macOS 10.15 Catalina

Sad Professor

Just announced at WWDC, out in Autumn as usual.

Major change is that iTunes is no more. Now separate Music, Podcasts and TV apps with device syncing relegated to the Finder. Also improvements to Photos, Notes, Reminders and Safari. And the ability to use an iPad as a second display and use the Pencil via the iPad. Some iOS features like Screentime and Activation Lock (only recent Macs) have also been ported over. Also Voice Control for navigating the Mac via voice commands.

Supports all mid-2012 or later Macs.

More here: https://www.apple.com/macos/catalina-preview/

Thoughts?

Happy that my mid 2012 macbook pro gets yet another extension. Great value.

iniall

Delighted that my 2013 MacBook Air gets another OS update - thought that Mojave would be the end of the road for it...

whippet

Using the iPad as a desktop extension is a game changer for me ! I use my MacBook Pro with two external displays on the desk and when I’m out and about - which is most of the time I really get frustrated with the single screen

Cabaal

No upgrade for me, Mid-2011 iMac 27" is too old.

To be honest for the performance loss I regret upgrading last time

calum

whippet wrote: »

Using the iPad as a desktop extension is a game changer for me ! I use my MacBook Pro with two external displays on the desk and when I’m out and about - which is most of the time I really get frustrated with the single screen

There have been plenty of great 3rd party solutions for that for some time (Duet, Luna Display etc.), if that's what you needed to keep you sane...

calum

OSI wrote: »

Duet has been widely condemned for being an unreliable piece of ****.

Has it? I've never heard that, and I've used it for years with no issues. But anyway, it's by no means the only option available.

PropJoe10

JayZeus wrote: »

Happy that my mid 2012 macbook pro gets yet another extension. Great value.

Likewise! Running a 2012 unibody that I wasn't expecting to get any more updates for. Nice to know I've at least another couple of years of support on this!

Installing the beta on it now actually.

IamMetaldave

OSI wrote: »

Duet has been widely condemned for being an unreliable piece of ****.

100% Agree. It's awful.

I too am pleased that my 2012 Air is going to see another update (the last I would imagine). I am planning an upgrade in the next 6 months so it won't make any odds going forward.

Sad Professor

GM is out but apparently quite buggy. Wouldn't surprise me if there's a second GM before release.

calum

Doubt I'll be going anywhere near it unless/until I need to get a new Mac. I have way too many bought-and-paid-for 32-bit apps and games still in use.

PropJoe10

Might not bother moving to this at all, Mojave runs great on my 2012. Might see if I can install it on my 2008 Mac Pro for the craic at some stage, though.

DubDJ

I can see Catalina being released this week. Although at the same time they might be holding it back until they have their rumoured October event, but more than likely it’s shipping soon especially with the GM already released.

I’m looking forward to it. The iTunes split and Finder being the new device manager makes a lot of sense to me. I’m glad Apple finally added auto dark mode switcher, should have been there on day 1.

jack presley

Out now.

jack presley

Not impressed with the Music app on first impressions.

I have about 50-60 playlists in my library and like a certain layout of what's displayed (band, album, song, time etc.). Apple Music gives a default that is different to what I want to see and there doesn't seem to be a way to change them all to my preferred format in one go so it looks like I'll have to go into each one individually and change.

Also when syncing music to the phone, the options (playlist, album, artist, genre) are still there but the album one which you used to able to see all albums by an artist in order is changed. Now you just see every album in your library in chronological order with no artist name so you can't differentiate between albums with the same name by different artists.

Sad Professor

Became unresponsive on the post-installation setup screen, had to force a restart. Now Mail won't open, keeps crashing. Finder is stuck loading for ages.

Not a good start. I'd strongly advise people to think twice before installing.

jack presley

jack presley wrote: »

Not impressed with the Music app on first impressions.

I have about 50-60 playlists in my library and like a certain layout of what's displayed (band, album, song, time etc.). Apple Music gives a default that is different to what I want to see and there doesn't seem to be a way to change them all to my preferred format in one go so it looks like I'll have to go into each one individually and change.

Also when syncing music to the phone, the options (playlist, album, artist, genre) are still there but the album one which you used to able to see all albums by an artist in order is changed. Now you just see every album in your library in chronological order with no artist name so you can't differentiate between albums with the same name by different artists.

My album art seems to be missing for a good chunk of my albums too.

IamMetaldave

Installed last night on my mid 2012 MacBook Air, it was using the old Microsoft minutes from years (time going up and down... ).. anyway, after a pretty slow install it seems to have gone smoothly enough and it's all working OK so far. What's funny is, by this time of the morning my fans would usually be blowing on full... with the update the machine is running much cooler, even taking a peek at the activity monitor, CPU use is down, memory pressure seems to be down too..

whippet

i installed it over night on my 2017 MBP 13" - and it did stall on start up this morning - restarted and it has been working away fine.

haven't played around with music or podcast yet ... but sidecar with my Gen 2 12.9" iPad Pro works a dream !! I work remotely and have a two external display set up in the home office .. so when i am out and about I do get frustrated with a single screen sometimes - however i've noticed that side care monsters the battery life of both devices !!

Sad Professor

Mr.S wrote: »

I’m stuck on the “Setting up your Mac” stage, any tricks to get around this?

I had to force power off, though I suspect this messed up Mail which it took me an hour to find a fix for last night and now my emails are loading in when I click on them and I have probably lost other things. Terrible update.

DubDJ

Just updated today. I ended up wiping the drive and setting up as a new Mac. A folder was created called “moved files” or something like that and there was a second Macintosh HD drive after the upgrade. Some strange behaviours. Setting up fresh and copying files over and everything is back to normal.

One big problem though, all my previous purchases in the Mac App Store are no longer there, the purchases page is blank. Previous apps are showing the price again instead of the cloud icon. I’ve tried signing out and in, restarting etc but still the same. Anybody else experience similar?

Sad Professor

I currently have a second Macintosh HD showing in Disk Utility as well.

DubDJ

Sad Professor wrote: »

I currently have a second Macintosh HD showing in Disk Utility as well.

I think one was a ‘data drive’ after the update for me. Didn’t pay much attention, just wiped the ssd clean. I don’t know what Apple did but they had some strange migration technique for this update.

brav

Sad Professor wrote: »

I currently have a second Macintosh HD showing in Disk Utility as well.

This is expected as macOS now uses the same technique as the iOS does, it added firmlinking so user data is now a separate partition and is mounted in system/volumes but with firmlinking it acts and looks similar to how it used to look

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/117470

https://medium.com/@hammen/significant-changes-in-macos-10-15-catalina-of-interest-to-mac-admins-fbc3865c055e

brav

DubDJ wrote: »

Just updated today. I ended up wiping the drive and setting up as a new Mac. A folder was created called “moved files” or something like that and there was a second Macintosh HD drive after the upgrade. Some strange behaviours. Setting up fresh and copying files over and everything is back to normal.

One big problem though, all my previous purchases in the Mac App Store are no longer there, the purchases page is blank. Previous apps are showing the price again instead of the cloud icon. I’ve tried signing out and in, restarting etc but still the same. Anybody else experience similar?

Regarding the relocated items see
https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mchl8ae423a3/mac

On my own mac it was nothing important just some old config files in private/var somewhere



The purchases being blank could be related to issues the iTunes/App Store had:
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/08/itunes-store-is-unable-to-process-purchases-error/

DubDJ

Yeah it was the same for me, some system files were in the folder. Strange thing is I had performed a clean install of Mohave and then upgraded and the relocated items were still there even though it was a stock version with no third-party software.

The dual volume Macintosh HD setup is interesting. Hadn’t seen that reported anywhere before. Thanks for the info.

I had a look over on Reddit and seems there’s a fair few people having the same issue with purchases on the Mac App Store. A lot of those seem to have done a clean install of Catalina, so possible it’s related to that. Hopefully Apple fix it server side.

finno

Mr.S wrote: »

I’m stuck on the “Setting up your Mac” stage, any tricks to get around this?

I installed this morning and i'm getting the same thing.

Sad Professor

I hate Apple for what they'd done my email with this update. I have to rebuild, reindex and redownload all my mailboxes, which may take days or weeks.

DubDJ

The Mac App Store issue with purchases seems to have resolved itself for me. No intervention required on my part.

Only other thing that required any extra work for me was the switchover from bash to the zsh shell in Terminal. My old profile no longer worked as expected due to the different syntax. Found a great walkthrough online though and was able to build a new profile using that. I knew the switchover was coming so wasn’t a big issue for me.

Overall, can’t say I had any major issues with the upgrade. Starting with a fresh install obviously helped with that.

Having activation lock on the MacBook Pro is also welcome, hopefully it will be an eventual deterrent for thieves in the future.

PropJoe10

Honestly have no idea why folks immediately upgrade to a new MacOS version. The newer releases are never stable enough for my liking until at least 10.1x.2. Why not stick with Mojave/High Sierra or something that works?

Grab All Association

Am I the only one that this update went smoothly for? Apart from getting stuck on setting up mac which I solved by just unplugging my Mac.

cnocbui

I'm still on El Capitan and I'm staying here.

jack presley

Grab All Association wrote: »

Am I the only one that this update went smoothly for? Apart from getting stuck on setting up mac which I solved by just unplugging my Mac.

No issues installing for me either. Went through quite smoothly actually. Now I don’t like the changes in the new Music app but that’s a different story.

The Black Oil

Late 2015 iMac here. No issues, but haven't really looked around much yet.

Sad Professor

Apple Mail Bugs Can Lead to Data Loss in macOS Catalina

Dardania

PropJoe10 wrote: »

Honestly have no idea why folks immediately upgrade to a new MacOS version. The newer releases are never stable enough for my liking until at least 10.1x.2. Why not stick with Mojave/High Sierra or something that works?

Indeed - always takes a little time for hackintoshs to be stable also

DubDJ

Sad Professor wrote: »

Apple Mail Bugs Can Lead to Data Loss in macOS Catalina

But with Gmail or Outlook the mail can be re-downloaded from their servers. Is this bug just relating to personal servers or what’s the exact issue. Article is a little unclear.

Grab All Association

No problems here with my mailbox.

Sad Professor

DubDJ wrote: »

But with Gmail or Outlook the mail can be re-downloaded from their servers. Is this bug just relating to personal servers or what’s the exact issue. Article is a little unclear.

Re-downloading from the server is how I (mostly) resolved my issue, but that takes time and checking every single message isn’t possible so I can’t be sure I didn’t lose emails. The real danger is that the corrupted messages (headers with no content) will be synced back to the server. I also have a lot of offline mailboxes from old email accounts which can’t be downloaded again. I have backups but it’s a big inconvenience.

Type 17

Worked fine for me (including a few Gmail email accounts), except that the latest version of Safari (13.0.2) that comes with Catalina doesn't (yet?) support Autofill on 1Password - I'm holding off upgrading my main Mac until (hopefully) this can be fixed.

Sad Professor

Type 17 wrote: »

Worked fine for me (including a few Gmail email accounts), except that the latest version of Safari (13.0.2) that comes with Catalina doesn't (yet?) support Autofill on 1Password - I'm holding off upgrading my main Mac until (hopefully) this can be fixed.

Are you using an old version of 1Password? If so you you have the buy the new version. I'm not going to bother. iCloud keychain is good enough for me and I can just copy and paste anything that is still stored in 1Password.

Type 17

Yes, I'm using 1Password 7 - I upgraded (€) recently, to stay compatible with Safari 13, but I bought a licence version, as I can't be dealing with any more subscriptions.

iCloud Keychain is good, but I use 1Password for loads of autofilling besides passwords, including Identities, Credit Cards, Addresses, etc (I have over 300 items in the vault).

Type 17

Type 17 wrote: »

...the latest version of Safari (13.0.2) that comes with Catalina doesn't (yet?) support Autofill on 1Password...

Actually, scratch that, I got it working with one more reboot (strange as I had rebooted twice already )

Sad Professor

10.15.1 is out!

Taking forever to download...

NUTZZ

Sad Professor wrote: »

10.15.1 is out!

Taking forever to download...

I had to roll back to Mojave 10.14.6 on my 2019 MBP. Catalina 10.15 was throwing up all sorts of issues for me, unresponsive applications, dock disappearing, keyboard not being recognised occasionally and signing me out of iCloud. I tried several fresh installs and not much improvement so reverted back to Mojave and has been perfect again since.

I might try Catalina again in a few months times.

cnocbui

There used to be a time Apple made computers, now they make phones and only the interns work on the computer stuff anymore. I don't trust Apple when it comes to Mac OS anymore. I used to.

whiterebel

Same here. Their software releases keep getting worse.

Sad Professor

For the most part I would say Apple's software has improved, just not as much you would expect it to. Their competitors have made bigger leaps but from a far lower standard. Windows for example was borderline unusable for most its existence. People expect better from Apple.

They need to stop releasing OS updates, especially Mac ones, to coincide with new iPhones. Release the OSs when they are ready.

Sad Professor

Sad Professor wrote: »

They need to stop releasing OS updates, especially Mac ones, to coincide with new iPhones. Release the OSs when they are ready.

^^This. Apple needs to FOCUS on updates when they are READY and not as a propaganda tool.

whiterebel

Sad Professor wrote: »

For the most part I would say Apple's software has improved, just not as much you would expect it to. Their competitors have made bigger leaps but from a far lower standard. Windows for example was borderline unusable for most its existence. People expect better from Apple.

They need to stop releasing OS updates, especially Mac ones, to coincide with new iPhones. Release the OSs when they are ready.

I have to totally disagree, SP. I’m getting Constant restarting on its own accord. Not seeing NAS units. Network performance becoming worse with every update. Constant applications not responding. Finder crashes. This is with a standard MacBook Pro. For the first time ever I’m seriously looking at trying out a Windows machine to see if it is any better.
I started with 7.0 OS which was an absolute nightmare, probably the worst software release ever, until they made it worse with each update to 7.6. Then it was oil on water and it was so good through 8.0 and 9.0
OS X was a huge change and took a while to bed down, but once they got it right, it was amazing. The last 3 or 4 big updates have been really, really poor, IMO. It seems to be style over substance now. It was always the combination of software and hardware that made macs work. Now it all seems to be about making the hardware as expensive as possible while putting no effort into software development. Unless its developing emojis.

I remember fondly the best laptop they ever produced, the Wall Street PowerBook. 13inch screen, 2 bays for CD drive/battery/floppy drive. Every connection you needed back then, including a modem port.........but not on the 12” version. Brilliant hardware and software working in combination. Started with OS8.0 but went up into the early OS Xs. Weighed a ton, but a total mobile powerhouse.
iPad performance isn’t much better. I find apps freeze a lot more, Safari seems to stop for a fag break when loading pages at first. Battery performance seems to be getting worse across different types and generations of iPad. Terrible seeing how buggy 13 was yet they still released it.

Totally agree about releasing when ready, not to fit an agenda.

Sad Professor

whiterebel, Apple have a long history of releasing buggy and unstable point-oh releases that settle down nicely after a few months. Some of the most stable Mac OS releases were terrible at launch. Apart from the very embarrassing installation screen bug, Catalina is just a return to that kind of "wait for the point two or three" type release. The last few annual updates have been fairly smooth sailing IMO. They weren't great upgrades in terms of new features, I agree, but they avoided my worst fears about what annual Mac OS updates would be like. Catalina has rekindled them though.