External boot disks still don’t work properly with M1 Macs When running Big Sur 11.1 on an M1 Mac, making a bootable external disk is entirely unpredictable. Some users seem to have all the luck, and the first external SSD they connect to their M1 Mac works fine with the Big Sur installer, and they don’t look back. For others, the macOS installer just can’t do the trick, and a high-quality SSD is left unbootable. Now that Big Sur can be updated to 11.2, I’ve been looking at how that affects external boot disks, and whether it finally enables them all to work. However, far from 11.2 solving this problem, it actually makes it worse.