Note to self: If a regular macOS update does not work for some reason, try downloading it from the App Store. Instead of an incremental installer you will receive the full installer which is roughly four times as large however there are two advantages there:
- it works
- you can copy it around to other macbooks that need updates
Downloading now and we’ll see what happens. Be right back…
Well. That was painful. The installer causes a kernel panic. That’s a problem. Kudos by the way for Apple being able to recover from a failing OS installation. Anyway after some thinking I concluded that it might be a good thing to remove anything that installs kernel extensions. So Little Snitch and Parallels and iStat Menus and Intel processor gadget applications were uninstalled. And indeed this turned out to be a good hunch. Big Sur 11.1 installed without problems after having removed those applications. After installing I re-installed all of them with the exception of the Intel processor gadget. I really have to see if that is going to work under this macOS version. And do I really need it?