EtreCheck reports a kernel panic today. Also, I can't resintall macOS Monterey.
I tried to reinstall macOS Monterey. I get a screen that shows two volumes: Macintosh HD and Preboot. I click on the HD one, and it says, "The volume cannot be downgraded." Say what? So I can't reinstall macOS if I've done macOS updates? And what about the Preboot volume? What is that? It said 0 KB available. Doesn't sound good!
And about the kernel panic. The machine did freeze strangely. Started with Firefox, I think. I had dozens of tabs open! I suppose that doesn't help things. Never ever got red in the memory pressure graph. The beach ball came on and first spun only over FF, but then spun over everything. The ball often froze and stuttered as it was "trying" to spin. I had seen this before and thought it was from Final Cut Pro 10.6.8. So I downgraded to 10.6.6. Things seemed to stabilize until today.
I was going to reinstall macOS Monterey anyway, as I've had other strange things happen from time to time: Rarely the tabs or header of Finder or the main Mail window would turn red! Often the Time Machine panel suddenly hides itself under everything else. Sometimes it shows strange things. So I thought it's time. But I can't downgrade from 12.6.8 to 12? I have to erase the drive and restore from Time Machine? That'll take many hours! Even First Aid runs take about 3 hours, due to having to check about 2 dozen "snapshots."
Another reason to reinstall the OS was the FCLM (Final Cut Library Manager) app doesn't work right. So I wanted to see if a simple reinstall would fix it before upgrading to Ventura. But given all this, what to do? Should I upgrade to Ventura and hope for no more kernel panics? Bring the Mac in to the local Apple Store for them to diagnose the hardware because of the one or more kernel panics? Erase the disk, reinstall macOS, do all the updates, then restore all my data from Time Machine? It'll likely take many, many hours! (I have two slow TM drives and Backblaze for offsite backing up.)
The machine is barely a year old!
EtreCheck report attached.
macOS 12.6.8 (Monterey)
24" M1 4-port 2021 iMac
TIA!
iMac (M1, 2021)