This week I went ahead and upgraded one of my machines to the final release of macOS Monterey 12.0.1; while I was at it, I also upgraded Xcode to 13.1 final.

The machine is an M1-based MacMini. The process of installing the upgrade felt faster than previous versions. I would estimate I was up and running again within an hour. Before installing, I created a USB bootable installer as I always do for future installs/repairs I wrote a blog post on that, which you can find here.

Now that the OS had been updated, I started the Xcode upgrade from the App Store. This is never fast and always seems to take way longer than it should. So I left the machine to perform that update and let it do whatever it needed after the OS upgrade.

A couple of hours later, everything was done. Since this was an upgrade, I feared the worst when it came to all the apps I have installed, OS extensions, permissions, and all the fun stuff that I usually have to go through and fix or allow permissions again.

But to my surprise, there was very little to do. A few things needed fixing to start at login. Other than that, everything appears to be just fine. I have been using the machine for a few days now and have not hit an issue using my daily driver software.

So maybe this was a good year to upgrade and not have to deal with issues; fingers crossed that it continues to be that way, even iCloud seems happy for once.