Bulletproof!

Initial media reactions to Apple's Catalina.

Get It Try It

One if by land, two if by sea: it finally arrived. Yesterday. After the initial flurry of clickbait pieces, things have been relegated to a number of discussion forums.

The general consensus is: wait. Both Ars and the Verge recommend it. Discussions at /. and MacRumors also lean in that direction.

Just --Ignore It

A recommendation's come in, for those wanting to be rid of nags to upgrade.

sudo /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina"

The Ars Review

The Ars review - at least the first few pages - are required reading.

https://is.gd/6dLZKQ

Apple's software development teams all seem to be a bit overwhelmed this year.

And the Ars verdict is: wait.

The betas and the GM build of Mojave felt pretty solid, and it was the rare macOS release where waiting for the 0.1 or 0.2 update didn't feel super necessary. But although Catalina doesn't feel as rough as High Sierra did when it came out, I do think you should probably wait for one or two major bugfix updates to come out before you install Catalina (unless there are Catalina-only apps that you absolutely need to run right now).

The Verge Review

They think the same way at The Verge. Perhaps even more so.

https://is.gd/Nha1b4

Despite the fact that the first four paragraphs of my Catalina review were an argument that you should hold off on updating your Mac until you know for sure your apps will work, I still don't feel I was strenuous enough.

Yet more people didn't realize that they would need to set aside a solid hour to click approval boxes for apps requesting access to newly-restricted parts of your computer. Many people made jokes about the bad old days of Windows Vista and its pop-up boxes.

And a comment on how these platforms should work.

... open platforms, where anybody is free to make and distribute software that works on them without asking permission from the companies that create the operating systems (except, well, that's changing a bit with notarisation on the Mac...

Talk @ /.

There's been a bit of discussion at Slashdot.

https://is.gd/pZFRsy

Someone notes resistance on a corporate level.

I have already received notices to not install it.

One poor sod fairly loses it.

A company that ships hardware with an OS that has the temerity to tell ME, (WHEN I AM, let's not forget, THE GODDAMNED FUCKING OWNER OF THE COMPUTER, what I MAY OR MAY NOT DO with MY FUCKING COMPUTER that I PAID fucking MONEY FOR because Apple can't be bothered to maintain the 'old' code, as if having it tag along somehow hurts the rest of the OS, (pretty sure the only way it could do that is if they were incompetent,) when this is software WRITTEN to run on APPLE COMPUTERS, that has run on them JUST FINE in the past, is ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY NOT a company that will EVER get another fucking PENNY out of me.

A large part of the discussion is about the 32-bit thing.

I, for one, won't be upgrading any time soon because I have too many 32-bit apps lying around that I still use occasionally.

The lack of support for 32 bit apps is apparently likely to result in most of your games collection no longer running, or as Steve Jobs would probably describe it, by removing certain features it will help improve your productivity...

You can still run many DOS programs on even 64 bit windows by simply using compatibility mode. And if not, well, you can always just run 32 bit Windows in a VM. But Apple goes out of their way to prevent you from doing that. Microsoft enables you to run old software. Apple prevents you. Apple is actually worse than even Microsoft. Linux, of course, is superior to either, as usual.

There's no actual technical need for removing the 32-bit support.

As customers our goal is not to justify some Apple bean counter's decision or call them 'courageous', the customers should demand to get the most that they can and play the tug-of-war game the forces companies to create higher quality products. The Apple fan base that applauds anything that appears is only encouraging mediocrity.

As it is, this change is mostly going to increase the market share in VMs and Linux.

MacRumors

The MacRumors discussion seems best, but they're not all happy there either.

https://is.gd/v7PoiI

I have never seen so many problems on a MacRumors form.. I am staying far away from this one.

I love that iTunes got broken up; honestly my favourite feature so far.

I've never had a problem updating on day 1 before... until today. My 3 week old MBP is frozen solid. For the first time in my life, I regret upgrading to the new Mac OS. I have a 3 week old, 2019 MBP. The new software appeared to load properly and I patiently waited through all the progress bars then when it finished I entered my password and thought everything was OK. The 'Find My' screen came up explaining the new Find My features and at the bottom of the screen was a 'Back' button and a 'Continue' button. I hit the 'Continue' button and my computer has been froze for the past 30 minutes (and counting).

I was gonna ask about this, got apps like HandBrake which I use daily that are 32bit and might not be rewritten in 64bit. Might be stuck with Mojave for some time yet.

HandBrake has been 64bit for more than 10 years now

After reading a few pages of this title, I'm waiting for at least a .2 upgrade. With 40 years experience in IT mostly with a $2B developer of software and hardware, I'm fed up with Apple using we users for doing their QC for them.

For the first time since 10.4 on my G4, I will not be day 1 installing this on any of my systems. I will not be updating anytime soon as probably 50% of my used apps are 32 bit.

this time I am going to wait for a little while ...

This update is just awful. I have thousands of audiobook files and Catalina has decided to move them into the Library inside folders...

I logged this with Apple when the first beta came out. I pointed out that it's a stupid place to put user data. Plus the Books app is awful: no proper organisation and no metadata editing options. They just ignored the Feedback.

Yup. Just rearranged again. This update is a mess.

Man, this gets annoying. Took the time to rearrange everything and now I just saw (don't know what caused this) that some Apps have been removed from the "Other" folder and put at the end of the Launchpad apps and on top of that the "Other" folder is completely scrambled again.

Safari feels snapier!

SPACE WARNING - I started installing Catalina over 6 hours ago, i had 165gb free from 2tb drive on MacBook Pro, at about the 3 hour point it slowed down con with the update, with the progress bar stopped. I called Apple and turns out Catalina installs a separate partition for the os, I tried restarting and got into recovery mod. The hard drive had a second drive partition with the original drive only having about 10gb of space. I am letting this run for a few more hours hoping it completes before I do a restore. I would recommend that anyone that is doing a install have at least 25% free space on there hard drive or more.

Tried the music app for the first time. It's worse than I expected. Apple needs to hire people who care about the UX again

I just installed it. After my install experience of having it on the 'setting up your mac' and then getting we are having trouble identifying my built in keyboard on my 2017 Mac Pro. It does not instill confidence in me.

This is a really problematic update for one Apple devotee. A whole bunch of 32 bit apps are going to become inoperative and the amount of work to update all the older video files across my numerous drives is too much to bear at this point in time.

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