but that’s just a guess since Microsoft doesn’t actually give that information in their download UI.
Once the download finished and I rebooted my machine, I went off to read for a while as the installation went through all of its steps. On the whole, I think it took somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 minutes to complete. Just as was the case with Windows 11, I’m not exactly sure since the computer was at the desk behind me while I sat in the living room on my iPad.
After the installation, I didn’t have to jump through a bunch of setup like I did with Windows. I was just dropped at my familiar operating system with some new perks.
Monterey doesn’t feel dramatically different from Big Sur, which could be either good or bad depending on your outlook. One of the immediate changes, similar to what happened recently with iOS, is that the system now has a prominent indicator in the upper-right corner of the screen informing you of when the microphone is in use:
Clicking on it will provide additional details, namely which application is actively using the mic.
The other big different I noticed is that iCloud Private Relay is now available within macOS. I’ve left Private Relay enabled on both my phone and iPad since upgrading their software a few months ago. I’ve run into startlingly few issues with it on those devices, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be quite as robust yet on macOS.
Through the course of the day, I’ll periodically find pages simply not loading in Safari while Private Relay is enabled (yes, it only works on Safari.) Toggling Private Relay off will always fix the problem… and usually immediately toggling it back on will still work. Connections running through it just seem to periodically drop, and a disconnect/reconnect cycle kicks things back into gear. I’m not overly concerned since I’d say the service currently provides much greater value on iOS, which I’m more likely to be using on a random WiFi network than macOS. For times when I’m on the go with my laptop and Private Relay isn’t being reliable enough, I also still have a ProtonVPN subscription. I do hope that they drop the “beta” moniker soon, though, and make things a bit more consistent with it.
Originally published at https://looped.network on November 6, 2021.
