Monterey, the next major release of macOS is being released today along with the first day of shipping of the new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros. As in the past, this is our “think twice before upgrading” note. Compared to the Big Sur release last year, the Monterey upgrade is a bit more low-key but software compatibility with the apps you use each day in your business is our primary concern. So as always, check before you upgrade.
The good news is that some major applications used by our clients have already stated they are fully compatible (Box.com), and others that are testing have been fairly stable, and they will be fully compatible shortly after the public release (Microsoft). In our experience, Adobe and FileMaker tend to lag for a few weeks after the release of the latest macOS and this time around doesn’t seem to be any different. There are lots of threads in their forums of users testing and finding issues, and as of this morning, nothing official has been announced on either of their websites.
If your office is already running macOS Big Sur systems without issue, then you will likely be able to upgrade to macOS Monterey shortly. However, if you haven’t made that jump yet, it may be a bigger move for your team. That is because Big Sur took several major steps forward in the macOS foundation in terms of security structure, and applications had to be upgraded to ensure compatibility. macOS Monterey builds on those same features.
As system administrators, we’re excited that the upgrade to Monterey will allow our clients to import most, if not all, of their existing Apple hardware fleet into Apple Business Manager, a free tool Apple offers for businesses to manage their Apple assets. More on that in a forthcoming post!
We’ve been getting a lot of questions about the new MacBook Pro models that were announced last week, and those will require the use of macOS Monterey. That means we will need to dive into the ecosystems of tech in your business, and ensure the deployment of these new systems will be a positive experience for your team. Like many of you, we’ve been holding off on purchasing new systems for a few months in anticipation of this hardware release. And like some of you, we jumped at the chance and ordered a few for our team. As we add these into our fleet, we’ll collect impressions and experiences from our team and post a review.
Lastly, because upgrading to a new OS prematurely can have a negative impact for your team, we will be taking steps for our Managed clients to block the macOS Monterey upgrade in the short term, so it can’t be accidentally installed.
Update: In our forthcoming post talking about our experience adopting Apple Silicon into our ecosystem, we will be addressing how some software developers don’t expect to have Apple Silicone native apps until 2022. Note that Dropbox is one of them, and while the app will run through Rosetta, it has a negative impact on the system overall.
