MacOS – Big sur 11.2.2 very lagging on 2019 Macbook Pro

big surcatalinamacos

I have a late 2019 macbook pro (the base model). I've been running Catalina until yesterday when I upgraded to Big Sur 11.2.2. It's noticeably laggy. Has anyone experienced this? I'm not sure if 11.2.1 was laggy, so I was considering downgrading. Does anyone know how I can downgrade to 11.2.1, and possibly back to Catalina?

Best Answer

Here is how I would back date a newer Big Sur system to 11.2.1

If you have a Time Machine Backup from before you ran the upgrade. That means you can erase the Mac - get the installer for 11.2.1 and then erase / install in a fairly straight-forward manner.

Once 11.2.1 is running, migrate data from the Time Machine snapshot or backup interval before the upgrade (or whatever your custom backup procedure entails). If you don't have a backup - make one now so you can hand migrate some of the easy apps and files that are compatible with a downgrade - some apps like Photos databases don't necessarily work backwards so you'd need to handle those errors and issues one by one.

Also - Catalina may have made a snapshot of your system that’s usable as a backup, so you would just boot to recovery and restore the system to that shapshot and not even need to worry about an installer.

And in macOS High Sierra or later, another snapshot is saved before installing any macOS update.

If you need to make a bootable 11.2.1 installer, here's how:

  1. Delete any Install macOS Big Sur apps you have in /Applications (or copy them to an external drive)
  2. Open terminal.app or another tool to get to the command line and issue this command

softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 11.2.1

Once the installer is there, follow this guide to make an installable USB for 11.2.1

Then follow this guide to erase install.

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