I'm trying to help out a friend who's been having a hard time with his 2017 model iMac (incessant spinning beachballs, among other problems). He's running the current Catalina OS. I'm still running in Sierra; due to chronic poor health I haven't had the energy to keep up with recent developments. So I've been doing a crash course the last couple weeks to catch up.
(I've been using Macs since I got my first computer – a Mac Plus – in 1988. Made my living doing Mac support ca. 1994–2009, when I became too ill to work. Installed MacOS hundreds of times. So I'm pretty experienced with this.)
After reinstalling the OS via ⌘R Recovery, which provided only slight improvement, I've erased the drive and am about to do a fresh install. Only the Install macOS Catalina app won't run. It just bounces in the Dock (I gave up after 100 bounces and Force Quit it). I have three installations of Catalina, one on my spare (2013) MacBook Pro and two in partitions on my external utility SSD. The Installer does the same trick – incessant bouncing – in all of them. The same Catalina Installer opens promptly on a single bounce in Sierra and Mojave volumes.
I went to download a fresh copy of the Install macOS Catalina app, found it impossible to do when running in Catalina; I could get the 10.15.5 Updater, but not the full installer. (Why is the full installer only 10.15.4?) I had to restart in Mojave to download the Catalina installer. Which I did, but got the same results as above with a fresh copy.
I'd heard that post-Sierra versions of MacOS are not popular with long-time users such as myself, but had never really looked into any of them. Just yesterday I found my way to Apple's own page macOS Catalina on the Mac App Store, where I see 17 of the 24 reviews are only one star (of five). That's an average rating of 1.83 stars. For Apple's flagship software. Is anybody at Apple paying any attention at all?
I've never encountered this problem before, in 32 years of working on Macs. Yeah, I can install the Catalina OS while running from Mojave (or Sierra), but this snafu makes me nervous. Anybody else have this experience? Anybody have any thoughts?
(I've been using Macs since I got my first computer – a Mac Plus – in 1988. Made my living doing Mac support ca. 1994–2009, when I became too ill to work. Installed MacOS hundreds of times. So I'm pretty experienced with this.)
After reinstalling the OS via ⌘R Recovery, which provided only slight improvement, I've erased the drive and am about to do a fresh install. Only the Install macOS Catalina app won't run. It just bounces in the Dock (I gave up after 100 bounces and Force Quit it). I have three installations of Catalina, one on my spare (2013) MacBook Pro and two in partitions on my external utility SSD. The Installer does the same trick – incessant bouncing – in all of them. The same Catalina Installer opens promptly on a single bounce in Sierra and Mojave volumes.
I went to download a fresh copy of the Install macOS Catalina app, found it impossible to do when running in Catalina; I could get the 10.15.5 Updater, but not the full installer. (Why is the full installer only 10.15.4?) I had to restart in Mojave to download the Catalina installer. Which I did, but got the same results as above with a fresh copy.
I'd heard that post-Sierra versions of MacOS are not popular with long-time users such as myself, but had never really looked into any of them. Just yesterday I found my way to Apple's own page macOS Catalina on the Mac App Store, where I see 17 of the 24 reviews are only one star (of five). That's an average rating of 1.83 stars. For Apple's flagship software. Is anybody at Apple paying any attention at all?
I've never encountered this problem before, in 32 years of working on Macs. Yeah, I can install the Catalina OS while running from Mojave (or Sierra), but this snafu makes me nervous. Anybody else have this experience? Anybody have any thoughts?
