Issues with macOS Ventura

I found a good deal on an almost maxed out Intel MacBook Air 2020 (Core i7-1060NG7 @ 1.20GHz, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) and set it up today. I figured, since it’s fully supported, I’d start this one off on Ventura (macOS 13) from day one. It came wiped to a fresh install of Monterey (macOS 12). First I tried to do the ⌘⌥R restore method to install the latest operating system, but every time after about a half hour or so I’d get an error -2005F error and could go no further. (A little digging suggests that that error is WiFi related? Wireless here isn’t awesome, I see 49 networks sitting in my living room, 21 of then 2.4 GHz, 28 in the 5 GHz band; there are no channels free from interference.) Tried both 2.4 and 5 GHz networks before giving up and completing the setup for Monterey, and then using Software Update to install Ventura.

This was a mistake. I had the same issue this user had, where most of the .pkg files I tried to install (e.g., OpenJDK8U-jdk_x64_mac_hotspot_8u345b01.pkg), just didn’t work. Like mnikec, doing a wipe-and-reinstall (without upgrading from Monterey) worked, every package I tried installed. To get the restore-from-Internet option working, I hooked up my Cable Matters USB-C hub with built-in Ethernet and did the install over wired Ethernet (the integrated NIC appears to be a Realtek RTL8153 - x0bda VendorID 0x8153 ProductID), which worked perfectly, no Ethernet driver installation required. Took about 2 hours to download and install everything on a freshly formatted SSD.

Once past those hurdles, so far I like it. All of my software stack seems to work (Office, Acrobat Pro, NetBeans, Eclipse, etc). The Core i7 is snappy and fast, feels much faster than the i5 in my other late 2020 MacBook Air. 

(And now I need to thin the herd. The 2015 MacBook 12" will be moving on to a new home, probably others as well. I’ll keep the 2015 Core i7 11" MacBook Airs, one’s in the conference room dedicated to Zoom and other virtual appearances, the other is just too cute (and already battered, so can be carried anywhere without any real fear) to give up. The 2012 and 2010 machines... Hmm. A lot of history there, and they don’t take up much space. But I’m definitely consolidating around USB-C devices I can recharge from easily sourced, cheap battery packs...)

Okay, back to work.

Edit: Well, I spoke a bit too soon. Although the restrictions have been around since the Mojave days (an OS I skipped; went straight from High Sierra to Big Sur), I’ve never been stymied like this before. Accessing a shell through Terminal, I couldn’t access my own Downloads directory! Attempts to do so ended like this:

Downloads % ls
ls: .: Operation not permitted

Following this tip, I enabled full disk access to Terminal, which seems to have addressed the issue:

 Some other niggles: Control panels and settings have been jumbled around, with apparently little rhyme or reason. Putting the Bluetooth menu in the menu bar has moved from the Bluetooth control panel to the Control Center panel, where you'll also find the control to determine when the Sound menu is displayed in the menu bar. Other menu bar items are buried, though; e.g., to get the keyboard input menu (with the handy emoji selector), it’s Keyboard -> Text Input -> Input Sources -> Edit -> Show Input menu in menu bar.

Power management has been changed up, too, and no longer offers a simple way to keep the display from sleeping. Looking at Jolt of Caffeine, I learned about /usr/bin/caffeinate which has a variety of cool options (and is bundled with the operating system). Looks like a lot of the utilities (e.g. KeepingYouAwake) that purport to have the same functionality, are just GUI wrappers around this existing utility.