Urgent: macOS Big Sur Announcement
With the recent release of macOS Big Sur, faculty, staff, and students alike have asked us about updating to Big Sur. Big Sur is the first major macOS update in many years, so it may be tempting to update right away. But, the bigger the update, the bigger the initial problems, and right now Big Sur has plenty of them…

As a department, we are strongly recommending not updating to macOS Big Sur at this time. Departmental laptops currently have the update blocked and we highly discourage anyone with a personal laptop from updating until Big Sur is further tested and the initial bugs are worked out. If you choose to do so, know that you do so at your own risk, as we are currently not supporting Big Sur as an IT department.

A few notes on Big Sur compatibility that we’ve seen firsthand:

On some older MacBook Pros, especially 2013/2014 models, the Big Sur update bricks your computer completely, to the point that you only get an unresponsive black screen when you turn it on. See here for details.
Cisco AnyConnect VPN has been causing kernel panics on multiple departmental test Macbook Pros.
If you’re currently on Mojave, you should know that Catalina and Big Sur have both stopped support for any 32bit pieces of software. There is no workaround, short of installing Mojave on a virtual machine and virtualizing the app.
There are many untested pieces of software used at a departmental level in Trinity A&S. Considering that finals are right around the corner, if you update and find yourself unable to run pieces of software essential to your final exams, we will be unable to assist.