Catastrophic Issue with M1 Big Sur 11.2. A Total Nightmare

I knew upgrading to M1 would have its growing pains. But never did I think it would be so bad that it would compromise my job and probably get me fired.

Last night my printer would not print an important work document. After reading into it I learned that there was an issue with 11.1 and I needed to update to 11.2 so it would work. Low and behold updating did work. Perfect.

Little did I know that going from 11.1 to 11.2 would break something else though. My Softraid driver that allows my OWC Thunder Bay 6 raid drive to mount for some reason doesn't work on 11.2. The Softraid tech support team told me its an apple issue with 11.2 blocking the driver and I must go to 11.1 to make it work. There is no way for them to even fix it to work on 11.2.

Now here is the massive problem. brace yourself.... Unlike intel Macs where it is incredibly easy to go back a version in your OS, something about M1 makes it virtually impossible to go back an OS version. After speaking on the phone with an Apple senior advisor for LITERALLY 2 hours, we had nothing. Even he was shocked and dumbfounded that there is literally no solution for me.

So here I am. Documenting a major issue. I love you apple and what you have done with M1 but right now boss is fumigating at me because I can't get him the files he needs and there's nothing I can do about it. We're talking about getting a drive to mount, not hacking into the NSA. This should have a simpler solution to this. The Apple Senior Advisor told me to wait for 11.3 or try and go buy another M1 Mac with a previous version of 11.1 installed on it.

There is no chain of explicative words I can shout into a pillow or personal property I can destroy to alleviate the frustration I am experiencing. I could lose my job over this.