macOS 13.1 Ventura: There are still bugs in many areas

Users of macOS 13 aka Ventura have reported a whole host of bugs that can disrupt daily life with the current Mac OS released in October. The first major update to macOS 13.1, released in December, only partially helped here.

System Preferences, Spotlight, Finder

With Ventura, Apple mainly operated product maintenance, but also introduced innovations in various fields. These are sometimes drastic: System settings have been changed as a central function of the entire operating system. The look is now more reminiscent of the iPad, but it hasn’t necessarily become simpler or more straightforward. There are weird graphical glitches—for example, you have to enter your Apple ID from the right and some menu items remain blank—incorrect indications of software updates (which are sometimes missing), search issues, and unreliable information for background apps.

When mounting external media, the system sometimes freezes because Spotlight seems to be working erratically – this actually affected macOS 12 aka Monterey, but seems to be worse in Ventura. Ejecting external media sometimes doesn’t work reliably, and Time Machine drives sit idle for a long time because the system assumes they haven’t been cleaned yet. There are sometimes launch issues in the Finder (sidebar missing, clicks on windows not registering). Sometimes wrong codes are displayed. Sometimes it seems that the save dialog is being saved to the wrong folder.

The backbone of the app: Apple Mail and Safari

There are also reports of difficulties with Apple Mail. Here the search sometimes loses the desired folder, there are irregular freezes when switching to the application and various paste errors are reported – the application does not adhere to plain text / rich text. There are also occasional interruptions when switching between messages. Safari, on the other hand, says that sometimes a website that uses JavaScript heavily can slow down the entire browser. The only remedy here is to turn off JavaScript.

All in all, given the bugs, Ventura seems surprisingly immature for an operating system with a long history. In addition, as always, there has been a long beta phase since the summer, during which Apple has already managed to fix many bugs. All that remains is to wait for macOS 13.2, which is likely to appear in the coming weeks. It’s also helpful to look at the various error lists to see if a “special” error is included. For example, developer Michael Tsai He posted an overview on his blogSome of which are mentioned in this post. As an error collection point is also a file Reddit Megathread on macOS 13.1 Worth a look.

(BA)