25 ms·

macOS Catalina 10.15.5

228 points by simjue 6y ago

karmakaze 6y ago
> Battery Health Management > • Battery health management to help maximize battery lifespan for Mac notebooks > • Energy Saver preference pane now displays battery condition and recommends if the battery needs to be serviced > • Option to disable battery health management <<< Apple learned from their iOS update/iPhone slowdown faux pas.
dthul 6y ago
Since the last Catalina update (10.15.4) Firefox is almost unusable for me, whereas it was buttery smooth before. There are constant multi-second freezes and when I switch tabs I often see a gray loading screen before the content shows up a few seconds later. Never saw that happen before. Maybe it's just a coincidence and has nothing to do with the Catalina update, but I am interested whether other people experience the same.
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  Have you tried profiling it in Instruments to see what Firefox is doing?
- asdff 6y ago
  I experience this in a lot of different apps on catalina. just a brief flash of something. Seems to have gone away in 10.15.5, but I've only had the update for an hour.
- dthul 6y ago
  Follow up: The latest Firefox update seems to have solved the issue. So far.
asplake 6y ago
Last time I tried, it was not at all well documented how to upgrade to Catalina when your iMac's boot drive is 1) an external SSD and 2) not (yet) formatted to APFS. Giving it another try now, but unless it suddenly got a whole lot easier I'll probably be passing again. Have it on my 2016 and 2019 Airs though, no issues.
- asplake 6y ago
  Passing once again...
sccxy 6y ago
Thanks, but I'll wait for some months before update.
diimdeep 6y ago
> The battery health management feature in macOS 10.15.5 is designed to improve your battery's lifespan by reducing the rate at which it chemically ages. The feature does this by monitoring your battery's temperature history and its charging patterns. > Based on the measurements that it collects, battery health management may reduce your battery's maximum charge when in this mode. This happens as needed to ensure that your battery charges to a level that's optimized for your usage—reducing wear on the battery, and slowing its chemical aging. Sound great. I hope this means no more swollen batteries. https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/What_to_do_with_a_swollen_battery https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/What_to_do_with_a_swollen_batter... https://lepageblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/how-to-fix-a-swollen-macbook-battery/ https://lepageblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/how-to-fix-a-swo...
- irjustin 6y ago
  Deep discharge & Heat are common accelerators of swelling. Avoiding going to <10% battery and running aggressive heat dissipation will always help prolong the life. My favorite is Macs Fan Control[0] for removing heat. 40' the fan is spinning mid range speed and by 50' it's full 6500 rpm. It's the least I can do =/ [0]https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control
  - dividedbyzero 6y ago
    I think I'll rather take the battery performance hit than bear with (near-?)constant fan noise.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      My favorite nerd hysteria conspiracy theory is that Apple runs its computers hot and fans loud in order to sell AirPods.
      - snazz 6y ago
        I think the goal of running Macs hot is to prevent the fans from kicking in for most use-cases. If you're running twelve virtual machines and compiling Chromium simultaneously, then you might need earplugs.
m3nu 6y ago
Third battery in my Macbook Pro in 3 years. Very excited about this feature.
- randyrand 6y ago
  Do you leave your macbook pro plugged in all the time?
  - irrational 6y ago
    I do. I rarely need to take it anywhere.
    - inapis 6y ago
      This destroys battery. You do need to charge and discharge the battery frequently.
      - enriquto 6y ago
        This is an extremely bad UI for battery management logic. If that is the case, a computer that is always plugged should discharge and re-charge the individual battery cells one by one to enlarge their lifespan.
      - kstenerud 6y ago
        Seems strange that they don't put code in to repeatedly drain the battery to 90% and then charge it again when plugged in, if that were the case.
        jannes 6y ago
        The happy range for a modern battery is 20-80%. The bottom and top 20% are what's causing the wear, so merely staying between 90% and 100% won't do you any good.
        deleted 6y ago
darkteflon 6y ago
> Major new releases of macOS are no longer hidden when using the softwareupdate(8) command with the --ignore flag. This change also affects macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra after installing Security Update 2020-003. As a Mojave user, not happy about this.
- hrak 6y ago
  They did this just to annoy the scores of people who refuse to upgrade to Catalina.
- sheinsheish 6y ago
  Meaning? Can you elaborate a bit? I’ve just downgraded to Mojave on an iMac (fusion drive) primarily used for Logic Pro. Do you think Mojave is not getting updates anymore ?
  - jiripospisil 6y ago
    The "ignored" flag caused macOS to NOT offer the update to the new major version every once in a while (a little popup in the top right corner). It also made the Software Update app report that there are no updates available. After installing this update, the Update app reports the update to Catalina even though I have ignored the update previously on this machine. This does not mean that Mojave is not getting any more updates, it's just that macOS will nag you to update (but you will still be able to dismiss it manually) without the option to tell it to stop.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
      Is there a patch somewhere that turns the nag off permanently? I'm definitely not updating several of my machines to Catalina in the next years, and the nag is just an useless distraction.
      - chrisfinazzo 6y ago
        There was a Mac911 article[1] by Glenn Fleishman which detailed how to do this back in October of last year. I have the following in a file called Catalina.sh: sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina" && defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0 && killall Dock Unfortunately - unless I'm mistaken - 2020-003 means this script is toast. [1]: https://www.macworld.com/article/3447396/how-to-stop-getting-a-reminder-to-update-to-catalina-in-macos.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3447396/how-to-stop-getting...
jneplokh 6y ago
> Improves performance on certain Mac models when enabling hardware acceleration in GPU-intensive apps such as those used for video conferencing Any info on which specific Mac models this applies to?
- dijit 6y ago
  Probably Skylake and up. As Skylake has very competent h265/HEVC decoding.
fossuser 6y ago
The group FaceTime UI is very strange, why have several overlapping boxes rather than just dividing the screen equally and using all of it? I know it's like this in iOS, but I'm not sure what group video looks like in macOS (though it sounds like it's the same based on the update text here). It's weird because the easier thing also seems like the obvious thing, and it's clearly better.
- szhu 6y ago
  I typically use video chat apps like Facebook, Google Meet, and Zoom. I think the grid is efficient from a space perspective -- there's less wasted space -- but the grid looks very corporate and boring. I think there's also a practical advantage of placing tiles haphazardly: it might help spatial memory. It's a lot harder to focus on or find a particular rectangle in a sea of rectangles than it is to follow a shape than looks a little different from the rest. However, I have never used FaceTime group calling (because I don't have most of my friends' phone numbers), so I don't whether this is effective in practice.
  - Bellyache5 6y ago
    FWIW, I don't believe FaceTime requires others' phone numbers. I think it can be a phone number or any email address tied to their Apple ID, similar to iMessage.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I don't buy this - this feels like rationalizing a bad design decision after the fact. It seems like bad design to waste space on a small screen because it looks 'boring'.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  why have several overlapping boxes rather than just dividing the screen equally and using all of it It's good for smaller screens. I was on a Zoom video conference last week, and all I could think about was how so many people who weren't allowed to/going to speak were taking up valuable screen real estate.
saagarjha 6y ago
Security content: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211170 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211170
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  Thanks, that's quite a lot of fixes.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I should note that this list isn't unusually long for a point release.
i2shar 6y ago
It's crazy that even dot releases are a full 3.6G download
- ajconway 6y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, the amount you download when updating from a previous version is significantly less than a full installer image.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  Still far from Microsoft Visual Studio update, which renamed VSO into Azure DevOps, and required 1.2GB download basically just for that.
- TheChaplain 6y ago
  Binary patching hasn't been a thing for years unfortunately. Even bigger wreck on consoles these days, where an update can be 50+ gigabytes...
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    Where are you getting 50+ GB console updates?
    - Operyl 6y ago
      I think they’re referring to games. A good example? CoD Modern Warfare (the recent one) _always_ seems to have 50GB updates. It is rather annoying, even with fast internet.
      - Hamuko 6y ago
        I can't remember a time I've downloaded a patch that is as big as the base game on a console. Granted, most of the games I play are on physical copies.
      - raihansaputra 6y ago
        Usually it's around 30GB. I play on PC and have to remind all of my party to update the night before. Each update seems to only come with small changes, and the total game size only increases by ~5GB usually. So they're either recompressing previous assets or changing stuff that can't be patched in along with new content. These updates usually happens every week/every other week. It's insane. I think all of the previous CoD:MW titles combined isn't as big as this one alone.
dochtman 6y ago
Software Update isn't showing me 10.15.5 yet. Others? On my 2019 16" I've definitely noticed that Zoom calls slow stuff down by a lot. Would be great if that gets fixed here.
- rado 6y ago
  Press ⌘+R in System Preferences – Software Update (really)
  - caribousoup 6y ago
    Wow, I never realized this. Make sure the Search field isn't focused, it is by default on launch.
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  Why would a single application's behaviour get "fixed" by an OS update?? Isn't the issue with Zoom? Have you looked in Activity Monitor or Instruments to see what Zoom is doing to see why the machine gets sluggish?
  - sibartlett 6y ago
    > Improves performance on certain Mac models when enabling hardware acceleration in GPU-intensive apps such as those used for video conferencing
    - 72deluxe 6y ago
      Thanks! Shows me up for not noticing that. Thanks for highlighting it, I honestly would have not noticed it otherwise.
dirtylowprofile 6y ago
Just updated my 2012 MBP. So far still alive.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  Same, except on Mojave. Keeping fingers crossed that 10.16 will continue supporting 2012.
  - dirtylowprofile 6y ago
    Why are you still on Mojave? If I may ask
    - TMWNN 6y ago
      I still have 32-bit applications. More to the point, I don't know of any compelling reasons to upgrade from Mojave. The new battery-conditioning feature may be the first such.
    - have_faith 6y ago
      Still on Mojave on my work laptop. If there's no clear benefit to outweigh potentially breaking some local setup I have then I ignore it.
    - infinityplus1 6y ago
      I have a working machine and wherever I have read, Catalina is buggy. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade and waste time fixing bugs.
    - dreamcompiler 6y ago
      Speaking for myself (not the person you asked) I still have machines on El Capitan and don't plan to upgrade them because they just work. High Sierra almost completely bricked them. Every new version of MacOS is more buggy than the previous and it takes dozens of hours of googling to figure out how to work around the bugs, restore features Apple removed, and turn off misfeatures Apple added.
- 6y ago
Reason077 6y ago
> ”Addresses an issue that may prevent password entry on the login screen” I’m still on Mojave 10.14.6 and this hits me from time to time, maybe once a month or so. Very annoying bug. Great if they have finally fixed it!
- ttfkam 6y ago
  But if you update, you'll get nagware on upgrading to Catalina. Damned if you do...
rado 6y ago
Where is the Safari 13.1.1 changelog? Thanks.
- css 6y ago
  As far as I can tell, this is all they publish: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211177 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211177
isaikumar 6y ago
Did anyone face any issues installing the update? I have been lucky till now as I have never faced issue while updating. But then I read news reports that say people faced issues and macbooks were bricked while updating. So I thought from now on I would wait few days before I update.
m1h4 6y ago
Still having a (at least one of the multiple different) kernel panic during sleep: panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff801e29169c): Sleep transition timed out after 180 seconds while calling power state change callbacks. Suspected bundle: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily. Thread 0x2754. Ever since moving to a brand new 16" MBP there isn't a day that passes wihout me being welcomed by the crash report dialog…
- robin_reala 6y ago
  I had one of those for the first time last night (new Macbook Air) on 10.15.4. Shame that you’re seeing it in 10.15.5 too…
- simonklitj 6y ago
  Read a user somewhere reporting that leaving his iPhone plugged into his Mac caused this problem to occur almost daily. After charging it with a wall charger, and not having it plugged in, the problem went away. After resetting PRAM and SMC too. Hope the issue gets resolved for you someday!
- kjakm 6y ago
  Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I've started getting these in the last week. It coincided with a screen replacement but sounds like that might be a coincidence based on your report.
- paultopia 6y ago
  Oh damnit, damnit. I've been having those on 10.15.4 too, was really hoping they'd fixed it on this one. It's really profoundly upsetting to spend $3,500 on a brand new computer by the most reliable major manufacturer in the industry and still have daily damn kernel panics.
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    > by the most reliable major manufacturer in the industry You might want to revisit that. If you are looking for reliability, ThinkPads are way better.
jevgeni 6y ago
Will this update unbrick my iMac that 10.15.1 bricked?
chris_wot 6y ago
I am constantly gobsmacked by how slow point release upgrades are. On Ubuntu, it takes virtually no time and doesn’t interrupt my workflow.
- LeSaucy 6y ago
  There are plenty of disruptive ubuntu upgrade issues, for example for almost 5 years (through 12.04 to 16.04!) if you installed on LVM volumes your /boot partition never cleaned up old vmlinuz and initrd images, causing dpkg-reconfigure to fail, leaving dpkg completely broken. Operating systems are hard.
  - chris_wot 6y ago
    Sure, that’s a hard failure, I was talking about the average speed to install an update.
albertzeyer 6y ago
I'm still on High Sierra... I wonder if there are really good reasons to upgrade to Mojave? (I only know about disadvantages about upgrading to Catalina.)
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  I'm on High Sierra on one Mac and Mojave on another. Other than APFS, I cannot see any real differences in usability, other than opening quickview and then pressing shift and up to go to the previous file in a list (so you could look over many photographs and select them so as to choose which ones to delete) is now busted in Mojave and will only show the first file selected, making quickview now useless. In High Sierra and prior (back to Snow Leopard at least?) this would work and show you the preview of the most recently highlighted item, so in a selection of 20 items, if you shift-up select item 21 you see 21. Now you only see item 1 all the time. It's a great annoyance. So no I cannot think of a reason to upgrade.
- Hates_ 6y ago
  I'm on HS too, but finding that occassionaly apps require 10.14+, which is making me consider upgrading.
- diebeforei485 6y ago
  Dark Mode :)
- infinityplus1 6y ago
  The new built-in screenshot/recorder feature is nice in Mojave.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I have found High Sierra to be subtly faster on older hardware, and subtly less crash-prone (although neither crash often). So I would suggest staying put absent a reason not too. High Sierra was a very good release.
stadeschuldt 6y ago
Direct download links macOS Catalina 10.15.5 Update: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2039 https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2039 macOS Catalina 10.15.5 Combo Update: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2040 https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2040
azangru 6y ago
Anyone using Node.js for work who has updated to Catalina here? How did it go? I heard there were problems with node-gyp, but didn't investigate further. Everything running smoothly now? Any gotchas?
- nvahalik 6y ago
  I helped a junior dev get set up with this a couple of weeks ago. The docs on GitHub worked just fine.
- Sayrus 6y ago
  I had to reinstall xcode cli tools as node-gyp couldn't compile anything after the update. However, this is pretty straightforward and there wasn't any gotchas. I did not investigate the root cause so reinstalling XCode might be a bit overkill.
  - holstvoogd 6y ago
    yeah, you have to run xcode-select --install after every update/install afaik
- jorisw 6y ago
  I use Node.js all day, no change here after updating. I use n to manage Node.js versions.
- egorfine 6y ago
  No problem with node.js and native modules development whatsoever.
- woutr_be 6y ago
  I haven’t experienced any issues at both of my machines. I have a couple of different version through nvm, all running smooth from the start.
MperorM 6y ago
Since Catalina I have been getting daily freezes, where the entire operating system locks up. I can still move the cursor around and audio keeps playing as well, but everything else is completely frozen. Once in a while the freeze lasts so long the computer crashes resulting in a crash report: Termination Reason: WATCHDOG, [0x1] monitoring timed out for service Termination Details: WATCHDOG, checkin with service: WindowServer returned not alive with context: unresponsive work processor(s): WindowServer main thread I am at my wits end to what can be causing this. Is anyone else experiencing similar freezes?
- fender1959 6y ago
  I have the same issues !! I have a couple of raid drives and third 10T - a second dell monitor connected to my iMac pro 18 core....If I loop a time line in fcpx, loop audio in Logic, run the Black Magic disk test my system will freeze, still playing audio then give up the cursor then hang fully and crash = in the spin dump we get the watchdog time out !!!! I am on 10.5.5 looks like its some kind of GPU issue
- jurip 6y ago
  I just had that yesterday. Not sure if I've ever seen it before, but yeah.
- zerkten 6y ago
  Sounds like what they were talking about on the atp.fm podcast recently.
- logical_proof 6y ago
  I am! It only happens when I am on multiple monitors (clamshell opened or closed) and usually when I am in a video conference (zoom, hangouts, and G2meeting). Thought it was overheating.
  - brmcd 6y ago
    Im seeming to have the same issue. 2019 MBP connecting through USB-C. However, I find the issue is less frequent (to non existent) after I switched to a USB-C to HDMI adapter.
lxgr 6y ago
Battery health management sounds great! I wish there was a way to customize this, though: Thinkpads have (on Linux) allowed setting thresholds for "charge only when less than" or "charge only up to" for many years now. Given that such primitives must also exist as part of 10.15.5 now, I hope that somebody will figure out how to modify the default behavior.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  There's an app for that called Aldente[0]. I am sceptical of the benefits though, too much of micromanagement for a device that's supposed to just work. I mean you can be better off if instead of undercharging the device all the time and have less than optimal charge when you need it today you can have a device that holds just as little charge some time in the feature and fix it by replacing the battery if it turns into an issue. Live the high life today worry-free and suffer tomorrow instead of suffering today for some possible occasion in the feature where you might need few more hours of juice. [0]: https://github.com/davidwernhart/AlDente https://github.com/davidwernhart/AlDente
- OJFord 6y ago
  I'd rather leave it to the OEM to determine the best setting (knowing their batteries and charge circuitry), but have the option in OSs that run on devices whose OEM hasn't done so.
  - chadlavi 6y ago
    on a mac those are the same thing
    - OJFord 6y ago
      That's my point - I replied to someone wanting it to be configurable on macOS; I'm saying why, I'd rather leave it to Apple, I assume they can do a better/more accurate job than me, but sure, it's great that you can do that on Linux if there aren't OEM drivers available with better tuning.
- diebeforei485 6y ago
AshamedCaptain 6y ago
Anybody knows what has happened that multiple manufacturers (at least Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, and now Apple) have released _all within this year_ updates to "enhance battery health management"? Even on devices which were otherwise out of support already. I ponder what has happened. I didn't hear any recent stories of battery explosions, huge battery recalls, or new regulations, yet all manufacturers are reacting to something.
- riscy 6y ago
  Apple got sued for throttling iPhones with overly aged batteries. My understanding is that for all battery-dependent devices, you either sometimes throttle the CPU so it doesn’t demand more voltage than the battery can reliably deliver, or else you risk sudden power loss at what appears to be 20% life. After the lawsuit I assume now all manufacturers leaving it up to the consumer to decide which behavior they want.
  - Reason077 6y ago
    There's nothing wrong with throttling in itself. Pretty much anyone will prefer a performance hit to a spontaneous shutdown. Where Apple got in trouble was that they were doing it secretly. Now days they still do the throttling, but you can go into battery status and it tells you if the battery is delivering peak performance or not.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      It actually gets worse in Apple's case. They were doing it secretly, which is bad enough, but they were also denying warranty repairs to throttled phones (since policy was to only conduct the repairs once an arbitrary "health" metric fell below a certain point, and the throttling kicked in first). This meant your options were to either deal with the crap performance, or void your warranty by installing a third party battery.
      - Reason077 6y ago
        > "your options were to either deal with the crap performance, or void your warranty by installing a third party battery." Or pay Apple a not-entirely-unreasonable fee to get them to replace the battery ($49 IIRC?), a bit more than the third party price but perhaps worth it for peace of mind.
api 6y ago
Looking forward to seeing whether this contains a microcode or OS patch to fix what appears to be an Ice Lake CPU bug: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310 Read the whole thing. It really appears as if there is a virtualization-escaping CPU-crashing bug in Ice Lake (10th generation) Intel chips that was discovered because it exclusively crashes when used with Jetbrains IDEs. Sounds unlikely, yes, but seriously read the whole thing.
- api 6y ago
  Self-reply: no, it apparently does not. Microcode rev is the same and the issue is still there. TL;DR: Jetbrains IDEs all crash on the 2020 Air, which has a 10th gen Ice Lake CPU in it. Sometimes it brings down the OS. Doesn't happen at all on older Macs. At first I and everyone else thought it was a MacOS or maybe graphics driver bug. Then the plot thickened... I tried it in a Parallels Linux VM, and it crashed and brought down the entire host. Not the VM, the host. This should not be possible. Then someone reported that it also afflicts a Microsoft Surface model with the same generation CPU. So given that it escapes VM isolation and occurs on multiple OSes and hardware, it really appears as if this is an Intel CPU bug being triggered by some exotic pattern of instructions being generated by the JVM. I must also add that nothing else crashes on this machine. Nothing. I've run multiple OSes in concurrent VMs, done heavy work, run GPU stress tests, and it's rock solid... unless I fire up CLion or GoLand... then kaboom. No I'm not the only reporter. No it's not (insert mundane thing here). Read the whole thread I linked above.
therockhead 6y ago
I have Catalina on a iMac Pro, a 16inch and 15 MacBook pro and for what it worth have hit zero issues.
- yedpodtrzitko 6y ago
  "works on my machine"
  - therockhead 6y ago
    "machines" ;)
  - frereubu 6y ago
    Most of this thread is anecdata, which tends to skew heavily negative. As a comment above says, it's difficult to tell whether these are issues at scale, and whenever I read these complaint-heavy anecdata threads I always feel like chipping in that I've had very few problems with my Mid-2014 MacBook Pro 15" on all versions of MacOS that have been release since I bought it. I'm not even sure what the purpose of threads like this is, really.
    - snazz 6y ago
      Yes. It's extremely difficult to get an idea of the scale of these problems from these threads because they bring out a lot of +1 piggybacking ("I have this issue too"). From there, it inevitably goes into a thread about the demise of Apple's quality control. Somebody should make an accurate product problems site where you can share your issues and people can only vote on them if they legitimately have that issue. Then it would be obvious the extent to which the problem is actually there.
  - chongli 6y ago
    This sort of low-effort drive-by dismissal is not in the spirit of the HN community guidelines [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- 6y ago
jacobush 6y ago
My 10.15.4 tells me since I installed it there is an update, but when I go into settings to install the update, there is nothing to install.
- jorisw 6y ago
  Hit Cmd-R from within the preference pane
archived22 6y ago
Amid lockdown, I am scared to update.
- jedieaston 6y ago
  It's fairly easy to install multiple versions of macOS on your drive to test [0]. You could create a separate install of Catalina and test your applications with it before making the move (which Apple now thinks is a bit more urgent for some reason). [0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208891 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208891
pmarreck 6y ago
I've been an Apple guy since 1984 when I was 12, and Catalina has finally pushed me to Linux for my daily driver. I'll still keep Apples around due to Apple's mostly excellent ecosystem execution, but... something has gone missing lately
- holstvoogd 6y ago
  Almost there too. Too much crappy deamons, too much cloud integration. And now since a week or two my bluetooth cannot connect to my external speaker. Looks like only a fresh install _might_ fix it... I've already bought a linux laptop for personal use, but it is just to crappy to use. I might just have to continue my efforts to get a proper linux distro on my mbp.
tibbydudeza 6y ago
Is reset PRAM still a thing ???. I used to have a Mac Pro (cheesegrater) but switched back about 2 years ago due to having a kid in college and Dell and Windows 10 were not too shabby. Probably on my 4th Windows 10 release from the original that Dell shipped with and it has been rather stable system.
bjoli 6y ago
Catalina decided to remap my paragraph key to "ö" this week (using a 3rd party Swedish Dvorak layout). Remaking the layout to the proper symbol works for about an hour. It is my Emacs prefix for functions I don't consider important enough to warrant their own direct key bindings. Annoying doesn't cut it. I haven't done a factory reset yet, but I started backups today to be able to. Catalina is a disaster. I got my Mac for free from a relative,but I sure as hell won't buy another.
- bjoli 6y ago
  So: The error seems to be that the keyboard assistant expects qwerty. It must have run some time, and it wanted me to press the button next to the left shift key, which on svdvorak is "ö". I had to delete the library/preferences/com.keyboardsomethingsomething and redo the keyboard identification and press the "<" key (which on svdvorak is about as far away as you can come from the ö key). Now it works.
ksec 6y ago
Sigh. Now every time I use Speech to Text there is a sound before the dictation. Before Catalina you could disable it in setting but now the setting is complete gone. And Apple wanted Voice Over to replace this dictation. The problem is most Apps doesn't even support this type of input. Example I cant use Voice Over for dictation on WhatsApp, but I could do it with old double Fn Key Dictation. Not to mention the voice over recognition by default uses Enhance Dictation which is offline, and its results is actually worst and slower than online dictation. Basically the worst of both worlds. It is super annoying.
trishankdatadog 6y ago
n=2 anecdata: no problems updating two MacBook Pros from 2017 and 2018, which were also already on Catalina.
stuaxo 6y ago
Does it have any fixes for the notarization delays ?
spacephysics 6y ago
Is there any point in downgrading to Mojave from Catalina? Haven’t looked into it, so I assume it’s a pain. But the semi-daily kernel panic, over heating, kernel tasks taking up 80%+ CPU is rediculous for a $3k+ laptop
- asdff 6y ago
  Set up a partition and find out! Won't be possible if your mac is newer than mojave, though.
ehsanullahjan 6y ago
My MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) was having kernel panics multiple times a day after having been asleep for extend periods. This was extremely annoying, as you can imagine. I’m happy to report that the Catalina 10.15.5 update fixes the kernel panics for me. The issue I experienced has been well documented [here](https://mrmacintosh.com/10-15-4-update-wake-from-sleep-kernel-panic-in-16-mbpro-2019 https://mrmacintosh.com/10-15-4-update-wake-from-sleep-kerne...) and elsewhere on the web. I use my MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) with a CalDigit TS3 Plus Dock and LG 32” 4K monitor. It’s worth noting that using the computer undocked never gave me any problems.
- perardi 6y ago
  Thank you for documenting this. I have been getting exactly this kernel panic dump on my 16-inch MacBook Pro, and it's good to know I'm not sitting on a lemon. (Another lemon. My first one was absolutely a lemon.)
- k3liutZu 6y ago
  > My MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) was having kernel panics multiple times a day after having been asleep for extend periods. This was extremely annoying, as you can imagine. I’m happy to report that the Catalina 10.15.5 update fixes the kernel panics for me. Will update ASAP. Thank you for beta-testing this!
naetius 6y ago
While I haven't had nearly as many bad experiences with Catalina as some other users, I am indeed starting to feel increasingly uneasy with the overall quality of the platform, both as a user and as a developer. I've been a Mac user since the late 2000s: the first Mac I could afford at the time was a MacMini G4. When I booted that machine up for the first time I was amazed by the quality and the refinements of the platform. When I started looking digging into the platform as a developer the feeling was exactly the same: care and refinements were almost omnipresent in every aspect of the platform. While bugs - and even nasty ones - have never been aliens on Mac OS X/macOS, what I've personally started to experience in the past few years is a feeling of neglect toward the platform. Yes, Catalyst seems to go against this trend: its intent, though, is to ease the porting effort of iOS applications to Mac. A certainly laudable goal. What would probably be more laudable for Mac users and developers are: core platform stability and quality, API stability, developer documentation overhaul [1]. Our CI breaks every single time there's a minor macOS update and/or an Xcode update: we're at the point where our macOS UITests (XCTest) require more maintenance to keep working than the application itself. XCTest on macOS has ridiculous bugs. I lost count of the radars we've opened, and the sample apps for reduction we've sent to Apple. At every single minor macOS upgrade, few users complain that our application "doesn't work anymore" in certain cases. And to be exquisitely blunt: there ain't wrong with the application itself. Rebooting after a macOS upgrade fixes whatever event tap regression we hit in Quartz. In general, what I'd personally like to see: * a less "hysterical" approach to the OS would be so. much. appreciated. (eg: focus on the few important core things, keep them working) * release when it's ready: this whole marketing driven annual release cycle is unsustainable I do understand that the vast majority of Apple's income is not Mac related at this point, but WTH... [1] The whole business with documentation is amazingly summarized by this HN post from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19966135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19966135 [Apologies if this comment sounds a bit complaining in nature, that's not what I meant]
- reaperducer 6y ago
  When I booted that machine up for the first time I was amazed by the quality and the refinements of the platform. And the speed of the boot process. I switched to Macs around 2000. One of the things that struck me was how quickly Macs booted compared with Windows machines. Today, a Macs don't seem to have any advantage when it comes to cold booting. Sleep, yes. But not a real boot.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
amaccuish 6y ago
And still I lose IPv6 connectivity after a while :(
ryanmccullagh 6y ago
It looks like they still haven't fixed the Power on thunderbolt failed issue.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
PunksATawnyFill 6y ago
I don't see anything about making group FaceTimes actually work.
msie 6y ago
Finally! They fixed my Image Capture bug! Now I can import pictures from my iPhone AND they will be deleted from the iPhone. I've only imported 7 movies at one time with no problem. So far, so good...
eatbitseveryday 6y ago
> Battery health management is on by default when you buy a new Mac notebook with macOS 10.15.5, or after you upgrade to macOS 10.15.5 on a Mac notebook with Thunderbolt 3 ports. Unfortunately... this update does not help everyone. I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) and these changes in the System Preferences are not visible. This quote was found only when digging further in the "How to control the battery health management feature" instructions.
Tre666 6y ago
I have a 2014 mbpro. It was working fine but when I try to export from final cut it crashed. After restart I tried to export again and it said that my battery was dying (it was at 55%) then powered down
- Tre666 6y ago
  This is actually the 1st time the mb ever crashed. I've had no issues with it

228 points by simjue 6y ago

> Battery Health Management > • Battery health management to help maximize battery lifespan for Mac notebooks > • Energy Saver preference pane now displays battery condition and recommends if the battery needs to be serviced > • Option to disable battery health management <<< Apple learned from their iOS update/iPhone slowdown faux pas.

dthul 6y ago

Since the last Catalina update (10.15.4) Firefox is almost unusable for me, whereas it was buttery smooth before. There are constant multi-second freezes and when I switch tabs I often see a gray loading screen before the content shows up a few seconds later. Never saw that happen before. Maybe it's just a coincidence and has nothing to do with the Catalina update, but I am interested whether other people experience the same.

72deluxe 6y ago
Have you tried profiling it in Instruments to see what Firefox is doing?
asdff 6y ago
I experience this in a lot of different apps on catalina. just a brief flash of something. Seems to have gone away in 10.15.5, but I've only had the update for an hour.
dthul 6y ago
Follow up: The latest Firefox update seems to have solved the issue. So far.

asplake 6y ago

Last time I tried, it was not at all well documented how to upgrade to Catalina when your iMac's boot drive is 1) an external SSD and 2) not (yet) formatted to APFS. Giving it another try now, but unless it suddenly got a whole lot easier I'll probably be passing again. Have it on my 2016 and 2019 Airs though, no issues.

asplake 6y ago
Passing once again...

sccxy 6y ago

Thanks, but I'll wait for some months before update.

diimdeep 6y ago

> The battery health management feature in macOS 10.15.5 is designed to improve your battery's lifespan by reducing the rate at which it chemically ages. The feature does this by monitoring your battery's temperature history and its charging patterns. > Based on the measurements that it collects, battery health management may reduce your battery's maximum charge when in this mode. This happens as needed to ensure that your battery charges to a level that's optimized for your usage—reducing wear on the battery, and slowing its chemical aging. Sound great. I hope this means no more swollen batteries. https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/What_to_do_with_a_swollen_battery https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/What_to_do_with_a_swollen_batter... https://lepageblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/how-to-fix-a-swollen-macbook-battery/ https://lepageblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/how-to-fix-a-swo...

irjustin 6y ago
Deep discharge & Heat are common accelerators of swelling. Avoiding going to <10% battery and running aggressive heat dissipation will always help prolong the life. My favorite is Macs Fan Control[0] for removing heat. 40' the fan is spinning mid range speed and by 50' it's full 6500 rpm. It's the least I can do =/ [0]https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  I think I'll rather take the battery performance hit than bear with (near-?)constant fan noise.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    My favorite nerd hysteria conspiracy theory is that Apple runs its computers hot and fans loud in order to sell AirPods.
    - snazz 6y ago
      I think the goal of running Macs hot is to prevent the fans from kicking in for most use-cases. If you're running twelve virtual machines and compiling Chromium simultaneously, then you might need earplugs.

m3nu 6y ago

Third battery in my Macbook Pro in 3 years. Very excited about this feature.

randyrand 6y ago
Do you leave your macbook pro plugged in all the time?
- irrational 6y ago
  I do. I rarely need to take it anywhere.
  - inapis 6y ago
    This destroys battery. You do need to charge and discharge the battery frequently.
    - enriquto 6y ago
      This is an extremely bad UI for battery management logic. If that is the case, a computer that is always plugged should discharge and re-charge the individual battery cells one by one to enlarge their lifespan.
    - kstenerud 6y ago
      Seems strange that they don't put code in to repeatedly drain the battery to 90% and then charge it again when plugged in, if that were the case.
      - jannes 6y ago
        The happy range for a modern battery is 20-80%. The bottom and top 20% are what's causing the wear, so merely staying between 90% and 100% won't do you any good.
        deleted 6y ago

darkteflon 6y ago

> Major new releases of macOS are no longer hidden when using the softwareupdate(8) command with the --ignore flag. This change also affects macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra after installing Security Update 2020-003. As a Mojave user, not happy about this.

hrak 6y ago
They did this just to annoy the scores of people who refuse to upgrade to Catalina.
sheinsheish 6y ago
Meaning? Can you elaborate a bit? I’ve just downgraded to Mojave on an iMac (fusion drive) primarily used for Logic Pro. Do you think Mojave is not getting updates anymore ?
- jiripospisil 6y ago
  The "ignored" flag caused macOS to NOT offer the update to the new major version every once in a while (a little popup in the top right corner). It also made the Software Update app report that there are no updates available. After installing this update, the Update app reports the update to Catalina even though I have ignored the update previously on this machine. This does not mean that Mojave is not getting any more updates, it's just that macOS will nag you to update (but you will still be able to dismiss it manually) without the option to tell it to stop.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    Is there a patch somewhere that turns the nag off permanently? I'm definitely not updating several of my machines to Catalina in the next years, and the nag is just an useless distraction.
    - chrisfinazzo 6y ago
      There was a Mac911 article[1] by Glenn Fleishman which detailed how to do this back in October of last year. I have the following in a file called Catalina.sh: sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina" && defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0 && killall Dock Unfortunately - unless I'm mistaken - 2020-003 means this script is toast. [1]: https://www.macworld.com/article/3447396/how-to-stop-getting-a-reminder-to-update-to-catalina-in-macos.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3447396/how-to-stop-getting...

jneplokh 6y ago

> Improves performance on certain Mac models when enabling hardware acceleration in GPU-intensive apps such as those used for video conferencing Any info on which specific Mac models this applies to?

dijit 6y ago
Probably Skylake and up. As Skylake has very competent h265/HEVC decoding.

fossuser 6y ago

The group FaceTime UI is very strange, why have several overlapping boxes rather than just dividing the screen equally and using all of it? I know it's like this in iOS, but I'm not sure what group video looks like in macOS (though it sounds like it's the same based on the update text here). It's weird because the easier thing also seems like the obvious thing, and it's clearly better.

szhu 6y ago
I typically use video chat apps like Facebook, Google Meet, and Zoom. I think the grid is efficient from a space perspective -- there's less wasted space -- but the grid looks very corporate and boring. I think there's also a practical advantage of placing tiles haphazardly: it might help spatial memory. It's a lot harder to focus on or find a particular rectangle in a sea of rectangles than it is to follow a shape than looks a little different from the rest. However, I have never used FaceTime group calling (because I don't have most of my friends' phone numbers), so I don't whether this is effective in practice.
- Bellyache5 6y ago
  FWIW, I don't believe FaceTime requires others' phone numbers. I think it can be a phone number or any email address tied to their Apple ID, similar to iMessage.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I don't buy this - this feels like rationalizing a bad design decision after the fact. It seems like bad design to waste space on a small screen because it looks 'boring'.
reaperducer 6y ago
why have several overlapping boxes rather than just dividing the screen equally and using all of it It's good for smaller screens. I was on a Zoom video conference last week, and all I could think about was how so many people who weren't allowed to/going to speak were taking up valuable screen real estate.

saagarjha 6y ago

Security content: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211170 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211170

72deluxe 6y ago
Thanks, that's quite a lot of fixes.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I should note that this list isn't unusually long for a point release.

i2shar 6y ago

It's crazy that even dot releases are a full 3.6G download

ajconway 6y ago
If I'm not mistaken, the amount you download when updating from a previous version is significantly less than a full installer image.
lostmsu 6y ago
Still far from Microsoft Visual Studio update, which renamed VSO into Azure DevOps, and required 1.2GB download basically just for that.
TheChaplain 6y ago
Binary patching hasn't been a thing for years unfortunately. Even bigger wreck on consoles these days, where an update can be 50+ gigabytes...
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Where are you getting 50+ GB console updates?
  - Operyl 6y ago
    I think they’re referring to games. A good example? CoD Modern Warfare (the recent one) _always_ seems to have 50GB updates. It is rather annoying, even with fast internet.
    - Hamuko 6y ago
      I can't remember a time I've downloaded a patch that is as big as the base game on a console. Granted, most of the games I play are on physical copies.
    - raihansaputra 6y ago
      Usually it's around 30GB. I play on PC and have to remind all of my party to update the night before. Each update seems to only come with small changes, and the total game size only increases by ~5GB usually. So they're either recompressing previous assets or changing stuff that can't be patched in along with new content. These updates usually happens every week/every other week. It's insane. I think all of the previous CoD:MW titles combined isn't as big as this one alone.

dochtman 6y ago

Software Update isn't showing me 10.15.5 yet. Others? On my 2019 16" I've definitely noticed that Zoom calls slow stuff down by a lot. Would be great if that gets fixed here.

rado 6y ago
Press ⌘+R in System Preferences – Software Update (really)
- caribousoup 6y ago
  Wow, I never realized this. Make sure the Search field isn't focused, it is by default on launch.
72deluxe 6y ago
Why would a single application's behaviour get "fixed" by an OS update?? Isn't the issue with Zoom? Have you looked in Activity Monitor or Instruments to see what Zoom is doing to see why the machine gets sluggish?
- sibartlett 6y ago
  > Improves performance on certain Mac models when enabling hardware acceleration in GPU-intensive apps such as those used for video conferencing
  - 72deluxe 6y ago
    Thanks! Shows me up for not noticing that. Thanks for highlighting it, I honestly would have not noticed it otherwise.

dirtylowprofile 6y ago

Just updated my 2012 MBP. So far still alive.

TMWNN 6y ago
Same, except on Mojave. Keeping fingers crossed that 10.16 will continue supporting 2012.
- dirtylowprofile 6y ago
  Why are you still on Mojave? If I may ask
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    I still have 32-bit applications. More to the point, I don't know of any compelling reasons to upgrade from Mojave. The new battery-conditioning feature may be the first such.
  - have_faith 6y ago
    Still on Mojave on my work laptop. If there's no clear benefit to outweigh potentially breaking some local setup I have then I ignore it.
  - infinityplus1 6y ago
    I have a working machine and wherever I have read, Catalina is buggy. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade and waste time fixing bugs.
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago
    Speaking for myself (not the person you asked) I still have machines on El Capitan and don't plan to upgrade them because they just work. High Sierra almost completely bricked them. Every new version of MacOS is more buggy than the previous and it takes dozens of hours of googling to figure out how to work around the bugs, restore features Apple removed, and turn off misfeatures Apple added.
6y ago

Reason077 6y ago

> ”Addresses an issue that may prevent password entry on the login screen” I’m still on Mojave 10.14.6 and this hits me from time to time, maybe once a month or so. Very annoying bug. Great if they have finally fixed it!

ttfkam 6y ago
But if you update, you'll get nagware on upgrading to Catalina. Damned if you do...

rado 6y ago

Where is the Safari 13.1.1 changelog? Thanks.

css 6y ago
As far as I can tell, this is all they publish: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211177 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211177

isaikumar 6y ago

Did anyone face any issues installing the update? I have been lucky till now as I have never faced issue while updating. But then I read news reports that say people faced issues and macbooks were bricked while updating. So I thought from now on I would wait few days before I update.

m1h4 6y ago

Still having a (at least one of the multiple different) kernel panic during sleep: panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff801e29169c): Sleep transition timed out after 180 seconds while calling power state change callbacks. Suspected bundle: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily. Thread 0x2754. Ever since moving to a brand new 16" MBP there isn't a day that passes wihout me being welcomed by the crash report dialog…

robin_reala 6y ago
I had one of those for the first time last night (new Macbook Air) on 10.15.4. Shame that you’re seeing it in 10.15.5 too…
simonklitj 6y ago
Read a user somewhere reporting that leaving his iPhone plugged into his Mac caused this problem to occur almost daily. After charging it with a wall charger, and not having it plugged in, the problem went away. After resetting PRAM and SMC too. Hope the issue gets resolved for you someday!
kjakm 6y ago
Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I've started getting these in the last week. It coincided with a screen replacement but sounds like that might be a coincidence based on your report.
paultopia 6y ago
Oh damnit, damnit. I've been having those on 10.15.4 too, was really hoping they'd fixed it on this one. It's really profoundly upsetting to spend $3,500 on a brand new computer by the most reliable major manufacturer in the industry and still have daily damn kernel panics.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  > by the most reliable major manufacturer in the industry You might want to revisit that. If you are looking for reliability, ThinkPads are way better.

jevgeni 6y ago

Will this update unbrick my iMac that 10.15.1 bricked?

chris_wot 6y ago

I am constantly gobsmacked by how slow point release upgrades are. On Ubuntu, it takes virtually no time and doesn’t interrupt my workflow.

LeSaucy 6y ago
There are plenty of disruptive ubuntu upgrade issues, for example for almost 5 years (through 12.04 to 16.04!) if you installed on LVM volumes your /boot partition never cleaned up old vmlinuz and initrd images, causing dpkg-reconfigure to fail, leaving dpkg completely broken. Operating systems are hard.
- chris_wot 6y ago
  Sure, that’s a hard failure, I was talking about the average speed to install an update.

albertzeyer 6y ago

I'm still on High Sierra... I wonder if there are really good reasons to upgrade to Mojave? (I only know about disadvantages about upgrading to Catalina.)

72deluxe 6y ago
I'm on High Sierra on one Mac and Mojave on another. Other than APFS, I cannot see any real differences in usability, other than opening quickview and then pressing shift and up to go to the previous file in a list (so you could look over many photographs and select them so as to choose which ones to delete) is now busted in Mojave and will only show the first file selected, making quickview now useless. In High Sierra and prior (back to Snow Leopard at least?) this would work and show you the preview of the most recently highlighted item, so in a selection of 20 items, if you shift-up select item 21 you see 21. Now you only see item 1 all the time. It's a great annoyance. So no I cannot think of a reason to upgrade.
Hates_ 6y ago
I'm on HS too, but finding that occassionaly apps require 10.14+, which is making me consider upgrading.
diebeforei485 6y ago
Dark Mode :)
infinityplus1 6y ago
The new built-in screenshot/recorder feature is nice in Mojave.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I have found High Sierra to be subtly faster on older hardware, and subtly less crash-prone (although neither crash often). So I would suggest staying put absent a reason not too. High Sierra was a very good release.

stadeschuldt 6y ago

Direct download links macOS Catalina 10.15.5 Update: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2039 https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2039 macOS Catalina 10.15.5 Combo Update: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2040 https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2040

azangru 6y ago

Anyone using Node.js for work who has updated to Catalina here? How did it go? I heard there were problems with node-gyp, but didn't investigate further. Everything running smoothly now? Any gotchas?

nvahalik 6y ago
I helped a junior dev get set up with this a couple of weeks ago. The docs on GitHub worked just fine.
Sayrus 6y ago
I had to reinstall xcode cli tools as node-gyp couldn't compile anything after the update. However, this is pretty straightforward and there wasn't any gotchas. I did not investigate the root cause so reinstalling XCode might be a bit overkill.
- holstvoogd 6y ago
  yeah, you have to run xcode-select --install after every update/install afaik
jorisw 6y ago
I use Node.js all day, no change here after updating. I use n to manage Node.js versions.
egorfine 6y ago
No problem with node.js and native modules development whatsoever.
woutr_be 6y ago
I haven’t experienced any issues at both of my machines. I have a couple of different version through nvm, all running smooth from the start.

MperorM 6y ago

Since Catalina I have been getting daily freezes, where the entire operating system locks up. I can still move the cursor around and audio keeps playing as well, but everything else is completely frozen. Once in a while the freeze lasts so long the computer crashes resulting in a crash report: Termination Reason: WATCHDOG, [0x1] monitoring timed out for service Termination Details: WATCHDOG, checkin with service: WindowServer returned not alive with context: unresponsive work processor(s): WindowServer main thread I am at my wits end to what can be causing this. Is anyone else experiencing similar freezes?

fender1959 6y ago
I have the same issues !! I have a couple of raid drives and third 10T - a second dell monitor connected to my iMac pro 18 core....If I loop a time line in fcpx, loop audio in Logic, run the Black Magic disk test my system will freeze, still playing audio then give up the cursor then hang fully and crash = in the spin dump we get the watchdog time out !!!! I am on 10.5.5 looks like its some kind of GPU issue
jurip 6y ago
I just had that yesterday. Not sure if I've ever seen it before, but yeah.
zerkten 6y ago
Sounds like what they were talking about on the atp.fm podcast recently.
logical_proof 6y ago
I am! It only happens when I am on multiple monitors (clamshell opened or closed) and usually when I am in a video conference (zoom, hangouts, and G2meeting). Thought it was overheating.
- brmcd 6y ago
  Im seeming to have the same issue. 2019 MBP connecting through USB-C. However, I find the issue is less frequent (to non existent) after I switched to a USB-C to HDMI adapter.

lxgr 6y ago

Battery health management sounds great! I wish there was a way to customize this, though: Thinkpads have (on Linux) allowed setting thresholds for "charge only when less than" or "charge only up to" for many years now. Given that such primitives must also exist as part of 10.15.5 now, I hope that somebody will figure out how to modify the default behavior.

mrtksn 6y ago
There's an app for that called Aldente[0]. I am sceptical of the benefits though, too much of micromanagement for a device that's supposed to just work. I mean you can be better off if instead of undercharging the device all the time and have less than optimal charge when you need it today you can have a device that holds just as little charge some time in the feature and fix it by replacing the battery if it turns into an issue. Live the high life today worry-free and suffer tomorrow instead of suffering today for some possible occasion in the feature where you might need few more hours of juice. [0]: https://github.com/davidwernhart/AlDente https://github.com/davidwernhart/AlDente
OJFord 6y ago
I'd rather leave it to the OEM to determine the best setting (knowing their batteries and charge circuitry), but have the option in OSs that run on devices whose OEM hasn't done so.
- chadlavi 6y ago
  on a mac those are the same thing
  - OJFord 6y ago
    That's my point - I replied to someone wanting it to be configurable on macOS; I'm saying why, I'd rather leave it to Apple, I assume they can do a better/more accurate job than me, but sure, it's great that you can do that on Linux if there aren't OEM drivers available with better tuning.
diebeforei485 6y ago

AshamedCaptain 6y ago

Anybody knows what has happened that multiple manufacturers (at least Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, and now Apple) have released _all within this year_ updates to "enhance battery health management"? Even on devices which were otherwise out of support already. I ponder what has happened. I didn't hear any recent stories of battery explosions, huge battery recalls, or new regulations, yet all manufacturers are reacting to something.

riscy 6y ago
Apple got sued for throttling iPhones with overly aged batteries. My understanding is that for all battery-dependent devices, you either sometimes throttle the CPU so it doesn’t demand more voltage than the battery can reliably deliver, or else you risk sudden power loss at what appears to be 20% life. After the lawsuit I assume now all manufacturers leaving it up to the consumer to decide which behavior they want.
- Reason077 6y ago
  There's nothing wrong with throttling in itself. Pretty much anyone will prefer a performance hit to a spontaneous shutdown. Where Apple got in trouble was that they were doing it secretly. Now days they still do the throttling, but you can go into battery status and it tells you if the battery is delivering peak performance or not.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    It actually gets worse in Apple's case. They were doing it secretly, which is bad enough, but they were also denying warranty repairs to throttled phones (since policy was to only conduct the repairs once an arbitrary "health" metric fell below a certain point, and the throttling kicked in first). This meant your options were to either deal with the crap performance, or void your warranty by installing a third party battery.
    - Reason077 6y ago
      > "your options were to either deal with the crap performance, or void your warranty by installing a third party battery." Or pay Apple a not-entirely-unreasonable fee to get them to replace the battery ($49 IIRC?), a bit more than the third party price but perhaps worth it for peace of mind.

api 6y ago

Looking forward to seeing whether this contains a microcode or OS patch to fix what appears to be an Ice Lake CPU bug: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310 Read the whole thing. It really appears as if there is a virtualization-escaping CPU-crashing bug in Ice Lake (10th generation) Intel chips that was discovered because it exclusively crashes when used with Jetbrains IDEs. Sounds unlikely, yes, but seriously read the whole thing.

api 6y ago
Self-reply: no, it apparently does not. Microcode rev is the same and the issue is still there. TL;DR: Jetbrains IDEs all crash on the 2020 Air, which has a 10th gen Ice Lake CPU in it. Sometimes it brings down the OS. Doesn't happen at all on older Macs. At first I and everyone else thought it was a MacOS or maybe graphics driver bug. Then the plot thickened... I tried it in a Parallels Linux VM, and it crashed and brought down the entire host. Not the VM, the host. This should not be possible. Then someone reported that it also afflicts a Microsoft Surface model with the same generation CPU. So given that it escapes VM isolation and occurs on multiple OSes and hardware, it really appears as if this is an Intel CPU bug being triggered by some exotic pattern of instructions being generated by the JVM. I must also add that nothing else crashes on this machine. Nothing. I've run multiple OSes in concurrent VMs, done heavy work, run GPU stress tests, and it's rock solid... unless I fire up CLion or GoLand... then kaboom. No I'm not the only reporter. No it's not (insert mundane thing here). Read the whole thread I linked above.

therockhead 6y ago

I have Catalina on a iMac Pro, a 16inch and 15 MacBook pro and for what it worth have hit zero issues.

yedpodtrzitko 6y ago
"works on my machine"
- therockhead 6y ago
  "machines" ;)
- frereubu 6y ago
  Most of this thread is anecdata, which tends to skew heavily negative. As a comment above says, it's difficult to tell whether these are issues at scale, and whenever I read these complaint-heavy anecdata threads I always feel like chipping in that I've had very few problems with my Mid-2014 MacBook Pro 15" on all versions of MacOS that have been release since I bought it. I'm not even sure what the purpose of threads like this is, really.
  - snazz 6y ago
    Yes. It's extremely difficult to get an idea of the scale of these problems from these threads because they bring out a lot of +1 piggybacking ("I have this issue too"). From there, it inevitably goes into a thread about the demise of Apple's quality control. Somebody should make an accurate product problems site where you can share your issues and people can only vote on them if they legitimately have that issue. Then it would be obvious the extent to which the problem is actually there.
- chongli 6y ago
  This sort of low-effort drive-by dismissal is not in the spirit of the HN community guidelines [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
6y ago

jacobush 6y ago

My 10.15.4 tells me since I installed it there is an update, but when I go into settings to install the update, there is nothing to install.

jorisw 6y ago
Hit Cmd-R from within the preference pane

archived22 6y ago

Amid lockdown, I am scared to update.

jedieaston 6y ago
It's fairly easy to install multiple versions of macOS on your drive to test [0]. You could create a separate install of Catalina and test your applications with it before making the move (which Apple now thinks is a bit more urgent for some reason). [0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208891 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208891

pmarreck 6y ago

I've been an Apple guy since 1984 when I was 12, and Catalina has finally pushed me to Linux for my daily driver. I'll still keep Apples around due to Apple's mostly excellent ecosystem execution, but... something has gone missing lately

holstvoogd 6y ago
Almost there too. Too much crappy deamons, too much cloud integration. And now since a week or two my bluetooth cannot connect to my external speaker. Looks like only a fresh install _might_ fix it... I've already bought a linux laptop for personal use, but it is just to crappy to use. I might just have to continue my efforts to get a proper linux distro on my mbp.

tibbydudeza 6y ago

Is reset PRAM still a thing ???. I used to have a Mac Pro (cheesegrater) but switched back about 2 years ago due to having a kid in college and Dell and Windows 10 were not too shabby. Probably on my 4th Windows 10 release from the original that Dell shipped with and it has been rather stable system.

bjoli 6y ago

Catalina decided to remap my paragraph key to "ö" this week (using a 3rd party Swedish Dvorak layout). Remaking the layout to the proper symbol works for about an hour. It is my Emacs prefix for functions I don't consider important enough to warrant their own direct key bindings. Annoying doesn't cut it. I haven't done a factory reset yet, but I started backups today to be able to. Catalina is a disaster. I got my Mac for free from a relative,but I sure as hell won't buy another.

bjoli 6y ago
So: The error seems to be that the keyboard assistant expects qwerty. It must have run some time, and it wanted me to press the button next to the left shift key, which on svdvorak is "ö". I had to delete the library/preferences/com.keyboardsomethingsomething and redo the keyboard identification and press the "<" key (which on svdvorak is about as far away as you can come from the ö key). Now it works.

ksec 6y ago

Sigh. Now every time I use Speech to Text there is a sound before the dictation. Before Catalina you could disable it in setting but now the setting is complete gone. And Apple wanted Voice Over to replace this dictation. The problem is most Apps doesn't even support this type of input. Example I cant use Voice Over for dictation on WhatsApp, but I could do it with old double Fn Key Dictation. Not to mention the voice over recognition by default uses Enhance Dictation which is offline, and its results is actually worst and slower than online dictation. Basically the worst of both worlds. It is super annoying.

trishankdatadog 6y ago

n=2 anecdata: no problems updating two MacBook Pros from 2017 and 2018, which were also already on Catalina.

stuaxo 6y ago

Does it have any fixes for the notarization delays ?

spacephysics 6y ago

Is there any point in downgrading to Mojave from Catalina? Haven’t looked into it, so I assume it’s a pain. But the semi-daily kernel panic, over heating, kernel tasks taking up 80%+ CPU is rediculous for a $3k+ laptop

asdff 6y ago
Set up a partition and find out! Won't be possible if your mac is newer than mojave, though.

ehsanullahjan 6y ago

My MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) was having kernel panics multiple times a day after having been asleep for extend periods. This was extremely annoying, as you can imagine. I’m happy to report that the Catalina 10.15.5 update fixes the kernel panics for me. The issue I experienced has been well documented [here](https://mrmacintosh.com/10-15-4-update-wake-from-sleep-kernel-panic-in-16-mbpro-2019 https://mrmacintosh.com/10-15-4-update-wake-from-sleep-kerne...) and elsewhere on the web. I use my MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) with a CalDigit TS3 Plus Dock and LG 32” 4K monitor. It’s worth noting that using the computer undocked never gave me any problems.

perardi 6y ago
Thank you for documenting this. I have been getting exactly this kernel panic dump on my 16-inch MacBook Pro, and it's good to know I'm not sitting on a lemon. (Another lemon. My first one was absolutely a lemon.)
k3liutZu 6y ago
> My MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) was having kernel panics multiple times a day after having been asleep for extend periods. This was extremely annoying, as you can imagine. I’m happy to report that the Catalina 10.15.5 update fixes the kernel panics for me. Will update ASAP. Thank you for beta-testing this!

naetius 6y ago

While I haven't had nearly as many bad experiences with Catalina as some other users, I am indeed starting to feel increasingly uneasy with the overall quality of the platform, both as a user and as a developer. I've been a Mac user since the late 2000s: the first Mac I could afford at the time was a MacMini G4. When I booted that machine up for the first time I was amazed by the quality and the refinements of the platform. When I started looking digging into the platform as a developer the feeling was exactly the same: care and refinements were almost omnipresent in every aspect of the platform. While bugs - and even nasty ones - have never been aliens on Mac OS X/macOS, what I've personally started to experience in the past few years is a feeling of neglect toward the platform. Yes, Catalyst seems to go against this trend: its intent, though, is to ease the porting effort of iOS applications to Mac. A certainly laudable goal. What would probably be more laudable for Mac users and developers are: core platform stability and quality, API stability, developer documentation overhaul [1]. Our CI breaks every single time there's a minor macOS update and/or an Xcode update: we're at the point where our macOS UITests (XCTest) require more maintenance to keep working than the application itself. XCTest on macOS has ridiculous bugs. I lost count of the radars we've opened, and the sample apps for reduction we've sent to Apple. At every single minor macOS upgrade, few users complain that our application "doesn't work anymore" in certain cases. And to be exquisitely blunt: there ain't wrong with the application itself. Rebooting after a macOS upgrade fixes whatever event tap regression we hit in Quartz. In general, what I'd personally like to see: * a less "hysterical" approach to the OS would be so. much. appreciated. (eg: focus on the few important core things, keep them working) * release when it's ready: this whole marketing driven annual release cycle is unsustainable I do understand that the vast majority of Apple's income is not Mac related at this point, but WTH... [1] The whole business with documentation is amazingly summarized by this HN post from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19966135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19966135 [Apologies if this comment sounds a bit complaining in nature, that's not what I meant]

reaperducer 6y ago
When I booted that machine up for the first time I was amazed by the quality and the refinements of the platform. And the speed of the boot process. I switched to Macs around 2000. One of the things that struck me was how quickly Macs booted compared with Windows machines. Today, a Macs don't seem to have any advantage when it comes to cold booting. Sleep, yes. But not a real boot.

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amaccuish 6y ago

And still I lose IPv6 connectivity after a while :(

ryanmccullagh 6y ago

It looks like they still haven't fixed the Power on thunderbolt failed issue.

deleted 6y ago

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PunksATawnyFill 6y ago

I don't see anything about making group FaceTimes actually work.

msie 6y ago

Finally! They fixed my Image Capture bug! Now I can import pictures from my iPhone AND they will be deleted from the iPhone. I've only imported 7 movies at one time with no problem. So far, so good...

eatbitseveryday 6y ago

> Battery health management is on by default when you buy a new Mac notebook with macOS 10.15.5, or after you upgrade to macOS 10.15.5 on a Mac notebook with Thunderbolt 3 ports. Unfortunately... this update does not help everyone. I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) and these changes in the System Preferences are not visible. This quote was found only when digging further in the "How to control the battery health management feature" instructions.

Tre666 6y ago

I have a 2014 mbpro. It was working fine but when I try to export from final cut it crashed. After restart I tried to export again and it said that my battery was dying (it was at 55%) then powered down

Tre666 6y ago
This is actually the 1st time the mb ever crashed. I've had no issues with it