14 ms·

Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

263 points by _fs 7y ago

thewhitetulip 7y ago
The biggest issue I have with Mac upgrades is that for me, it doesn't cache the upgrade. My internet is weak, not as great in speed and bandwidth as US so it downloads 4gb and then fails. Then it starts from 0 sgain. I expected Apple of all companies to cache downloads. Frankly, it caches only the first 500MB. I do not know why. Any workarounds?
- tcoff91 7y ago
  I think you might be able to use the Apple developer downloads site to get the whole installer
- sgt 7y ago
  Frankly nowadays (on most systems) you need a decent connection. I would perhaps connect from another connection (if you have the opportunity) for the download itself.
  - jaynetics 7y ago
    If 25M people are eligible for this upgrade and it fails in the middle for only 1%, that is 1 Petabyte transferred in vain. Not to mention man hours wasted. Just to save a few lines of code.
    - sgt 7y ago
      You're missing the point. It's about the way you treat people and also shaming a particular individual on a corporate blog.
  - thewhitetulip 7y ago
    I don't have broadband connection. I use mobile data.
- cerberusss 7y ago
  If you have another (24/7 powered-on) Mac in the household, it can act as a cache: https://hashtagwifi.com/blog/apple-content-caching-and-you-setup-and-advanced-options https://hashtagwifi.com/blog/apple-content-caching-and-you-s...
- jasonrm 7y ago
  You might want to give "macOS Patcher" a try. http://dosdude1.com/software.html http://dosdude1.com/software.html It's main purpose is to allow for running macOS on unsupported Macs, but it also can download the original unmodified version. I've only used the unpatched Mojave version myself and I have no idea how well it supports slow/unstable connections.
  - simongr3dal 7y ago
    I've had good experiences using this to download the installer and install macOS on external storage.
- satysin 7y ago
  I use the installer download script from https://github.com/munki/macadmin-scripts https://github.com/munki/macadmin-scripts Has always worked fine.
  - thewhitetulip 7y ago
    Thank you
sgt 7y ago
I've actually kept postponing upgrading to Catalina (I'm still on Mojave) because I want to keep iTunes. I have a lot of stuff there I don't really want scattered all over the place, and I always felt iTunes was underrated.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  How are you going to solve this? I'm in a similar position, having several music apps I bought a while ago that won't work in Catalina. But I have to upgrade because it's my development machine. So far my plan is to upgrade my MacBook Pro to continue develop software, and leave my Mac Pro with Mojave to compose music. I wonder how others deal with this.
  - Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
    Similar. Current plan is to reluctantly upgrade my newer Mac mini for Xcode, and keep the old one for Illustrator CS6. A royal pain, though, especially because the old one is just that bit too slow.
  - Lammy 7y ago
    Does the license allow you to virtualize Mojave as long as it’s on Mac hardware?
  - newscracker 7y ago
    See my comment above [1] with a link to a Macrumors forum thread that allows you to run iTunes and older versions of iTunes on Catalina and Mojave. It might probably break at some point in the future, but people seem to be managing so far. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326724
- narenkeshav 7y ago
  Really wish there was an open source music player similar to the OLD iTunes. It was a joy, back then.
  - 7y ago
atonse 7y ago
I have heard enough horror stories about stability and security prompts that it’s the first macOS release I’ll probably skip. Can’t afford to lose a day or more of productivity to fiddling with my OS.
- cerberusss 7y ago
  You do you, but the relentless flow of horror stories didn't stop me from upgrading and it was flawless for me. I'd recommend reading these critical pieces and seeing whether any of it actually applies to you.
  - llarsson 7y ago
    Very difficult to know if it is going to apply to one's own system. With updates apparently sometimes crashing after being only partially applied, even the most diligent research into application-specific "will I be able to run XYZ after upgrading" might not be able to save you from having to reinstall from scratch. This is the kind of low-quality handling of software updates that I never imagined coming from Apple. I upgraded when it came out, had no issues, and only a few prompts. Because the machine was entirely new to me anyway (inherited MBP2016), I couldn't imagine having anything to lose. But on my older machine? Still have not upgraded. Don't see a reason to, until they've ensured higher quality.
    - cerberusss 7y ago
      But your actual experience is that it worked fine, right? I have the idea that there's currently an atmosphere where it's fashionable to repeat other people's bad experiences. Regardless of one's own experience.
      - ckrailo 7y ago
        Nah, it's pretty bad.
  - newscracker 7y ago
    The security prompts apply for everyone who has and uses more than a few applications. There is no scope for individual differences there except for the number of prompts.
chalst 7y ago
Also worth reading John Gruber's complaints, over and above bugs: > But I don’t know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed security design of Catalina. Not one. Every single expert user I know is annoyed. That is a bad place for MacOS to be. MacOS 10.16 needs a serious course correction to fix this, and if 10.16 goes the opposite way — growing even more heavy-handed in restricting professional Mac users from just using their machines as they want and expect to — I genuinely fear for the future of the Mac as a platform for serious computer users. https://daringfireball.net/2020/02/my_2019_apple_report_card https://daringfireball.net/2020/02/my_2019_apple_report_card
- spoondan 7y ago
  There’s an important point to be made here about the gap between theoretical and practical security. Overly elaborate password policies (excessive complexity demands, passwords expiring, no reusing last five passwords) end up causing annoyed users to make bad decisions that compromise password security. Similarly, an excess of popups doesn’t increase security. It annoys users to the point they stop thinking about individual security decisions. There’s an important intersection of security research and HCI that doesn’t get discussed as much as it needs to be.
  - SkyMarshal 7y ago
    >Overly elaborate password policies (excessive complexity demands, passwords expiring, no reusing last five passwords) end up causing annoyed users to make bad decisions that compromise password security. Similarly, an excess of popups doesn’t increase security. It annoys users to the point they stop thinking about individual security decisions. It's particularly annoying b/c there's a subset of craftsmen developers who pay close attention to this problem, who realize these cures are worse than the disease, and who reverted years ago to not using these flawed security patterns. Many here on HN, for example. And then there are Apple engineers who seem to be so far behind the curve that they're just now discovering and implementing patterns that others not only discovered and tested years ago, but discarded years ago. It's like corporate 9-to-5'ers with no pride of craftsmanship or motivation to stay current with their field made these decisions. Either that or clueless management ordered it, which in any other company besides Apple would be my first guess.
athiercelin 7y ago
I've heard these upgrade stories since the 90s (on Mac). It got better a few years back, and it's back again at hit or miss but in the end it's like backup strategies: it's basic knowledge at this point but still needs to be repeated. If your mac is a production machine, don't jump on any of the updates, decide if you need the update then check your programs one by one. If you can, pop into the Apple Store to test the system. I'm not defending Apple, I'm not victim-blaming, it's just an advice to avoid the misery of going past the point of no return.
- neurostimulant 7y ago
  Yup, this is pretty much what I do regardless of operating system. Just don't upgrade to the latest major version immediately after release. Wait around a bit to see if other people reported any major issue, and then wait until those issue fixed before upgrading.
- cosmiccatnap 7y ago
  I get that, and everyone in this thread knows that, but the issue is that alot of devices come with it and it is branded as "stable" Windows and Linux have a better excuse they have to support thousands upon thousands of devices and configurations but for apple to have this many issues with the hand full of pre built systems they have, well, it should be perfectly understandable to ask why a company with this much time and money would release something in this state especially when they had a beta. For most of us it's not a big deal but plenty of people have to start writing their app and testing on this and for them it's pretty confusing and you have to ask yourself how it got this way when there shouldn't have been any reason for it to.
ble52 7y ago
Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).
- askafriend 7y ago
  It's been completely fine for me. On both my personal and development machines.
- rado 7y ago
  No breaking bugs here.
- daveFNbuck 7y ago
  I haven't had any issues, and I appreciate being asked for permissions rather than assuming them. It makes me feel safer even if I haven't yet encountered a situation where I said no.
  - markandrewj 7y ago
    I agree. I think this was one of the motivating factors in the change. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/25/macwoes_google_chrome_update/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/25/macwoes_google_chro...
- gempir 7y ago
  No Problem here. I use for work and personal. Got zero issues that I can think off that weren't there in other versions
- fredsted 7y ago
  Not sure what the issue is either, once you add the necessary permissions for your apps, it doesn't ask again. Only complaint is Apple seem to ignore long-standing bugs that have been there for years, like monitors switching around every time you dock your MacBook. They should make a Snow Leopard-like release and clean out their bug tracker.
narenkeshav 7y ago
I use Unity3D and everytime there is a new macOS update, I always procrastinate it for a year at least. This year around, I was very tempted to update it, early last week. Looking at this feed, I ain't going to do it. I have an iOS app to publish & can't do anything stupid.
- davnicwil 7y ago
  I have a similar attitude. At the end of the day, MacOS updates have zero chance of helping me get work done faster, yet they have low but non-trivial chance of halting progress on work for a few hours due to obscure issues. There just seems no upside to upgrading - I just wait until either I'm forced to or starting a completely new project just to pay off a tech debt of sorts. I'll caveat this by saying I don't work in the Apple ecosystem so don't have any dependencies there, the tools I run are orthogonal to MacOS specific features, so I don't really care about them per se.
  - riffraff 7y ago
    this, a hundred times. I stayed on snow leopard for years, and I can barely notice anything better in Mojave, and about nothing in Catalina either. On the other hand, the weather widgets in the dashboard have now stopped working, and nobody seems to care, because that's not a cool feature anymore.
- appstorelottery 7y ago
  Me too, I've been using Unity for over 10 years. Having said that, I simultaneously develop on Mac & PC and right now don't have an iOS project - so I took the leap. No issues with Catalina with Unity. However there are a few other minor annoyances; finder seems a bit unstable with network drives (force restart is your friend), time machine corrupts NAS backups, and the occasional mess-up with my dual monitor setup. Other than that it's been fine FYI.
- jeffhuys 7y ago
  I had to install Mojave on another partition and I dual-boot to that if I need to use Unity. But the last time I used it was about 3 months ago, Unity might have gotten a few updates in the meantime.
auggierose 7y ago
Yeah, there's been some pain to upgrade to Catalina, but for me as a developer it was worth it, just because of Project Catalyst. Also, they were making some serious (and necessary) changes to the iCloud / File API, and I would have been very surprised if that went without lots of bugs ... To be honest, the transition went much smoother than I expected.
- galad87 7y ago
  10.15 beta shipped with a new iCloud implemented with NSFileProvider. But it was buggy, so they reverted to the old implementation for the final release.
- newscracker 7y ago
  Project Catalyst trades off some developer pain for a few thousand or tens of thousands of developers with pain imposed on millions or tens of millions of users. A rushed and half baked system that breaks Mac conventions isn’t worth it for the users. Not now. It could turn out to be something worthwhile next year or the year after.
joelrunyon 7y ago
Still holding off on this. Is the consensus to just keep waiting for the next one to drop?
- ssijak 7y ago
  Let me count the votes and I'll let you know...
- Spacemolte 7y ago
  That's what i usually do. I'm only on catalina now because i got a new macbook and it came preinstalled.
- newscracker 7y ago
  Unless the next release announced in WWDC 2020 is one that clearly says it’s about stability and is low on new features, I’ll be holding off on any upgrades. Mojave will have security updates for another year or so.
checker659 7y ago
I used to be a huge fan of Dashboard. Why they had to remove it is beyond me.
- mantap 7y ago
  It was theoretically replaced by notification center widgets, but in reality it was replaced by smartphones. All the little apps I used to have on dashboard, like the weather, are now things I check on my phone.
mistahenry 7y ago
I was already using zsh and somehow the MacOS upgrade path for making zsh the new default shell deleted my shell history. This was a short term blow to productivity since I had only made external notes on about half the difficult command line tasks I’d completed since getting this MacBook in 2017. How do people generally go about backing up this file? Or do most people not
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  I use several tabs and histories override each other, meaning I could never count on a command being present in the history. I’ve always been told an experienced dev has a folder with txt notes, so that is what I did.
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure that you can configure zsh to write to zsh_history every command to prevent this
    - catalogia 7y ago
      setopt inc_append_history
      - DelightOne 7y ago
        Thank you! I did not know that this option exists!
- javagram 7y ago
  > How do people generally go about backing up this file? Or do most people not If you use Time Machine it should be backed up. I have two hard drives I rotate on and off my computer regularly for Time Machine for redundancy, it’s always worked well so far.
rcarmo 7y ago
I’ve put off upgrading until (at least) the Mail issues are fixed. I have zero trust that Apple is even prioritizing those kinds of fixes, and simply can’t risk the disruption of having my machine not work in some subtly critical way. (In contrast, my Windows machines are stubbornly reliable, even the one running Insider builds. Which is a wild inversion of the reasons I started https://taoofmac.com https://taoofmac.com 16 years ago...)
SkyMarshal 7y ago
I have a 2013 MacBook that is my main work computer when not at home on my desktop workstation. Years ago I learned to disable automatic system updates and to stay 1 major OS version behind. Let the enthusiasts, fanboys and early adopter pawns work out all the bugs in the current OS X version, install it only when the next version nears or launches.
anoncow 7y ago
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250719221 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250719221 Thread on Catalina bricking Macbooks.
- cannam 7y ago
  My god, the rudeness of some of the defensive replies on there. If I was in that situation, with an expensively broken computer and no help from anyone, and someone with no experience of it kept harrying me in that way, well... I'd be so livid I could barely type.
tannhaeuser 7y ago
Even if I wanted to upgrade my old Mini (by having a new OS on an external HD), Mojave and Catalina won't let me because required APFS support for EFI comes only as part of the 6GB Mojave (or Catalina) download/install, rather than as separately downloadable BIOS upgrade. Even bought a flash drive and ordered to have Mojave installer copied to it at an Apple retailer only to find out that it doesn't work like that anymore. After many years of good use in the 2010s, for me the Mac has lost it's practical side where you could use disk target mode, boot from external HD, etc. Edit: 2000s not 2010s
- newscracker 7y ago
  Someone somewhere must have faced the same issue as you. I’d suggest searching on Reddit and the Macrumors forums. Worst case, you can install Linux and continue using it (though the experience may not be the same in many ways).
  - tannhaeuser 7y ago
    Re installing Linux: I did that many years ago already ;) I used to enjoy an alternative Unix laptop provider and hate to see Apple fade away as an option. Regarding searching reddit and co, I briefly did, but then thought if I have to go to forums etc., I can just as well run Linux on a well-supported notebook in the first place.
diebeforei485 7y ago
We're coming to a point where March is the best time to upgrade. By then, Apple has fixed most issues, and most apps have fixed their bugs as well. The issue is: every year at WWDC they announce a bunch of (way too many) features. Then, they only have ~3 months to actually complete the features. But crucially, betas are only made available after WWDC. So they get a ton of bug reports that they can't possibly really fix by release.
mhd 7y ago
It's been a long time since a MacOS upgrade was "worth it", from an end-user perspective. They're much more liked Windows Service Packs these days. This used to be way different, every new OS X release was much more celebrated and often brought features that were really appreciated by the users. Sure, part of that was just easier in the beginning: 10.0 started out with a lot of issues, and just getting rid of most of the CRT-focussed UI elements (heavy zebra-striping, gum-drop buttons) took several releases (I do miss drawers, though). But that still left you with quite a few innovations: FileVault, Spotlight, Expose, Time Machine, Dashboard, Spaces etc. I was a lot more excited about the zoological releases than the geographical ones. Cross-pollination with iOS didn't produce something exciting, either. Dropping compatibility once again would sure be a better sell if expectations of the future would be higher.
- pjc50 7y ago
  And from the developer point of view, notarisation is a colossal headache. It might be OK if you're shipping a single app, but we have a vast hybrid thing that includes Mono, a JDK, and some Python native libraries. All of which have to be signed themselves.
  - dep_b 7y ago
    I did a Xamarin app that had some kind of custom USB driver built in. That hell just got one level deeper?
antihero 7y ago
I was pretty sad I can’t play counter strike 1.6 every so often any more. Is there a way to rollback?
MikeTaylor 7y ago
One of the killers for me is the dropped support for 32-bit binaries. I don't have a gaming box, so I play Steam games on my MacBook. Lots of the games I want to play (e.g. all the BioShocks) are 32-bit.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  this is my situation, my iMac is for home use which includes games and the like, more than half of my games are marked incompatible and this includes all the Half Life titles and even a few games which have current DLC. Now is the first time in years where it is valid for Windows fans to mock those who use their Macs for games as it truly isn't for a majority of games that used to work just fine. Though a few games that run through the equivalent of Wine wrappers are again working.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    Yep, same here. This really sucks.
- whywhywhywhy 7y ago
  I understood when they removed PPC support via Rosetta from Intel OS X (Even though the tech pretty much felt like magic). But I don't get the justification for ditching all that legacy 32bit software. If it hasn't been upgraded yet, then it's never going to be. The Mac isn't like iOS, it's pretty niche. You can't just throw all the software under the bus every few years and sit back smugly expecting either developers to fix all their old software or the market to create new software to fill the gap. No 32bit Mac apps are going to be replaced with 64bit SwiftUI native apps, they're going to be replaced with Javascript apps in wrappers and your platform is going to be worse off than it would be if the dusty "old" 32bit cocoa app still ran.
  - jmull 7y ago
    I think the issue is that supporting 32-bit apps in MacOS isn't free. So there's a cost/benefit analysis to do. It probably isn't helped by the current MacOS business model. MacOS needs to focus on things that help sell new Macs because that's where the money comes from. Back when you'd drop $129 every few years the focus could be more on the OS itself. Not that it didn't also have to sell Macs, but the OS itself was product and it isn't any longer.
tbarbugli 7y ago
Catalina is by far the worst OSX release for me and many people I know. For months ext monitor support was buggy, touchbar stopped working daily (related to ext monitor bug) and restarts were necessary in order to go back to stable state. Since a couple weeks things improved a lot and I am back to my default state: I dont care about my OS nor about any Apple app, just let me use my IDE and browser without annoying me. I think that the wise thing here is to never ever upgrade OSX until a couple minor releases are out. Bugs eventually get fixed and security patches are important! This reminds me of Cassandra where x.y.6 was the right version to use :)
nicolas_t 7y ago
I have a new macbook pro 16 inch so I'm forced to use Catalina for it. Up until 10.15.2, it was extremely buggy with applications like the Terminal crashing and then refusing to start again if you force quit them. I had to restart the computer once a day about... With 10.15.3, it's a bit better but I still see the spinning spinning wheel of death way more than I used to, and my computer completely crashed once with the fan turning on very quickly and the screen becoming completely gray... I don't think it's production ready yet. As an aside not being able to run 32 bits applications is really annoying to me. I like to play old games, and not being able to annoys me. I can use crossover with the windows version of the games but it's a hassle. Just for the 32 bits issue, I wish I could install Mojave on my mbp 16 inch. So, yes, worst os upgrade in a long time... I'm now dreading the os update that will disable kernel extensions and stop me from having Little Snitch and Karabiner. If that happens, I'll probably switch to Linux for my personal computers. Surprisingly, I'm less bothered by the Permission popups, and while I don't care about apps having access to Downloads and Desktop, I do care about them having or not access to Documents. I see this is as a complement of Little Snitch. So this is for me the only positive of Catalina...
- MobileVet 7y ago
  Hold the phone... I am going to have to give up Little Snitch?!? Not cool.
- dep_b 7y ago
  Some issues I noticed on my previous 2015 MBP 15" (still on Mojave) also popped up on my brand new 2019 MBP 16", like the UI completely halting doing mundane stuff like opening a new tab or something. I always thought it was software rot after 5 years of use and a fresh install would fix everything.
  - nicolas_t 7y ago
    At the same time, my old trusty Mac Pro on Mojave never does that... Both have the same amount of RAM, both are 8 cores... But the Mac pro is just that much more stable.
indymike 7y ago
Catalina has been a pretty smooth upgrade. Helps to have one of the newer macs with a fingerprint reader... it makes all the new confirm you want to do this thing dialogs much more livable. Migrating to zsh took an unexpected hour of updating build scripts. Honestly, 90% of the annoyance in software updates is being forced to do stuff you really didn't plan on doing.
jasoneckert 7y ago
I'm still using Mojave for the simple reason that there's a 32-bit app that I absolutely need to have, and Catalina doesn't run 32-bit apps anymore.
xkemp 7y ago
How can there still be people writing these yearly "I'm so disappointed" articles. It's the same for every single MacOS release. I bet if I look through the archives here, the last halfway usable OS release from Apple was Mac OS 8. You'd figure the people writing these articles wold leave for other platforms, and those that remain should be less likely to do hot-take duty next year, considering they didn't feel the need to this year? Unless there's constant renewal in the pool of people-with-something-to-say. I guess today's worst-MacOS-ever is their future good-old-days-of-quality.
- thawaway1837 7y ago
  This is absolutely not true. I haven’t been in the Mac ecosystem for some time now, but I can say for sure that no one was writing these articles until Snow Leopard at least. I thin what has led to the prevalence of these articles is Apples shift to an annual release cycle for their Mac OSes. It used to be well known that you didn’t upgrade to an OS until the .1 version at the earliest, and it was only until .3 or .4 that a new OS X would be absolutely stable. Unfortunately with the annual release cycle the OS isn’t stable for even a few months before it is replaced. And I’m convinced that the fixes aren’t as good anyways because as soon as one OS is out, many devs are likely working on the next one. Catalina itself appears to have become a bigger disaster due to what may be considered good decisions, such as better security and killing 32 bit, but done in a way that reminds people of Vista. With nag screens and a poor transition path. That’s why the noise against Catalina has been even louder.
  - tambourine_man 7y ago
    Memory is a curious thing. Snow Leopard had a very problematic release but got better during the dot updates. Its “no new features” slogan was commendable and resonated well, but it meant under the hood changes that broke things. Perhaps they should reconsider the yearly release schedule. Either go back to a more conservative one, letting things settle after many point updates and enjoying the achieved stability for longer, or adopt a continuous evergreen model, like Chrome and Firefox.
    - 7y ago
speeder 7y ago
I never been an Apple fan. When iPhone launched I was skeptical, and didn't wanted one, and so on... I often argued with apple fans, and one thing that was clear to me, is that people that tried apple products around 2008 or so often would just love it, and many would become apple fans too. I used my first Mac around that time, and although I found some stuff just silly (mouse with only one button...) I overall liked it. Fast forward to launch of Touch Bar... Now I see lots of division and love hate relationship with apple... Still, my sister moved to US to be a researcher, invited by top universities (she even did a 6 month stint in MIT, at their request!) And was offered to pick a computer. She always liked Apple and other "fashionable" brands and picked up a machine with touch bar and would get mad at me whenever I pointed out it's flaws (like the impossible to repair keyboard), until the touchbar suddenly died and the machine would not boot anymore... She took it to Apple and they just swapped the whole machine. Then keyboard broke... Another swap. Then Catalina... Then the fact upgrading it's RAM was unecessarily hard and expensive and needed urgently (an app to analyze microscope data was outright refusing to run). Then she came to me, sheepishly, to ask me to recommend a non Apple computer, and said Apple was worse than what I said... Thing is, it is not just her, I have the impression that current Apple is opposite of 2008 Apple, instead of making weird but good stuff that create hardcore fans, it is creating products that are just bad and makes haters stop hating, and just ignore the company, and fans start hating...
- konceptz 7y ago
  You posed an interesting point which my mind immediately went to: How do you think 2008 apple would do against the sole of today given today’s technology?
- whywhywhywhy 7y ago
  >Then the fact upgrading it's RAM was unecessarily hard and expensive and needed urgently Isn't it impossible? It's soldered to the board.
  - speeder 7y ago
    Exactly.
prpl 7y ago
My only gripe is that my login/wake up are slow for some reason (Macbook 16), but I can't pinpoint it or rule out IT shenanigans. I appreciate the security, I'm happy that many of the apps don't get to shit all over my Documents directory as easily anymore.
st3fan 7y ago
DOOM! DOOM! SO MUCH DOOOOM! So different story here: using Catalina on two Macs since the betas - zero issues. Really, Zero Issues. It all just works. I use it 8+ hours a day - Browsers, terminal work, Mail.app, lots of third-party applications, Xcode. Ok fine, Xcode can be a PITA sometimes. But Catalina .. my workhorse since the betas. Never lets me down.
hurricanetc 7y ago
I am loving Catalina. The new Reminders app is a huge upgrade that allowed me to stop relying on shoddy third party apps. Using Apple Watch to authenticate is handy. Sidecar is useful as hell on business trips. iTunes is no longer a bloated unorganized mess of an application. Safari is dramatically better. Photos is better. Having screen time data on my Mac is great. Catalyst has brought a handful of new macOS apps for me to use that were not available previously. Several that I use on a daily basis. And I haven’t experienced any bugs or issues. So I guess your mileage will vary. But if you hate macOS enough to write TWO blog posts about it why don’t you just switch to another platform???
- filchermcurr 7y ago
  What Catalyst applications are you using? I haven't heard of any beyond Apple News, Swift Playgrounds, and I think maybe Twitter? Definitely interested in trying more.
  - hurricanetc 7y ago
    Carrot Weather, JIRA, and Rosetta Stone. There may be others that are Catalyst that I am not even aware of. But I use those three heavily on a daily basis.
m000 7y ago
Time Machine is the Internet Explorer of backup software. Change my mind.
zer0zzz 7y ago
Catalina has been mostly fine for me. My 2015 15” mbp has been a little unresponsive at times under dark mode but all my other laptops are doing great on it. Other than that, my work computer has all this stuff like Cisco and chef installed on it and it generally needs a reboot every other day. But generally my personal machines are fine.
KingOfCoders 7y ago
My main problem is with having an external monitor (LG) connected with USB-C. Sometimes it detects the right solution, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes when closing the laptop, sometimes that doesn't work either. Very frustrating in 2020.
briandear 7y ago
I am not sure who the author is, but why are so many people emailing him about Catalina? As far as the people who didn’t know about the new Music app, spotlight searching for iTunes will bring up Music.
georgehaake 7y ago
When I upgraded my 2019 mini I thought I bricked it. It was a couple of days of heroics to get it upgraded. Kind of a blur now. With the minor annoyances, not any more shitty in aggregate than before. (current 13" macbook pro - no upgrade issues at all)
mistrial9 7y ago
the people who are not complaining are in two camps ? the aggregate of Homebrew / Web devs / terminal users; and on the other hand the unaware consumers with their lives in the browser and simple purchases. ps- I am looking at a 10.7 machine directly in front of me, and there are two more nearby... zero interest in Catalina here
blablabla123 7y ago
It's the same with every Major update with breaking changes. This is not even macOS specific, if these updates wouldn't happen, every software would be like Windows or MS Office which stays backwards compatible for decades. It makes sense to adapt as user and also that developers need to adapt, e.g. to create 64 bit software. Also there are always work-arounds.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I am happy with the direction Apple is taking, locking down macOS. I have two Linux laptops I can mess with, I want my Macs as secure as possible.
foxx-boxx 7y ago
Upgrading is a mess, if you for instance replaced a disk. It’s clearly a software design and such move is unnecessary. I wouldn’t upgrade unless I really have to. It’s painful.
nonamenoslogan 7y ago
I'm a Macperson but for my primary Mac (Retina iMac), I refuse to upgrade simply because of my 32bit apps. I still have plenty of them that work as designed and have no interest in purchasing newer versions just because Apple says so.
cutler 7y ago
For a long time I've been baffled about what amounts to testing at Apple. I purposely avoid new releases for at least a year due to Apple's history of releasing beta-grade OS X updates. Testing seems to be an afterthought or maybe the users ARE the test suite. From one of the biggest tech companies on the planet as well - unfathomable.
szines 7y ago
My recommendation is that never update only clean install. I never had any problem with macOS.
dwaite 7y ago
I think in general Catalina was missing flagship features. - The split of iTunes into Music, Podcasts and TV (and system integration for iOS synchronization/backup) didn't bring about significant user-visible benefits. I think there was an issue with content not being available in iTunes under 4k the was solved, and Dolby Atmos was added. - Catalina is not really a user-level feature. The apps which are created using Catalina aren't really draws - Find My is probably my most used, and I could just use the website if it wasn't an app. - Reminders got a big refactor and new functionality, but the in itself is a limited draw. - A few smaller changes to Notes, Photos, and Safari, but nothing I couldn't live without - Screen Time - perhaps useful in families, but my understanding is that the conceptual differences between iPhone usage and Mac usage weren't accommodated for. There was the delayed release, impact to polish, and removal of features like iCloud Folder Sharing (which I've indirectly been told were all the same issue - that folder sharing was not stable enough to be integrated into the tree and it impacted other development). It was a much rockier-than-normal update. You also have the anti-features of 32-bit support being removed, and additional privacy-consent-for-access prompts for screen sharing, sensitive folder access, etc. The prompts are IMHO overblown - they are one-time and many of them have gone away as software has been updated for Catalina (as in, there was no legitimate reason for some particular application to be scanning the Desktop to begin with). This doesn't change that there isn't a big draw. If there is a big feature for macOS Catalina, it would be SideCar. This adds a second screen to the Mac, it enables pencil usage, and perhaps even provides a slight bit more justification to Touch Bar functionality. This is still limited as it is an ecosystem feature - IMHO its real value comes when you are using an iPad Pro.
lovetocode 7y ago
Catalina totally wrecked my development environment for Ruby versions < 2.4. The only positive result is that we are running 2.6 now.

263 points by _fs 7y ago

The biggest issue I have with Mac upgrades is that for me, it doesn't cache the upgrade. My internet is weak, not as great in speed and bandwidth as US so it downloads 4gb and then fails. Then it starts from 0 sgain. I expected Apple of all companies to cache downloads. Frankly, it caches only the first 500MB. I do not know why. Any workarounds?

tcoff91 7y ago
I think you might be able to use the Apple developer downloads site to get the whole installer
sgt 7y ago
Frankly nowadays (on most systems) you need a decent connection. I would perhaps connect from another connection (if you have the opportunity) for the download itself.
- jaynetics 7y ago
  If 25M people are eligible for this upgrade and it fails in the middle for only 1%, that is 1 Petabyte transferred in vain. Not to mention man hours wasted. Just to save a few lines of code.
  - sgt 7y ago
    You're missing the point. It's about the way you treat people and also shaming a particular individual on a corporate blog.
- thewhitetulip 7y ago
  I don't have broadband connection. I use mobile data.
cerberusss 7y ago
If you have another (24/7 powered-on) Mac in the household, it can act as a cache: https://hashtagwifi.com/blog/apple-content-caching-and-you-setup-and-advanced-options https://hashtagwifi.com/blog/apple-content-caching-and-you-s...
jasonrm 7y ago
You might want to give "macOS Patcher" a try. http://dosdude1.com/software.html http://dosdude1.com/software.html It's main purpose is to allow for running macOS on unsupported Macs, but it also can download the original unmodified version. I've only used the unpatched Mojave version myself and I have no idea how well it supports slow/unstable connections.
- simongr3dal 7y ago
  I've had good experiences using this to download the installer and install macOS on external storage.
satysin 7y ago
I use the installer download script from https://github.com/munki/macadmin-scripts https://github.com/munki/macadmin-scripts Has always worked fine.
- thewhitetulip 7y ago
  Thank you

sgt 7y ago

I've actually kept postponing upgrading to Catalina (I'm still on Mojave) because I want to keep iTunes. I have a lot of stuff there I don't really want scattered all over the place, and I always felt iTunes was underrated.

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
How are you going to solve this? I'm in a similar position, having several music apps I bought a while ago that won't work in Catalina. But I have to upgrade because it's my development machine. So far my plan is to upgrade my MacBook Pro to continue develop software, and leave my Mac Pro with Mojave to compose music. I wonder how others deal with this.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  Similar. Current plan is to reluctantly upgrade my newer Mac mini for Xcode, and keep the old one for Illustrator CS6. A royal pain, though, especially because the old one is just that bit too slow.
- Lammy 7y ago
  Does the license allow you to virtualize Mojave as long as it’s on Mac hardware?
- newscracker 7y ago
  See my comment above [1] with a link to a Macrumors forum thread that allows you to run iTunes and older versions of iTunes on Catalina and Mojave. It might probably break at some point in the future, but people seem to be managing so far. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326724
narenkeshav 7y ago
Really wish there was an open source music player similar to the OLD iTunes. It was a joy, back then.
- 7y ago

atonse 7y ago

I have heard enough horror stories about stability and security prompts that it’s the first macOS release I’ll probably skip. Can’t afford to lose a day or more of productivity to fiddling with my OS.

cerberusss 7y ago
You do you, but the relentless flow of horror stories didn't stop me from upgrading and it was flawless for me. I'd recommend reading these critical pieces and seeing whether any of it actually applies to you.
- llarsson 7y ago
  Very difficult to know if it is going to apply to one's own system. With updates apparently sometimes crashing after being only partially applied, even the most diligent research into application-specific "will I be able to run XYZ after upgrading" might not be able to save you from having to reinstall from scratch. This is the kind of low-quality handling of software updates that I never imagined coming from Apple. I upgraded when it came out, had no issues, and only a few prompts. Because the machine was entirely new to me anyway (inherited MBP2016), I couldn't imagine having anything to lose. But on my older machine? Still have not upgraded. Don't see a reason to, until they've ensured higher quality.
  - cerberusss 7y ago
    But your actual experience is that it worked fine, right? I have the idea that there's currently an atmosphere where it's fashionable to repeat other people's bad experiences. Regardless of one's own experience.
    - ckrailo 7y ago
      Nah, it's pretty bad.
- newscracker 7y ago
  The security prompts apply for everyone who has and uses more than a few applications. There is no scope for individual differences there except for the number of prompts.

chalst 7y ago

Also worth reading John Gruber's complaints, over and above bugs: > But I don’t know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed security design of Catalina. Not one. Every single expert user I know is annoyed. That is a bad place for MacOS to be. MacOS 10.16 needs a serious course correction to fix this, and if 10.16 goes the opposite way — growing even more heavy-handed in restricting professional Mac users from just using their machines as they want and expect to — I genuinely fear for the future of the Mac as a platform for serious computer users. https://daringfireball.net/2020/02/my_2019_apple_report_card https://daringfireball.net/2020/02/my_2019_apple_report_card

spoondan 7y ago
There’s an important point to be made here about the gap between theoretical and practical security. Overly elaborate password policies (excessive complexity demands, passwords expiring, no reusing last five passwords) end up causing annoyed users to make bad decisions that compromise password security. Similarly, an excess of popups doesn’t increase security. It annoys users to the point they stop thinking about individual security decisions. There’s an important intersection of security research and HCI that doesn’t get discussed as much as it needs to be.
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  >Overly elaborate password policies (excessive complexity demands, passwords expiring, no reusing last five passwords) end up causing annoyed users to make bad decisions that compromise password security. Similarly, an excess of popups doesn’t increase security. It annoys users to the point they stop thinking about individual security decisions. It's particularly annoying b/c there's a subset of craftsmen developers who pay close attention to this problem, who realize these cures are worse than the disease, and who reverted years ago to not using these flawed security patterns. Many here on HN, for example. And then there are Apple engineers who seem to be so far behind the curve that they're just now discovering and implementing patterns that others not only discovered and tested years ago, but discarded years ago. It's like corporate 9-to-5'ers with no pride of craftsmanship or motivation to stay current with their field made these decisions. Either that or clueless management ordered it, which in any other company besides Apple would be my first guess.

athiercelin 7y ago

I've heard these upgrade stories since the 90s (on Mac). It got better a few years back, and it's back again at hit or miss but in the end it's like backup strategies: it's basic knowledge at this point but still needs to be repeated. If your mac is a production machine, don't jump on any of the updates, decide if you need the update then check your programs one by one. If you can, pop into the Apple Store to test the system. I'm not defending Apple, I'm not victim-blaming, it's just an advice to avoid the misery of going past the point of no return.

neurostimulant 7y ago
Yup, this is pretty much what I do regardless of operating system. Just don't upgrade to the latest major version immediately after release. Wait around a bit to see if other people reported any major issue, and then wait until those issue fixed before upgrading.
cosmiccatnap 7y ago
I get that, and everyone in this thread knows that, but the issue is that alot of devices come with it and it is branded as "stable" Windows and Linux have a better excuse they have to support thousands upon thousands of devices and configurations but for apple to have this many issues with the hand full of pre built systems they have, well, it should be perfectly understandable to ask why a company with this much time and money would release something in this state especially when they had a beta. For most of us it's not a big deal but plenty of people have to start writing their app and testing on this and for them it's pretty confusing and you have to ask yourself how it got this way when there shouldn't have been any reason for it to.

ble52 7y ago

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

askafriend 7y ago
It's been completely fine for me. On both my personal and development machines.
rado 7y ago
No breaking bugs here.
daveFNbuck 7y ago
I haven't had any issues, and I appreciate being asked for permissions rather than assuming them. It makes me feel safer even if I haven't yet encountered a situation where I said no.
- markandrewj 7y ago
  I agree. I think this was one of the motivating factors in the change. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/25/macwoes_google_chrome_update/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/25/macwoes_google_chro...
gempir 7y ago
No Problem here. I use for work and personal. Got zero issues that I can think off that weren't there in other versions
fredsted 7y ago
Not sure what the issue is either, once you add the necessary permissions for your apps, it doesn't ask again. Only complaint is Apple seem to ignore long-standing bugs that have been there for years, like monitors switching around every time you dock your MacBook. They should make a Snow Leopard-like release and clean out their bug tracker.

narenkeshav 7y ago

I use Unity3D and everytime there is a new macOS update, I always procrastinate it for a year at least. This year around, I was very tempted to update it, early last week. Looking at this feed, I ain't going to do it. I have an iOS app to publish & can't do anything stupid.

davnicwil 7y ago
I have a similar attitude. At the end of the day, MacOS updates have zero chance of helping me get work done faster, yet they have low but non-trivial chance of halting progress on work for a few hours due to obscure issues. There just seems no upside to upgrading - I just wait until either I'm forced to or starting a completely new project just to pay off a tech debt of sorts. I'll caveat this by saying I don't work in the Apple ecosystem so don't have any dependencies there, the tools I run are orthogonal to MacOS specific features, so I don't really care about them per se.
- riffraff 7y ago
  this, a hundred times. I stayed on snow leopard for years, and I can barely notice anything better in Mojave, and about nothing in Catalina either. On the other hand, the weather widgets in the dashboard have now stopped working, and nobody seems to care, because that's not a cool feature anymore.
appstorelottery 7y ago
Me too, I've been using Unity for over 10 years. Having said that, I simultaneously develop on Mac & PC and right now don't have an iOS project - so I took the leap. No issues with Catalina with Unity. However there are a few other minor annoyances; finder seems a bit unstable with network drives (force restart is your friend), time machine corrupts NAS backups, and the occasional mess-up with my dual monitor setup. Other than that it's been fine FYI.
jeffhuys 7y ago
I had to install Mojave on another partition and I dual-boot to that if I need to use Unity. But the last time I used it was about 3 months ago, Unity might have gotten a few updates in the meantime.

auggierose 7y ago

Yeah, there's been some pain to upgrade to Catalina, but for me as a developer it was worth it, just because of Project Catalyst. Also, they were making some serious (and necessary) changes to the iCloud / File API, and I would have been very surprised if that went without lots of bugs ... To be honest, the transition went much smoother than I expected.

galad87 7y ago
10.15 beta shipped with a new iCloud implemented with NSFileProvider. But it was buggy, so they reverted to the old implementation for the final release.
newscracker 7y ago
Project Catalyst trades off some developer pain for a few thousand or tens of thousands of developers with pain imposed on millions or tens of millions of users. A rushed and half baked system that breaks Mac conventions isn’t worth it for the users. Not now. It could turn out to be something worthwhile next year or the year after.

joelrunyon 7y ago

Still holding off on this. Is the consensus to just keep waiting for the next one to drop?

ssijak 7y ago
Let me count the votes and I'll let you know...
Spacemolte 7y ago
That's what i usually do. I'm only on catalina now because i got a new macbook and it came preinstalled.
newscracker 7y ago
Unless the next release announced in WWDC 2020 is one that clearly says it’s about stability and is low on new features, I’ll be holding off on any upgrades. Mojave will have security updates for another year or so.

checker659 7y ago

I used to be a huge fan of Dashboard. Why they had to remove it is beyond me.

mantap 7y ago
It was theoretically replaced by notification center widgets, but in reality it was replaced by smartphones. All the little apps I used to have on dashboard, like the weather, are now things I check on my phone.

mistahenry 7y ago

I was already using zsh and somehow the MacOS upgrade path for making zsh the new default shell deleted my shell history. This was a short term blow to productivity since I had only made external notes on about half the difficult command line tasks I’d completed since getting this MacBook in 2017. How do people generally go about backing up this file? Or do most people not

alexis_fr 7y ago
I use several tabs and histories override each other, meaning I could never count on a command being present in the history. I’ve always been told an experienced dev has a folder with txt notes, so that is what I did.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure that you can configure zsh to write to zsh_history every command to prevent this
  - catalogia 7y ago
    setopt inc_append_history
    - DelightOne 7y ago
      Thank you! I did not know that this option exists!
javagram 7y ago
> How do people generally go about backing up this file? Or do most people not If you use Time Machine it should be backed up. I have two hard drives I rotate on and off my computer regularly for Time Machine for redundancy, it’s always worked well so far.

rcarmo 7y ago

I’ve put off upgrading until (at least) the Mail issues are fixed. I have zero trust that Apple is even prioritizing those kinds of fixes, and simply can’t risk the disruption of having my machine not work in some subtly critical way. (In contrast, my Windows machines are stubbornly reliable, even the one running Insider builds. Which is a wild inversion of the reasons I started https://taoofmac.com https://taoofmac.com 16 years ago...)

SkyMarshal 7y ago

I have a 2013 MacBook that is my main work computer when not at home on my desktop workstation. Years ago I learned to disable automatic system updates and to stay 1 major OS version behind. Let the enthusiasts, fanboys and early adopter pawns work out all the bugs in the current OS X version, install it only when the next version nears or launches.

anoncow 7y ago

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250719221 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250719221 Thread on Catalina bricking Macbooks.

cannam 7y ago
My god, the rudeness of some of the defensive replies on there. If I was in that situation, with an expensively broken computer and no help from anyone, and someone with no experience of it kept harrying me in that way, well... I'd be so livid I could barely type.

tannhaeuser 7y ago

Even if I wanted to upgrade my old Mini (by having a new OS on an external HD), Mojave and Catalina won't let me because required APFS support for EFI comes only as part of the 6GB Mojave (or Catalina) download/install, rather than as separately downloadable BIOS upgrade. Even bought a flash drive and ordered to have Mojave installer copied to it at an Apple retailer only to find out that it doesn't work like that anymore. After many years of good use in the 2010s, for me the Mac has lost it's practical side where you could use disk target mode, boot from external HD, etc. Edit: 2000s not 2010s

newscracker 7y ago
Someone somewhere must have faced the same issue as you. I’d suggest searching on Reddit and the Macrumors forums. Worst case, you can install Linux and continue using it (though the experience may not be the same in many ways).
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  Re installing Linux: I did that many years ago already ;) I used to enjoy an alternative Unix laptop provider and hate to see Apple fade away as an option. Regarding searching reddit and co, I briefly did, but then thought if I have to go to forums etc., I can just as well run Linux on a well-supported notebook in the first place.

diebeforei485 7y ago

We're coming to a point where March is the best time to upgrade. By then, Apple has fixed most issues, and most apps have fixed their bugs as well. The issue is: every year at WWDC they announce a bunch of (way too many) features. Then, they only have ~3 months to actually complete the features. But crucially, betas are only made available after WWDC. So they get a ton of bug reports that they can't possibly really fix by release.

mhd 7y ago

It's been a long time since a MacOS upgrade was "worth it", from an end-user perspective. They're much more liked Windows Service Packs these days. This used to be way different, every new OS X release was much more celebrated and often brought features that were really appreciated by the users. Sure, part of that was just easier in the beginning: 10.0 started out with a lot of issues, and just getting rid of most of the CRT-focussed UI elements (heavy zebra-striping, gum-drop buttons) took several releases (I do miss drawers, though). But that still left you with quite a few innovations: FileVault, Spotlight, Expose, Time Machine, Dashboard, Spaces etc. I was a lot more excited about the zoological releases than the geographical ones. Cross-pollination with iOS didn't produce something exciting, either. Dropping compatibility once again would sure be a better sell if expectations of the future would be higher.

pjc50 7y ago
And from the developer point of view, notarisation is a colossal headache. It might be OK if you're shipping a single app, but we have a vast hybrid thing that includes Mono, a JDK, and some Python native libraries. All of which have to be signed themselves.
- dep_b 7y ago
  I did a Xamarin app that had some kind of custom USB driver built in. That hell just got one level deeper?

antihero 7y ago

I was pretty sad I can’t play counter strike 1.6 every so often any more. Is there a way to rollback?

MikeTaylor 7y ago

One of the killers for me is the dropped support for 32-bit binaries. I don't have a gaming box, so I play Steam games on my MacBook. Lots of the games I want to play (e.g. all the BioShocks) are 32-bit.

Shivetya 7y ago
this is my situation, my iMac is for home use which includes games and the like, more than half of my games are marked incompatible and this includes all the Half Life titles and even a few games which have current DLC. Now is the first time in years where it is valid for Windows fans to mock those who use their Macs for games as it truly isn't for a majority of games that used to work just fine. Though a few games that run through the equivalent of Wine wrappers are again working.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  Yep, same here. This really sucks.
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
I understood when they removed PPC support via Rosetta from Intel OS X (Even though the tech pretty much felt like magic). But I don't get the justification for ditching all that legacy 32bit software. If it hasn't been upgraded yet, then it's never going to be. The Mac isn't like iOS, it's pretty niche. You can't just throw all the software under the bus every few years and sit back smugly expecting either developers to fix all their old software or the market to create new software to fill the gap. No 32bit Mac apps are going to be replaced with 64bit SwiftUI native apps, they're going to be replaced with Javascript apps in wrappers and your platform is going to be worse off than it would be if the dusty "old" 32bit cocoa app still ran.
- jmull 7y ago
  I think the issue is that supporting 32-bit apps in MacOS isn't free. So there's a cost/benefit analysis to do. It probably isn't helped by the current MacOS business model. MacOS needs to focus on things that help sell new Macs because that's where the money comes from. Back when you'd drop $129 every few years the focus could be more on the OS itself. Not that it didn't also have to sell Macs, but the OS itself was product and it isn't any longer.

tbarbugli 7y ago

Catalina is by far the worst OSX release for me and many people I know. For months ext monitor support was buggy, touchbar stopped working daily (related to ext monitor bug) and restarts were necessary in order to go back to stable state. Since a couple weeks things improved a lot and I am back to my default state: I dont care about my OS nor about any Apple app, just let me use my IDE and browser without annoying me. I think that the wise thing here is to never ever upgrade OSX until a couple minor releases are out. Bugs eventually get fixed and security patches are important! This reminds me of Cassandra where x.y.6 was the right version to use :)

nicolas_t 7y ago

I have a new macbook pro 16 inch so I'm forced to use Catalina for it. Up until 10.15.2, it was extremely buggy with applications like the Terminal crashing and then refusing to start again if you force quit them. I had to restart the computer once a day about... With 10.15.3, it's a bit better but I still see the spinning spinning wheel of death way more than I used to, and my computer completely crashed once with the fan turning on very quickly and the screen becoming completely gray... I don't think it's production ready yet. As an aside not being able to run 32 bits applications is really annoying to me. I like to play old games, and not being able to annoys me. I can use crossover with the windows version of the games but it's a hassle. Just for the 32 bits issue, I wish I could install Mojave on my mbp 16 inch. So, yes, worst os upgrade in a long time... I'm now dreading the os update that will disable kernel extensions and stop me from having Little Snitch and Karabiner. If that happens, I'll probably switch to Linux for my personal computers. Surprisingly, I'm less bothered by the Permission popups, and while I don't care about apps having access to Downloads and Desktop, I do care about them having or not access to Documents. I see this is as a complement of Little Snitch. So this is for me the only positive of Catalina...

MobileVet 7y ago
Hold the phone... I am going to have to give up Little Snitch?!? Not cool.
dep_b 7y ago
Some issues I noticed on my previous 2015 MBP 15" (still on Mojave) also popped up on my brand new 2019 MBP 16", like the UI completely halting doing mundane stuff like opening a new tab or something. I always thought it was software rot after 5 years of use and a fresh install would fix everything.
- nicolas_t 7y ago
  At the same time, my old trusty Mac Pro on Mojave never does that... Both have the same amount of RAM, both are 8 cores... But the Mac pro is just that much more stable.

indymike 7y ago

Catalina has been a pretty smooth upgrade. Helps to have one of the newer macs with a fingerprint reader... it makes all the new confirm you want to do this thing dialogs much more livable. Migrating to zsh took an unexpected hour of updating build scripts. Honestly, 90% of the annoyance in software updates is being forced to do stuff you really didn't plan on doing.

jasoneckert 7y ago

I'm still using Mojave for the simple reason that there's a 32-bit app that I absolutely need to have, and Catalina doesn't run 32-bit apps anymore.

xkemp 7y ago

How can there still be people writing these yearly "I'm so disappointed" articles. It's the same for every single MacOS release. I bet if I look through the archives here, the last halfway usable OS release from Apple was Mac OS 8. You'd figure the people writing these articles wold leave for other platforms, and those that remain should be less likely to do hot-take duty next year, considering they didn't feel the need to this year? Unless there's constant renewal in the pool of people-with-something-to-say. I guess today's worst-MacOS-ever is their future good-old-days-of-quality.

thawaway1837 7y ago
This is absolutely not true. I haven’t been in the Mac ecosystem for some time now, but I can say for sure that no one was writing these articles until Snow Leopard at least. I thin what has led to the prevalence of these articles is Apples shift to an annual release cycle for their Mac OSes. It used to be well known that you didn’t upgrade to an OS until the .1 version at the earliest, and it was only until .3 or .4 that a new OS X would be absolutely stable. Unfortunately with the annual release cycle the OS isn’t stable for even a few months before it is replaced. And I’m convinced that the fixes aren’t as good anyways because as soon as one OS is out, many devs are likely working on the next one. Catalina itself appears to have become a bigger disaster due to what may be considered good decisions, such as better security and killing 32 bit, but done in a way that reminds people of Vista. With nag screens and a poor transition path. That’s why the noise against Catalina has been even louder.
- tambourine_man 7y ago
  Memory is a curious thing. Snow Leopard had a very problematic release but got better during the dot updates. Its “no new features” slogan was commendable and resonated well, but it meant under the hood changes that broke things. Perhaps they should reconsider the yearly release schedule. Either go back to a more conservative one, letting things settle after many point updates and enjoying the achieved stability for longer, or adopt a continuous evergreen model, like Chrome and Firefox.
  - 7y ago

speeder 7y ago

I never been an Apple fan. When iPhone launched I was skeptical, and didn't wanted one, and so on... I often argued with apple fans, and one thing that was clear to me, is that people that tried apple products around 2008 or so often would just love it, and many would become apple fans too. I used my first Mac around that time, and although I found some stuff just silly (mouse with only one button...) I overall liked it. Fast forward to launch of Touch Bar... Now I see lots of division and love hate relationship with apple... Still, my sister moved to US to be a researcher, invited by top universities (she even did a 6 month stint in MIT, at their request!) And was offered to pick a computer. She always liked Apple and other "fashionable" brands and picked up a machine with touch bar and would get mad at me whenever I pointed out it's flaws (like the impossible to repair keyboard), until the touchbar suddenly died and the machine would not boot anymore... She took it to Apple and they just swapped the whole machine. Then keyboard broke... Another swap. Then Catalina... Then the fact upgrading it's RAM was unecessarily hard and expensive and needed urgently (an app to analyze microscope data was outright refusing to run). Then she came to me, sheepishly, to ask me to recommend a non Apple computer, and said Apple was worse than what I said... Thing is, it is not just her, I have the impression that current Apple is opposite of 2008 Apple, instead of making weird but good stuff that create hardcore fans, it is creating products that are just bad and makes haters stop hating, and just ignore the company, and fans start hating...

konceptz 7y ago
You posed an interesting point which my mind immediately went to: How do you think 2008 apple would do against the sole of today given today’s technology?
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
>Then the fact upgrading it's RAM was unecessarily hard and expensive and needed urgently Isn't it impossible? It's soldered to the board.
- speeder 7y ago
  Exactly.

prpl 7y ago

My only gripe is that my login/wake up are slow for some reason (Macbook 16), but I can't pinpoint it or rule out IT shenanigans. I appreciate the security, I'm happy that many of the apps don't get to shit all over my Documents directory as easily anymore.

st3fan 7y ago

DOOM! DOOM! SO MUCH DOOOOM! So different story here: using Catalina on two Macs since the betas - zero issues. Really, Zero Issues. It all just works. I use it 8+ hours a day - Browsers, terminal work, Mail.app, lots of third-party applications, Xcode. Ok fine, Xcode can be a PITA sometimes. But Catalina .. my workhorse since the betas. Never lets me down.

hurricanetc 7y ago

I am loving Catalina. The new Reminders app is a huge upgrade that allowed me to stop relying on shoddy third party apps. Using Apple Watch to authenticate is handy. Sidecar is useful as hell on business trips. iTunes is no longer a bloated unorganized mess of an application. Safari is dramatically better. Photos is better. Having screen time data on my Mac is great. Catalyst has brought a handful of new macOS apps for me to use that were not available previously. Several that I use on a daily basis. And I haven’t experienced any bugs or issues. So I guess your mileage will vary. But if you hate macOS enough to write TWO blog posts about it why don’t you just switch to another platform???

filchermcurr 7y ago
What Catalyst applications are you using? I haven't heard of any beyond Apple News, Swift Playgrounds, and I think maybe Twitter? Definitely interested in trying more.
- hurricanetc 7y ago
  Carrot Weather, JIRA, and Rosetta Stone. There may be others that are Catalyst that I am not even aware of. But I use those three heavily on a daily basis.

m000 7y ago

Time Machine is the Internet Explorer of backup software. Change my mind.

zer0zzz 7y ago

Catalina has been mostly fine for me. My 2015 15” mbp has been a little unresponsive at times under dark mode but all my other laptops are doing great on it. Other than that, my work computer has all this stuff like Cisco and chef installed on it and it generally needs a reboot every other day. But generally my personal machines are fine.

KingOfCoders 7y ago

My main problem is with having an external monitor (LG) connected with USB-C. Sometimes it detects the right solution, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes when closing the laptop, sometimes that doesn't work either. Very frustrating in 2020.

briandear 7y ago

I am not sure who the author is, but why are so many people emailing him about Catalina? As far as the people who didn’t know about the new Music app, spotlight searching for iTunes will bring up Music.

georgehaake 7y ago

When I upgraded my 2019 mini I thought I bricked it. It was a couple of days of heroics to get it upgraded. Kind of a blur now. With the minor annoyances, not any more shitty in aggregate than before. (current 13" macbook pro - no upgrade issues at all)

mistrial9 7y ago

the people who are not complaining are in two camps ? the aggregate of Homebrew / Web devs / terminal users; and on the other hand the unaware consumers with their lives in the browser and simple purchases. ps- I am looking at a 10.7 machine directly in front of me, and there are two more nearby... zero interest in Catalina here

blablabla123 7y ago

It's the same with every Major update with breaking changes. This is not even macOS specific, if these updates wouldn't happen, every software would be like Windows or MS Office which stays backwards compatible for decades. It makes sense to adapt as user and also that developers need to adapt, e.g. to create 64 bit software. Also there are always work-arounds.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I am happy with the direction Apple is taking, locking down macOS. I have two Linux laptops I can mess with, I want my Macs as secure as possible.

foxx-boxx 7y ago

Upgrading is a mess, if you for instance replaced a disk. It’s clearly a software design and such move is unnecessary. I wouldn’t upgrade unless I really have to. It’s painful.

nonamenoslogan 7y ago

I'm a Macperson but for my primary Mac (Retina iMac), I refuse to upgrade simply because of my 32bit apps. I still have plenty of them that work as designed and have no interest in purchasing newer versions just because Apple says so.

cutler 7y ago

For a long time I've been baffled about what amounts to testing at Apple. I purposely avoid new releases for at least a year due to Apple's history of releasing beta-grade OS X updates. Testing seems to be an afterthought or maybe the users ARE the test suite. From one of the biggest tech companies on the planet as well - unfathomable.

szines 7y ago

My recommendation is that never update only clean install. I never had any problem with macOS.

dwaite 7y ago

I think in general Catalina was missing flagship features. - The split of iTunes into Music, Podcasts and TV (and system integration for iOS synchronization/backup) didn't bring about significant user-visible benefits. I think there was an issue with content not being available in iTunes under 4k the was solved, and Dolby Atmos was added. - Catalina is not really a user-level feature. The apps which are created using Catalina aren't really draws - Find My is probably my most used, and I could just use the website if it wasn't an app. - Reminders got a big refactor and new functionality, but the in itself is a limited draw. - A few smaller changes to Notes, Photos, and Safari, but nothing I couldn't live without - Screen Time - perhaps useful in families, but my understanding is that the conceptual differences between iPhone usage and Mac usage weren't accommodated for. There was the delayed release, impact to polish, and removal of features like iCloud Folder Sharing (which I've indirectly been told were all the same issue - that folder sharing was not stable enough to be integrated into the tree and it impacted other development). It was a much rockier-than-normal update. You also have the anti-features of 32-bit support being removed, and additional privacy-consent-for-access prompts for screen sharing, sensitive folder access, etc. The prompts are IMHO overblown - they are one-time and many of them have gone away as software has been updated for Catalina (as in, there was no legitimate reason for some particular application to be scanning the Desktop to begin with). This doesn't change that there isn't a big draw. If there is a big feature for macOS Catalina, it would be SideCar. This adds a second screen to the Mac, it enables pencil usage, and perhaps even provides a slight bit more justification to Touch Bar functionality. This is still limited as it is an ecosystem feature - IMHO its real value comes when you are using an iPad Pro.

lovetocode 7y ago

Catalina totally wrecked my development environment for Ruby versions < 2.4. The only positive result is that we are running 2.6 now.