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)
Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
191–200 of 248 posts
Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
#192I 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 f…
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.
Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
#193Am 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).
I will preface this by saying that for anyone who does have issues, it sucks. I empathize with you. Data loss is frustrating. Catalina seems to have been an especially large paradigm shift as well, so seems there are edge cases.
Having said that, Im curious if these folks went in blindly with no upgrade plan. ANY time you update ANY OS, you should do a bit of recon to know what you can and cannot live without, and take a safety copy of those items. The referenced email shows that maybe the person was a bit careless and over-reliant on the process "just working".
Re: barrage of security pop ups? I see the usual suspects (kernel extension needs approval, can the installer access an external drive, etc) but weren't most of these in previous versions of MacOS? Also, do you want Apple to choose for you? Unfortunately, there is an entire industry of shady individuals, companies and nation states dedicated to exploiting software. I dont think any software vendor enjoys worsening the user experience because the world contains @$$holes. I dont see a way around this for any OS.
I admit I jumped to Catalina on Day 1 but only after taking a backup of what I needed and ensuring I could wipe and revert to Mojave. Surprisingly, even apps that I had that were not Catalina compatible mostly all worked fine. I did lose a few 32 bit apps, but nothing I couldnt live without or didnt have an equal substitute for.
I only use a mail client for work email and that is outlook. I havent used the mail app in 10 years, and it sounds like it was the source of frustration for this user. I do think Apple should do better vetting upgrades.
iTunes split- I don't really notice any difference save for the UI. I dont have strong feelings about this app other than when I forget to specify a launch app for an audio file Im working on, iTunes is the default(I should change that...) and it is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW to launch. Im guessing the music library database is the culprit here. Maybe they could async that part and just call the music library offline/verifying so that you can play the single file you clicked quickly...
Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
#194Am 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).
The article kind of addresses this:
> The remaining 2% [of messages I've received] are neutral. They’re from people who simply wrote me to let me know they have upgraded to Catalina and ‘survived’, and that they have no issues to report so far.
> It’s interesting to me how — apart from the usual fanboys — I still haven’t seen any unequivocally positive feedback about Mac OS Catalina. I still haven’t found someone saying, Oh man, everything is so much better after upgrading to Catalina. I can take advantage of these new features, and my workflow and productivity are so much improved compared with Mojave or High Sierra. I’ve either read people saying, Yeah, I upgraded and nothing broke, thank goodness, or complaining about something they’ve lost or having changed in a disappointing way. What I haven’t seen is something I used to see more frequently in the past when a new major release of Mac OS X was introduced — enthusiasm.
I think it's safe to assume that 2% statistic is lower than it should be due to response bias—"everything is basically okay" isn't usually worth writing about. But his point about Catalina lacking positives seems very salient.
Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
#195I 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…
I've tried very hard to understand what benefits a MacBook has over Windows/Linux. I've boiled it down to- it can compile iOS apps, and you can use Unix commands. The first is Apple intentionally being anti competitive, the later is a genuine benefit that I nearly am unaffected by being a Windows/Linux user. However the strangest thing came up in my research, the number of SWE that said they liked the way it looks. I…
Aesthetics aren’t valid? Much of the fields of architecture, art, design, and even engineering would disagree.
It also doesn’t seem that you have “tried very hard” to understand the benefits of a Mac. “you can use Unix commands”? That’s the big benefit you discovered?
Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
#196Also 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…
> there should be a single switch for expert users to toggle to effectively say “I trust all of the software on my Mac”. As an "expert" software engineer, I completely trust absolutely zero software running on my computer, in my browser, or basically on any device anywhere. I begrudgingly put up with it all because there is no alternative. Adding friction is good because it will eventually push (force?) developers to…
Yes, it’s because of this that I leave SIP enabled even though it can occasionally be annoying. Running without SIP feels like being naked, because you really can’t trust third party software any more — even if the app itself isn’t doing something shady, someone somewhere is using a hole in it to do something shady.
Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
#197One 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.
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 developer…
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.
Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
#198the 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
Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
#199Also 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…
> there should be a single switch for expert users to toggle to effectively say “I trust all of the software on my Mac”. As an "expert" software engineer, I completely trust absolutely zero software running on my computer, in my browser, or basically on any device anywhere. I begrudgingly put up with it all because there is no alternative. Adding friction is good because it will eventually push (force?) developers to…
What if I wrote the software?
I have a bunch of Applescripts which start with:
tell application (path to frontmost application) to
Since Mojave, any time a new application happens to be in front, I get prompted to give Bash permission to control that app. And then the entire set of approved apps seems to get wiped sometimes when I edit the Applescripts. There's no way to approve apps ahead of time, and there's no way to blanket approve control of any app.
Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leopard was an utter crap release with tons of complaints. I remember the many issues just trying to get Finder to work without crashing, or syncing a phone. Snow Leopard was "better" in that it wasn't so terribly broken, and they eventually got it working decently. From then on, the only complaints were about how locked down each new version was, what was no longer supported, and how many new annoying dialogs they'd…
Leopard also got rid of Classic, which meant I just couldn't use it if I had wanted to at the time. At that point there had been a long-time legacy of backwards compatibility for the Macintosh, and I was in a position where I frequently needed to retrieve data in oddball formats from older Mac software. Tiger for Intel already didn't have it, and from that point forward Apple's attitude to backwards compatibility has…
I mean, Tiger for Intel had a PPC emulator, that’s not “minimum acceptable level”.